Eat, drink, travel Japan.
Japanese food and the dishes that pair with the drinks.
A great plan for a 3-hour night out. This Hiroshima bar-hopping tour is built for people who want the lively local rhythm without hunting for the right doorways on their own. You start at 7:00 pm near Fukuya Hacchobori, then move through Hiroshima’s food world with a guide who helps you skip tourist traps and … Read more
Sake stops being mysterious fast. This 3-hour Kyoto tour turns you from unsure drinker to confident chooser, starting with a guided visit to Gekkeikan Okura Sake Museum in Fushimi and ending in a dedicated tasting room with side-by-side comparisons. I love how the tasting is taught like a skill, not a demo, so you learn … Read more
Shinjuku at night tastes like Tokyo. This izakaya food tour strings together multiple local stops so you can sample a wide range of comfort foods, sashimi-style bites, and grilled skewers while walking through Tokyo’s after-dark neighborhoods, including the neon-laced Shinjuku scene. It’s a simple plan with a big payoff: food plus atmosphere, without you having … Read more
The third nigiri at Sushi Sho in Yotsuya was where it landed for me. Hokkaido shima-aji, brushed with a single drop of soy, the rice still warm. The pour beside it was a junmai from Akita served at room temperature, almost room-cool, in a small ochoko cup. One bite, one sip. The fish stopped tasting … Read more
A lemon sour at an Omoide Yokocho stall costs about ¥500. Six counter seats away from the cook, no English menu, you point at a skewer and a cold glass arrives without ceremony. The same drink does not exist on the list at Birdland in Ginza, where an omakase yakitori course starts north of ¥10,000 … Read more
I came into Nagoya planning one meal between Tokyo and Kyoto. I left three days later, full of red miso, with a notebook of bar addresses I still had not visited. The city does not market itself the way Osaka markets street food or Kyoto markets tea. It just feeds you, hard, with a regional … Read more
Hiroshima Station to Saijo by local train: 31 minutes, ¥420. From the platform, you walk five minutes to a thousand-year-old sake town with seven working breweries lined up between two thin streets. The Peace Memorial Park, the place every guidebook starts you, is in the other direction. Most foreign visitors never make it to Saijo. … Read more
The first time I really understood sake pairing, I was sitting at the counter of a tiny seven-seat kappo in Yanaka. The proprietor, Mr Sato, watched me start with a chilled daiginjo and a piece of grilled mackerel and shook his head, almost imperceptibly. Then he poured me a cup of warm kimoto junmai from … Read more
The first kushikatsu I had in Osaka was a single skewer of pork belly at a counter in Shinsekai, around 18:30 on a Wednesday in October. The man behind the fryer dropped six bullets of breaded skewers into the oil at once, lifted them out about ninety seconds later, and slid them onto a wire … Read more