I won't name the company, but I will say it wasn't worth anywhere near how much I spent on it. I gave my feedback privately and they gave me a small refund (honestly, smaller than I would have liked considering how I felt it was truly worth). But rather than recount the less-than-great aspects of the experience, I'll talk about the food we got to enjoy.
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| Manpuku Shokudo |
First stop was an izakaya called Manpuku Shokudo, in Yurakucho, not at all far from Ginza (where we met our guide), set under a railway bridge. Opposite the entrance, the wall was plastered with classic Japanese movie posters, weathered and peeling -- effortlessly cool. Apparently the owner of the izakaya is a huge fan of old movies, and the retro charm continued inside the restaurant which was decorated with enormous cartoonish murals.
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| Ham katsu; edamame |
Here we got to enjoy salted edamame, a classic available in nearly any UK-based Japanese restaurant. They were, well, edamame: salty, fresh-tasting, rather grassy. Ham katsu was more interesting, a triangle of lurid pink ham fried in panko, served with tangy tonkatsu sauce. Both were pleasant, good foils to an ice-cold glass of Asahi.
From here we walked to Kagoshima Kirishima Tsukada Nojo, in Shinbashi. There seem to be several of these restaurants around Tokyo, including a Shinjuku branch, all supplied with produce from their own farms in the Miyazaki prefecture.
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| Kagoshima Kirishima Tsukada Nojo |
Particularly good was their aged miso, served simply with cool, crisp cucumber and cabbage that we scraped the miso on to. It was pungent, potent, salty, with a good chunky texture, nothing at all like the jarred stuff.
Another stand-out dish was the nikumaki onigiri, pork-wrapped rice balls served in a sweet, rich soy-based sauce. These were obvious crowd-pleasers, the first to disappear, and apparently a common comfort food in Japanese households. Thick slices of amberjack (hampachi) were fresh-tasting, marinated in soy to take the raw edge off -- meaty and tender with no off-putting fishiness.
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| Clockwise from left: yakisoba, chicken nanban, dumpling soup, nikumaki onigiri, and vegetables for miso |
Also pleasant was the chicken nanban, a yōshoku dish (that is, a Japanese re-imagination of Western cuisine), especially appropriate here as a Miyazaki specialty. The chicken is deep-fried then soaked in vinegar, before being topped with a kind of tartar sauce, rich and fatty with egg and mayonnaise. The chicken was very good, moist, the vinegar adding some much needed acidity, but the accompanying sauce was too rich to enjoy more than one piece. Not to mention the fact that the batter collapsed into a soggy mess under the creamy dressing. This may be the intention, but to our palates it was a texture too far.
We also got two portions of the classic street food yakisoba, with prawns and without. Prawns were well-cooked, the flesh bouncy and sweet, the noodles themselves easy enough to eat. More intriguing was a pot sitting in the centre of our table above a burner, filled with a jellified stock that melted away as it was heated. Inside floated packets of dried fish and pretty, pale little dumplings. The broth itself was fabulous, clean yet complex; the dumplings slippery and juicy. I could've eaten a whole pot of these, though we only got one each.
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| Torahachi |
Our next visit was to a yakitori restaurant called Torahachi, again in Shinbashi. It was situated directly beneath the railway tracks, and was clearly a local favourite. It thronged with salarymen, drinking, laughing, the raucous atmosphere made louder still by the roar of trains overhead like endless thunder.
Pickled eggplant was good, an incredible indigo colour. Along with another plate of mixed pickles, these were enjoyable, each vegetable retaining its freshness and bite and the brine subtle. Skewers were tasty enough but not especially remarkable, lacking the intense charcoal flavour of the best yakitori.
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| Left: pork skewer with shichimi (seven spice seasoning); Right: chicken thigh skewer with soy |
Tare was good, however, well-balanced between salt and sweet, and the chicken and pork tasting strongly of chicken and pig respectively (as they should, of course, but so often don't).
Our final stop was for dessert, and one that my brother Adam had been anticipating for a while. Within a three minute walk from Torahachi, we came across Taiyaki Kanda-Daruma, a bustling kiosk with a window opening out into the street. People nearby were tucking in to fresh taiyaki, a sweet, waffle-like batter cooked into the shape of a fish, and filled with your choice of traditional sweetened red bean paste or vanilla custard.
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| Taiyaki Kanda-Daruma |
The taiyaki were good, though not as Instagrammable as some. The batter was not especially crisp, a touch too thick, and we lost the true definition and charm of the fish. Red bean paste had a good texture, not too smooth, and the correct level of mild sweetness. Vanilla custard was likewise pleasant. The vanilla flavour was true but the paste was gummy, and too rich in combination with the sweet, sadly soft batter.
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| Taiyaki with vanilla custard |
Our experience on the food tour wasn't bad, per se, and we certainly got to enjoy a decent range of food items, though perhaps not to the extreme suggested in the advert. Still, I came away feeling not just hard-done-by but ripped off, which I hadn't felt once in Tokyo up till then. Having spent five days eating and drinking in Tokyo with no trouble, and in fact with great pleasure, it stung to know the true costs of the food considering how much I paid for the guide. We also had a fairly decent working knowledge of Japanese food at this point, and while I would never call myself an expert, I could sense a certain unease once I told our guide where and what we had eaten already in Tokyo. We were likely better informed than most of their customers.
Date of visits: 09/09/2019
Addresses:
Manpuku Shokudo: 2 Chome-4-1 Yūrakuchō, Chiyoda City, Tokyo 100-0006, Japan
Kagoshima Kirishima Tsukada Nojo: 2-14-6 Shimbashi | 2F Mikuni Shimbashi Bldg., Minato, Tokyo 105-0004, Japan
Torahachi: 3 Chome-25-6 Shinbashi, Minato City, Tokyo 105-0004, Japan
Taiyaki Kanda-Daruma: 6 Chome-14-2, Sotokanda, Chiyoda City, Tokyo 101-0021, Japan
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