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Why You Should Plan Your Travel Around Food

The best way to explore the place you're traveling, Tokyo edition.

The smell of exquisitely prepared food fills your senses before you even step through the door. You’re greeted with a quiet scene — a spattering of people solemnly focused on their food. There is no shame in eating alone in Tokyo, and you often see it. No loud music, no phones out; it’s as if the dish fills all your senses and leaves no room for much of anything other than enjoying the simple pleasure in front of you. In Japan, you say “itadakimasu” before you begin eating, which translates to “I humbly receive.” This sentiment expresses respect for all living things and extends thanks to everything that went into the preparation of the meal — from the plants, animals, farmers, to the chefs and everything in between.

Basing your travel plans around food allows you to experience the flavors, smells, and textures that are the childhood memories, traditions, and daily life of people across the globe. Hunting down national dishes and the best restaurants is an essential part of planning a great trip.

The best restaurants in Tokyo tend to be the unassuming ones, at least in terms of the appearance. The kitchens are usually tiny, staffed by a small handful of people. Japanese dishes are uniquely suited to be fast meals, though the dishes themselves are anything but “fast food” in the sense I am familiar with coming from the US. Ramen, for example, involves a broth carefully simmered anywhere from hours to days. However, when an order is placed, putting all the carefully selected and prepared elements together in the bowl — tare, broth, noodles, aromatic oil, toppings — takes a mere matter of minutes. The steaming bowl (objectively the best dish ever created by humankind) makes it to your table, likely followed with a bow from the restaurant staff.

Most restaurants in Tokyo are tiny, especially considering the city's tens of millions of residents. Most restaurants seem to have maybe around 10-30 seats, although there are many places that have seats in the single digits. Most restaurants specialize in one dish, and that’s often all they serve. In Japan, you trust the chef — their work is often a product of a lifetime of dedication to their craft and a commitment to kaizen. It’s not an uncommon experience to return to a restaurant and the food is better than you remembered. And the amazing part — this food is typically inexpensive, all things considered. Most dishes sit around the five to fifteen USD mark, although you can certainly find some of the most expensive and exquisitely delicious beef, fish, and fruit in the world.

Walking along the neon-lit streets, you eventually come across a small station entrance, a hole that descends into the bustling underworld of Tokyo. Once you’re in, you might just be lucky enough to be enveloped in the entrancing smell of freshly baked pastries and the aroma of caramelized butter and sugar. That, or you’ll find yourself in a department store the size of small towns in the US surrounded by the staring eyeballs of freshly caught fish ready to be sold to eager customers. Subway stations are like the Disneyland of food — more food than you’ve probably ever seen before, most of it prepared and ready to go, bakeries with pastries so flawless looking that you question if they are real or if they are the plastic food models that every restaurant uses to display their dishes. These department stores not only have grocery stores and prepared food that seem like enough feed millions, but they also have floors of restaurants and sometimes even a dessert floor (really). Once you’ve seen enough food that your eyes start to glaze over, you ascend to the surface of the earth and (surprise) you find yourself surrounded by thousands of bustling restaurants, wondering how this food paradise even exists. You might be tempted to associate this food metropolis with shortcuts and cheap production, yet it’s the exact opposite. Japan is dedicated to quality food and seasonality — down to seasonal vegetables in fast food restaurants and, yes, seasonal KitKats….

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Tokyo Eats: Japanese Curry (Oroji 王ろじ)

When the hot bowl of luxurious Japanese-style curry topped with tender and crispy pieces of fried pork is placed in front of you, you have no choice but to eat in reverent silence. The curry sauce is deeply savory, aromatic, and perfectly balanced. Tender and juicy pork enrobed in a crispy-crunchy breading. Even the rice itself is delicious — perfectly toothsome pearls. In the absence of any music, the only disruption to the delicious reverent silence is the heavenly crackling sound of the pork frying and the near-constant sound of the server-hostess-chef-cashier woman yelling "Irasshaimase" (welcome in) and "arigato gozaimasu" (thank you) in that rather adorable, singsongy, almost cartoonish voice used in Japanese businesses.

Japanese curry is quite different from Indian or Thai curry. It's actually based off of British curry, which is based off of Indian curry, brought to Japan by the British during the Meiji Restoration. In line with the signature Japanese flavor profile, Japanese curry is somehow delicate but intensely savory, umami, and brilliantly balanced between sweet and salty. Curry is a dish often prepared at home, as I am continually reminded by the tortuous aroma emanating from my neighbor's window several times a week. For home cooking, it's typically prepared with curry roux cubes, which can be found in most every supermarket.

Japan seems to thrive on obsessing over *one* thing. And nothing is too small or insignificant. Just the other day I strolled past a shop right in central Tokyo that only sold masking tape — tape in all colors and designs neatly arranged and taking up only 1/64th of the available space in the store.

Single origin coffee, single origin chocolate, abundant varieties of rice from different prefectures, seasonal foods, regional specialties, the list could go on and on. With the staggering abundance of restaurants and readily available prepared foods, restaurants in Tokyo often end up focusing on just one main dish. This dish is made and improved upon for years or even decades. When you visit these sorts of restaurants, get the main dish. You don't need to exercise your free will here. Seriously. The chef knows better than you. The chefs at these restaurants become experts on that one dish, perfecting it.

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