Australian Members - Part II - if you read the first post, you'll get what this is all about.

[Coxsackie]

Money is no object when the money is paying for the food. I tried booking that first place through Voyagin.com - they charged my credit card the 7000, then emailed me to say that the reservation had been declined and they would refund my card within the next ten working days. That stinks. If they're charging me the equivalent of A$100 up front just to make a booking, they better damn well make the booking.

 

[Gerry Nelson]

I just re-read your post and I think @nabilmust (below) has a good point. That said, I think the standard of food is pretty high in Japan in any case so you won't be disappointed. If you're not limiting yourself to kaiseki, then this place is good if you can get in:

sushibaryasuda.com - sushibaryasuda Resources and Information.

sushibaryasuda.com is your first and best source for all of the information you’re looking for. From general topics to more of what you would expect to find here, sushibaryasuda.com has it all. We hope you find what you are searching for!

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I really enjoyed it.

This list might give you some other ideas:

Eat and drink like Anthony Bourdain in Tokyo

On Friday June 8, the world mourned the passing of an icon: Anthony Bourdain was found dead in his hotel room in France. He was 61.To many of us who followed

www.timeout.com

 

[Gerry Nelson]

I put a thread up in 18 Shopping in Japan it had food and booze advice in it.

If you mean this one: https://www.styleforum.net/threads/shopping-in-japan.614038/

I only saw a couple of bar recommendations in there and no food. Is there another thread with food recommendations?

 

[am55]

Tokyo, washoku, ranked by descending rating: https://tabelog.com/rstLst/?PG=1&fr...stKind=01&LstSitu=0&LstReserve=0&LstSmoking=0

Whenever I used this app, anything above a 4 has been great.

 

[Geoffrey Firmin]

@Coxsackie you could try OUT in Shibuya. Fresh truffles with fresh pasta nice selection of red wine and the complete works of Led Zeppelin.

 

[Geoffrey Firmin]

If you mean this one: https://www.styleforum.net/threads/shopping-in-japan.614038/

I only saw a couple of bar recommendations in there and no food. Is there another thread with food recommendations?

No. Must have gotten food recommendations from elsewhere.

 

[mercury]

Just spoke to the owner of a Japanese restaurant. She said even she has to book 2 months in advance for the high end stuff, and that's with being friends with the owners etc.

She said you can try Ren, which is owned by the same group as kagurazaka ishikawa. It will be easier to book, but still no guarantee on short notice.

【公式】蓮

料理は素材の味に素直に、凛と仕上げ空間やおもてなしはぬくもりを大切にお客様にとってお食事の時間があたたかなものとなるよう「笑顔」と「旬」を味わっていただければ幸いです。

ginza-ren.jp

 

[nabilmust]

Money is no object when the money is paying for the food. I tried booking that first place through Voyagin.com - they charged my credit card the 7000, then emailed me to say that the reservation had been declined and they would refund my card within the next ten working days. That stinks. If they're charging me the equivalent of A$100 up front just to make a booking, they better damn well make the booking.

Well.. they did, but it just so happened that there wasn't any space.

These providers charge for the service of booking, not for the actual booking.

 

[Journeyman]

As am55 mentioned, Tabelog is a great resource.

It's actually really difficult to find bad food in Japan, as the quality of restaurants (even "family restaurants" such as Denny's and Jonathan's) is consistently high.

If you are interested in finding high-end restaurants in Tokyo, you can go straight to the Michelin Guide itself:

MICHELIN GUIDE digital

Michelin Guide is now on the web!

gm.gnavi.co.jp

You can sort by number of stars, type of cuisine, area of Tokyo etc.

Let me know where you are staying (by PM if you prefer) and I will see if I can find any recommendations. Sometimes, however, it's great to just wander until you find somewhere that looks nice and then dive in and try it. I've had some amazing food at little "tachigui" (standing and eating) places under the railway tracks near central Tokyo. They look dodgy and are full of intoxicated businessmen, but that's part of the experience!

 

[conqueror]

i ate at a three michelin star restaurant in HK and booked six months in advance. four months in advance for a two star in singapore, and even then my first choice of date/time was unavailable. as someone said earlier, it's pretty common to book away ahead of time. faviken often had people waiting for approx 1.5 years.

during my recent tokyo trip (november) i ate at two one star joints with no reservation whatsoever. saying that, i tried my luck at lunch on a weekday which is generally much easier. still waited in line for an hour, though.

japanese businesses still regularly use fax machines, so it's no surprise that restaurant bookings can sometimes be a headache. some of the older big names also remain somewhat wary of foreigners and potential communication/ettiquete issues which adds another barrier to entry for non-japanese.

the "simple" way to visit high-end kaiseki restaurants without fluent japanese or a personal referral is to stay at a well regarded (i.e. absurdly expensive) hotel such as the mandarin oriental and ask the concierge. if you are eating solo and ask politely they will probably be able to pull some strings. perhaps you could wing the accomodation for just one night and reap the benefits if money truly is no issue.

 

[toasitha]

@Coxsackie you could try OUT in Shibuya. Fresh truffles with fresh pasta nice selection of red wine and the complete works of Led Zeppelin.

i tried OUT when they did a pop in melbourne last year. imho its not that good. tipo 00 does better pasta than that.

 

[am55]

the "simple" way to visit high-end kaiseki restaurants without fluent japanese or a personal referral is to stay at a well regarded (i.e. absurdly expensive) hotel such as the mandarin oriental and ask the concierge. if you are eating solo and ask politely they will probably be able to pull some strings. perhaps you could wing the accomodation for just one night and reap the benefits if money truly is no issue.

Yes, that worked for me at the Imperial. @Coxsackie also worth noting it has a music room with a Hamburg factory Steinway C; you can join the Imperial Club for free, get an upgrade to the tower, and 2 hours a day of Steinway (or just a much more spacious environment for your cello).

 

[Journeyman]

The Imperial Hotel is very nice indeed - my wife used to stay there frequently for work, as her company's office was very near. However, she was too exhausted to take advantage of the food options around the area and would end up getting room service!

We do, however, have a good stock of Imperial Hotel bathrobes and towels... ?

@Coxsackie - At the risk of sounding like a culinary snob (which I'm honestly not!), I'd suggest that unless you already know quite a bit about formal Japanese food (and you may!), then you might not fully appreciate/enjoy kaiseki anyway, unless you have someone go along with you who can explain the food to you. Otherwise, you may just end up eating a whole lot of little dishes, some of which may taste quite strange, not really know what you just ate, and pay some hundreds of dollars for the privilege.

I've been eating Japanese food for decades now but on the rare occasions that I eat kaiseki ryori, I often have to ask my wife what some of the ingredients are, or ask the waitstaff for an explanation.

By the way, on the topic of Japanese food, I can highly recommend a Japanese manga (comic) called "Oishinbo". Some volumes are available in translation and it's both entertaining and very informative:

VIZ: The Official Website for Oishinbo

The best selling and most beloved food manga of all time!

www.viz.com

 

[am55]

Oshinbo is amazing but will 10x your rice and sake bills...

 

[Journeyman]

Oshinbo is amazing but will 10x your rice and sake bills...

Interestingly, the author, Kariya Tetsu, has lived in Sydney for quite a few years.

I absolutely love the Oishinbo story where Yamaoka takes Kyogoku Mantaro (a very wealthy businessman) to Okaboshi, Yamaoka's favourite restaurant. He's asked Okaboshi (the owner-chef of the eponymous restaurant) to prepare a very simple meal of some rice, soup and fish, based on the food that Kyogoku ate when he was young and poor, before he made his fortune. However, although the meal was extremely simple, the quality of the chosen ingredients was excellent and they were exquisitely prepared.

On a related note, when I was at university in Tokyo, I remember watching a Japanese TV program where a few celebrities took a walk around their favourite part of Tokyo and talked to each other and to the camera about their favourite places (shops, cafes etc). In the course of the program, they walked past a "komeya" (rice shop) and, at the front of the shop were three rice cookers, each cooking precisely the same *subspecies* of short-grain rice, but grown in a different geographical region of Japan (somewhere in Kyushu, Niigata and one other place, from memory). The celebrities each sampled a little bit of the rice and exclaimed about the difference in flavour between the three different helpings of the same subspecies of rice. Meanwhile, I was sitting there thinking, "Um, it's... rice. Just rice".

Some years later, I mentioned this to the lady who is now my wife and she looked at me as though I was an idiot. Of *course* the precise same subspecies of short-grain rice tastes different depending on where it's grown. Rice from the same bag can taste different, depending on who cooks it. For many years, my wife refused to eat at a particular restaurant near us, simply because she didn't like the way they cooked the rice!

@Coxsackie - Anyway, to reiterate what I said earlier, so much of the food in Japan is great. Yes, it's fantastic to have a special experience by going to a "ryotei" (high-end, kaiseki ryori restaurant) when you happen to be in Tokyo, but you could also just step out of your hotel, flip a coin to decide whether to turn left or right, then get lost in a warren of little streets, pick a restaurant and it will still be great and you'll have a lovely meal.

As an example, my wife's parents live in an untrendy area on the fringes of the old "shitamachi" (downtown) area where the commoners traditionally lived in Tokyo. Despite that, there are plenty of great places to eat dotted around the place. During our last visit a couple of weeks ago, I was walking along a narrow street near the train station a little before 11:00am, when I noticed five or six people sitting on a bench outside a small, inconspicuous ramen shop, with a further twenty or so people waiting in a line snaking down the road. The shop wasn't even due to open for another half-an-hour! When I got back to my parents-in-law's house, I looked up the location and discovered that it's widely regarded as Tokyo's best tsukemen shop (ramen noodles served on a plate, with a bowl of dipping sauce). Depending on what you want to eat, the price varies from JPY650 (AUD$8.50) to JPY1150 (AUD$15.30) for a serve of noodles, broth and other ingredients such as "ontama" (onsen tamago - soft-boiled egg), menma (young bamboo shoots) and chashu (char siu - Chinese barbeque pork).

Meanwhile, about ten minutes' walk down the road is a soba noodle restaurant that has a "bib gourmand" in the Michelin guide (ie highly recommended but just below a star). When I arrived for a meal, the chef was sitting in the little entrance area of the restaurant with a small, stone flour mill between his legs, grinding buckwheat into flour so that he could then use the flour to make his own soba noodles, which he then cut up by hand. I had tamago-yaki (Japanese omelette) and a serve of the inakaya-zenro soba noodles and paid about JPY2000 (about AUD$26).