Tokyo Update

Mount Fuji in the distance.

It took me days to finally get into the habit of standing on the left side of an escalator in Tokyo, must have been going up and down all 15 floors of Takashimaya that finally got it to stick. Back in Hong Kong, I found myself, once again, standing on the wrong side of the escalator, Tokyo left instead of Hong Kong right. Funny how the mind adapts.

The tastebuds too have adapted. Every once in a great while, I have a meal that just blows me away and reminds me what really good food is about. There was the tempura at Kyoto's Tenyu that made me realize Hong Kong tempura is like the chop suey version of Chinese food. So I've stopped eating tempura. But for me, the mark of a really good chef is one that gets me liking something that I had previously disliked. Alain Passard turned an ordinary quail's egg into a moment of ecstasy. Thomas Keller got me excited about pea soup. This trip, it was sushi chef Nakamura-san who took my bar for sushi and raised it the height of a Shinjuku skyscraper. Nakamura-san used to work at Kyubei in Ginza before opening up his own shop. Kanesada is a small, little sushi restaurant in an alley around the corner from Tokyo Midtown's orangé bar/restaurant. I knew I would be in for a treat when MH told me it was H-san's pick.

Nakamura-san with a huge scallop, which he served up in thin, Ruffle-like, slices.

I rarely like lean, red tuna, but the pieces of akami that Nakamura-san served up along side the chu-toro and o-toro blew me away. The flavourful meat just melted in my mouth. Normally, I'm not a fan of clam either, but the pieces that were served up were unbelievably sweet. The highlight, however, was the abalone. Nakamura only had one abalone left and he had saved it especially for H-san. Although he showed us the abalone early on in the evening, it was not served until H-san arrived. It was absolutely delicious, freshly sweet and crunchy in texture.

I followed up this wonderful sushi meal with a meal at Chiaki in Tsukiji fish market. Owner Ogawa Koichi actually has a popular manga loosely-based on his life as a fish wholesaler. This summer, there will also be a movie.

Ogawa-san checking out one of the Macbook Airs.

It reminded me a bit of the Pike Place Fish phenomenon. The dinner was organized by HH who happened to be in town from SF (it was another one of those facebook moments). For me, it was more memorable for the company (a lot of Sony, google, Apple-related people as well as the author of a popular self-help book on saying the right things to different people), because the special of the day happened to be oysters. And unfortunately, I am seriously allergic to oysters. What sashimi and cooked fish I did have was delicious though. Throughout dinner, I had been fairly quiet, struggling to decipher bits of Japanese conversations that were happening around me. The moment the gadgets came out, eye.fi and Sony Rolly, conversation became easier. But the real communication breakthrough moment came when "Chicken Little" (so named because he bears an uncanny resemblance to the animated movie character by the same name) pulled out a brown Inter-Office envelope from his bag. He didn't even have to open the envelope for me to let out a squeal of delight, "Air!" Mac-love, it seems, is a universal language.

Playing with food...and Air: it's as thin as one of my fave white chocolate cookie sandwiches from Hokkaido!

Speaking of love, I was a bit beffudled by the signs advertising "White Day" on 14 March. Was this the Japanese version of Valentine's Day, I asked MM. If Valentine's Day is a Hallmark conspiracy, explained MM, then White Day is the snack industry's conspiracy. In Japan, girls give guys snacks on Valentine's Day. A month later, on White Day, guys are supposed to return the favour in double. Imagine receiving two dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts!


It never ceases to amuse me to see the long line for Krispy Kreme doughnuts each morning.


Schultz should consider re-vamping Starbucks stores around the world along the lines of its Tokyo stores. The Japanese are so good at packaging, even the recycling bins have a certain aesthetic.




Other great meals in Tokyo:
Morimoto XEX for teppanyaki -- Very subtle entrance signage.

Morimoto's signature Toro & caviar appetizer

Matsugen for soba -- E recommended an off-the-menu crabmeat soba salad, which was worthy of a second helping. They have outposts in Honolulu and NYC.
Takashimaya Food Hall -- Can never get enough of this place. It's a study of how beautiful packaging makes everything look so appetizing.

Tokyo Midtown and iPhone update

Was supposed to be in Tokyo this weekend with the yoga gang visiting FS, who is in Tokyo taking Japanese classes for a couple weeks, but work and other obligations have got me grounded in Hong Kong for the next few weeks. Am sure I'll hear all about their bacchanalian weekend though. In the meantime, FS sent picks of her swanky Oakwook serviced apartment in Tokyo Midtown.



On another note, been using the iPhone for a week now and still loving it (sounds like a McDonald's commercial!). I had a scare Saturday evening when I thought iPhone had gone into a coma. Turns out, when you run the battery down to nothing, it takes about 10 minutes for it to become responsive even after putting it into the charging dock. The biggest lesson in preserving the battery time is not to keep wifi on when not in use. With wifi constantly on, I only managed to get 24 hours standby out of the battery with about 4 hours of audio playback time (using the built-in speaker most of the time) and a couple hours of email checking and web browsing. My main complaints so far are its 8GB of memory (you have to be really selective about what music, TV shows and photos you load) and the fact that the Shure headphone jack doesn't fit into the iPhone (Apple's headphones are lousy at blocking outside noise, but the click control on the tiny microphone for pausing songs and forwarding tracks is quite convenient). Other than that, the iPhone works beautifully. Watching videos on it is so much better than iPod video and the great thing is the built-in speaker that lets more than one person watch (or listen to music, which is great when going running with BL so that he can entertain me with his karaoke running) at a time.

Tagged! & Tokyo wanderings through Meguro/Daikanyama

Just finished tagging all my previous posts. It's not a perfect system (for example, if you wanted to find all the posts on restaurants in Hong Kong, it's still probably easier to go through the results from google search function for the site), but basically there are two types of tags: destination (country, state/province, city.) or subject (such as hotels and restaurants that both take up 32% of my posts). The only subject tag that might require a bit of explanation is "services". Services encompasses everything from gyms, personal trainers, pilates instructors to spa & beauty services to telco, etc.

Here's the last bit from last weekend in Tokyo. While it rained on Saturday, it was absolutely beautiful on Sunday and Monday. I stayed with SM at her wonderful pad in Daikanyama. It was about a 15-20 minute walk to the Starbucks across from Shibuya station and only a 10-minute walk to Daikanyama station. On the way back from Shibuya Starbucks to the shopping around Daikanyama station, I decided to go for a detour along the streets behind Cerulean Hotel and got a little bit lost. But it was great, because I passed by lots of beautiful homes before finally following the Daikanyama loop bus to get back on track to my usual stop at Bonjour Records. This time, I found an awesome 24-hour food shop called Seijo Ishii. Great if you've run out of snacks and Champagne at 2am in the morning.

Here are some pictures of my walk. The Japanese are known for their politeness, so I just had to take a picture of this:

Elements of nice homes along the way:






Red leaves are coming!! As usual, global warming is just messing up the timing for red leaves and cherry blossoms.

Tokyo: Massato Paris, Sushi Restaurant Hashida, Tadao Ando's Omotesando Hills, Asuka

Am posting with the new beta.blogger.com, so please let me know if there are any glitches. Will be updating old posts with labels (i.e. blogger's version of tags) in the next couple weeks.

Massato Paris -- One of the things I like doing in Tokyo is getting my haircut. It’s not expensive and they always do a good job. But if you’re not a Japanese speaker, make sure you go with someone who does or make sure the place you’re going to has an English-speaker on hand. Last year, I went to Kakimoto Arms with LS in Roppongi Hills. This year, MH did the booking, so I joined her at Massato Paris, across the street from Grand Hyatt (above the Versace shop). I like the nice, little touches, like the head and shoulder massage after the final hair rinse and the post-cut tea and candies platter.

Sushi Restaurant Hashida (3-8-11, Kachidoki, Chuoh-Ku, Tokyo 104-0054, Japan; T: +81 3 3533 0341) -- For lunch, SM had booked one of her favourite sushi places near Ginza. She warned us, though, their specialty is BIG sushi. The first time she went, she said the sushi chef looked really angry and barely spoke to her. Towards the end, he just handed her a photo album. Inside were pictures of the likes of Will Smith, Cameron Diaz and Penelope Cruz with the sushi chef in his little sushi restaurant. Lunch is a set menu. The only thing you get to choose is whether you want your explosive, finale sushi to be uni (sea urchin) or ikura (salmon roe). The rest did not disappoint. I rarely eat scallop, shrimp or clam sushi, but the ones served here were delicious and sweet. I ordered uni for my explosive sushi and boy was it explosive! I was served enough uni to make at least 5 pieces of normal-sized sushi. All that sushi for around Y3,000!

The sushi chef did not look so fierce this time around. He was working behind the counter with his son by his side. They made a great father-son team. After the meal, he showed us the famous photo album and even had a brief chat with us. "You have to thank the people who come for dinner," said Hashida-san Sr., because they are the ones subsidizing the low-cost lunch set.

Omotesando Hills -- After lunch, continuing with the starchitect-designed shopping mall theme, we visited Omotesando Hills, Tadao Ando's shopping mall for Minoru Mori. It is supposed to resemble a long street promenade inside the building. MH complained that she didn't like the fact that she had to stroll by all the shops just to get to a shop at the top. It's great for retailers and those who have to lease the space out to potential retailers don't have to deal with the problem of potentially dead spaces. I, personally liked the indoor boulevard feel. The mall is intimate in size, compared to present-day mega-malls (like last week's visit to Toyo Ito's Vivo City in Singapore) and I like that sort of intimacy. And there's a simple logic of having one path to follow. For a shopper, it's much more reassuring, less overwhelming. The formal simplicity actually creates a certain visual/spatial poetry or rhythm, which I like. In a way, it's soothing; true retail therapy.


Asuka -- For dinner, SI had booked kaiseki for us at a restaurant in Shimokitazawa within walking distance from his place, which is in Uemura, a quiet, idyllic neighborhood (SM called it the Greenwich Village of Tokyo). We stopped by SI's place for Champagne before walking to Asuka. SI had arranged for us to sit at the counter, because he thought it would be a more interesting experience. The chef here was a very cheery one. He had a sort of happy buddha kind of serenity to his face.


The food was amazing. We chose the menu with crab for a little under Y10,000 per person. I always think a restaurant is really good when they can get me to try and like things that I normally wouldn't touch. I am not a fan of tofu of the Chinese variety, but I think the Japanese are masters of tofu dishes. So when a broth with milk tofu suspended in it arrived, I thought I'd try it, even though I normally don't like tofu. I did not regret my decision. The milk tofu looked like a ball of mozzarella cheese. The consistency was different from regular tofu, it was kind of elastic. Buried inside was uni.


Even though we had sushi for lunch, the sashimi was still a treat:


But the really unforgettable dish was the crab, which came complete with what my SM translated as crab ovaries (the bright orange gook, which was actually quite tasty!), crab roe (the darker brown bits) and the crab meat. In terms of eating adventures though, last week's sperm of whale at Iggy's in Singapore still takes the cake.

Tokyo: Shibuya Granbell Hotel, good things come in red, Tera Teppanyaki

I love Tokyo; it's one of the few cities in the world where I always feel like a lost foreigner despite the number of times I've been here. Diane von Furstenberg was in town last week for the opening of her first boutique in Japan with her whole entourage. MH, who's in town for other work, was guiding/hanging out with them and apparently it was the first time in Japan for some in DvF's group (including her son) and they absolutely loved it (especially the Loveless shop in Aoyama). The thing is, for a gaijin, or foreigner (such as myself), Tokyo will always be fresh and new, no matter how many times you visit. There'll always be that sense of excitement of the new and different, that buzz of not quite knowing what you'll stumble upon, the thrill of a mystery you'll never quite solve.

I arrived into Narita around 1400 and surprisingly the immigration queue was very short and moved quickly. Managed to get my luggage, rent my 3G phone (it's great that these days I can keep my Hong Kong number), grab some Starbucks


(Japan's stores probably have some of the best Starbucks food around and they have these really cool, Starbucks mermaid stirrers that are also stoppers for the lid that I haven't seen anywhere else in the world!) and caught the 1513 Narita Express out to Shinjuku station. It's a great thing these days to be able to get on the internet and show taxi drivers the location maps for where you want to go, because even with the English address for Shibuya Granbell Hotel, he wasn't quite sure where it was.

In terms of location, Shibuya Granbell is really great, a few minutes' walk to Shibuya station, less than 10 minutes to Parco Part One. But the best part is that it's on a quiet street, off the main strip. Downstairs, there's a nice cafe/bar that's open late called Piece of Pie. I booked a Double Room for Single Use (Y16,800, including ++!!). This is one of the very, very few hotels that offers a cheaper rate for single use of a double room. The room is very comfortable with all my necessary amenities. It has free LAN internet access and the cable's in the desk drawer. The bathroom has a tub (which is such a rarity in so-called boutique hotelrooms these days) and I had ample space to maneouver around with my bags laid out. Very good value for money. They have a great penthouse duplex suite with its own rooftop jacuzzi.


Good things come in RED! I got 2 wonderful surprises, both red. MH dropped by my hotel and produced a gift for me. It was a namecard holder from Inden-Ya. I had seen her namecard holder with a wonderful cream-dotted pattern on what she tells me is deer skin (navy blue). I had fallen in love with it and kept harrassing her to tell me where she got it. Unfortunately, it was a gift to her from her father so she didn't really know exactly where to buy it. Between her meetings here this time around, she chanced upon a shop selling Inden-Ya's wares, and got me my very own namecard holder with tan flower-shaped dots on red deer skin (red is my lucky colour). I found their website via google, so hopefully I'll have time to drop by their store.

The next wonderful surprise was that the GAP store near Parco sells their Product (RED) line! I had actually called Singapore's first GAP store, which just opened in Vivo City, but they had no idea what I was talking about. So when I saw the line here, I kind of went crazy and bought a whole bunch of inspi(red), desi(red) and hamme(red) t-shirts to give as gifts.


After a spot of shopping, SM picked us up and took us out for teppanyaki. Tera is a discrete, little teppanyaki restaurant in Nishi-Azabu that probably seats around 10 people at the counter and then another 20-25 people around tables. If you didn't know of its existence, you'd probably overlook its non-descript entrance. Once inside, you walk downstairs and there's a teppanyaki counter and behind it several screened-off tables. We sat at the counter. The first dish that came was uni on top of a small portion of grilled rice on top of crispy, grilled seaweed. It was absolutely delicious, the uni being very fresh and sweet in taste. Next came a Japanese teppanyaki version of raclette -- vegetables with cheese. We also had beef fillet and sirloin, garlic fried rice (which came with a wonderful broth), and vanilla ice-cream topped with grilled strawberries, all were wonderful! I'm so glad that I now know another good teppanyaki place aside from Seryna's Mon Cher Ton Ton.


After dinner, we went to nearby birth for a drink. I had yuzu tea. There's supposed to be a fortune-telling lady that goes around the tables, but when we saw how depressed a couple of girls looked after their readings, we opted not to take our chances.