The next day I had arranged for us to meet one of our friends around lunch, so we were left to fend for ourselves in the morning. We made a habit of frequenting the convenience stores throughout Tokyo for anything and everything, and this this included breakfast. Since we had three mornings in Tokyo, we would sample each of the major three convenience store brands for their onigiri offerings for breakfast each morning. The first morning we stopped at the nearby Family Mart, where I picked up a mackerel onigiri along with some juice for breakfast. What's neat about how the onigiri is packaged is that there is a plastic layer between the nori (seaweed) and the rice to keep the rice from soaking the nori. Overall this was an excellent convenience store breakfast before we headed out to explore.
Family Mart breakfast
Neighborhood
Our first stop was Don Qijote, one of the large standalone department stores in Tokyo. These department stores tend to span multiple levels and stock everything including cosmetics, food, electronics, clothes, and jewelry. Needless to say that this was for my friend who wanted to buy buckets of cosmetics, so I just mostly wandered around the store and outside.
So it begins
One of these does not belong
Almost tempted to ice someone
Waiting outside...
Since luxury fruit is a huge thing in Japan, I thought we'd take the opportunity to visit Takano, one of the most well-known purveyors of these items. These fruits tend to be of extremely high quality and are oftentimes from very specific regions within the country. While we could get more normal quality fruit from grocery stores or markets, that wouldn't even be as fun as visiting Takano. Our AirBnB was very close to their flagship building in Shinjuku. Takano is well-known for their fruit parlor and fruit bar on the 5th floor of the building, but since they can be difficult to visit without a reservation (especially during the weekend when we were there) we ended up going downstairs to visit the gift shop and the food shop down in the basement levels. Once there we saw insane displays of fruits and fruit-related items, each one looking absolutely perfect.
Gift shop
Original food and gifts
At the time the higo green melon, a relative of the honeydew with higher sugar content, was in season, so we ordered a higo green melon + pudding dish, with the pudding consisting of layers of champagne jelly, melon pudding, and a plain pudding/panna cotta-like layer. The balls of melon were all very sweet and the pudding was a great less-sweet contrast. While a bit pricey, the quality was definitely top-notch.
After enjoying the pudding we headed over to meet our friend for lunch, but not before stopping at Shinjuku station for a cheese tart and milk tea (and not boba milk!).
Bake Cheese Tart
As if we need more milk tea...
The plan for lunch and the afternoon was to meet our friend at Ochanomizu station, where we would basically just wander around, eat stuff, and visit some neat shops. My friend, who lives in Tokyo, seems to know all the best eats in every neighborhood in Tokyo, so that day we just wandered around the area seeing the best of what was around. While there is a time and place for fine dining, my friend primarily focuses on everyday type of eats, so we first headed to a nondescript Japanese curry house which he affectionately described as a "salaryman's curry". When we got there there was a line snaking out the door but we were able to get a seat a few minutes later. I ordered a heaping plate of tonkatsu (pork cutlet) curry and my goodness it was probably the best plate of Japanese curry I'd ever had. The cutlet was perfectly fried and there was just the right amount of curry so that there was nothing left on the plate.
After our first meal we wandered the neighborhood looking through old record stores and bookstores and visiting some hobby shops. Some of the antique bookstores had some really early editions of famous texts and I was surprised that they were just on the shelf for us to touch and peruse and we spent a fair amount of time just looking through some of the books. Some of the hobby shops are decently large and seem to get into some really niche areas, though I wouldn't really know since I know virtually no Japanese...
Books!
what
After wandering the shops for a while we headed out for our second lunch at a nearby conveyor belt sushi plate. My friend shared with us that eating at one of these places is supposed to be a slow relaxing experience of eating through 150 JPY plates of sushi. Additionally we ordered a few things directly from the sushi chefs since they were on the menu but we couldn't find them on the belt.
All smiles
Better than blue steel
After our second lunch we headed over to the Tokyo Dome Hotel. At the top of the hotel there is an Italian restaurant, The Artist's Café, that has fantastic views of the city. However they are generally ok with you just hanging out there and overlooking the city if you are nice about it. While we were there there were a number of people enjoying afternoon tea.
After enjoying the air conditioning on the hot summer day we left and immediately went to find ice cream. The shop be visited has been around a long time and was rebuilt by the owner after it was destroyed during WWII. The shop is more of a sorbet shop since it is dairy free and serves the sorbet inside a waffle-shaped wafer with mochi. I ended up ordering one with black currant and marble soda sorbets and it definitely hit the spot as another snack.
Decisions, decisions...
I may have had a few of these in Tokyo...
While walking with our snacks, we heard a little bit of a commotion down the street and we eventually found out that it was a Taiko drum group on the back of a truck. We weren't sure exactly what was going on in the neighborhood, but there definitely seemed to be an event of some sort happening. We stopped to enjoy the Taiko performance (or the Taiko truck if you will) before continuing along our way.
Taiko truck!
As it was approaching the evening, we headed over to Ueno for some dinner. The area around Ueno station is fairly lively with many shops in the market directly below and adjacent to the tracks. A lot of these shops are accommodating to foreigners, but we went to Daitoryo, an izakaya restaurant that caters primarily to Japanese workers. The shop itself is really small and crowded, with hardly any room between seats at the counter and lots of squeezing to let others in and out. We were able to secure some seats at the back corner of the counter and from there I let my friend do all the ordering and dish upon dish came off the grill and were swiftly eaten and washed down with some excellent tea.
After dinner we wandered around some more and there was definitely something going on in the city since we saw more displays throughout Ueno, though most were being taken down since it was the end of the night.
It was at this point in the evening my friend brought up an interesting thing that we had observed. In Tokyo it can be difficult to find public bathrooms and trash cans. For trash cans oftentimes the best options are convenience stores or small trash cans tucked into side hallways in train stations. Public bathrooms can also be found in convenience stores and department stores, particularly in less touristy/popular areas. However one place that will always have public bathrooms are Pachinko parlors. Pachinko is an interesting thing similar to slot machines, which is interesting since cash gambling in Japan is technically illegal. However it's a bit of a loophole where the balls won from Pachinko are exchanged for some kind of prize/figurines in the parlor (similar to arcades and Chuck E. Cheese establishments) and then the prize can be sold off-site to "someone who is willing to pay money for these prizes".
After this interesting Tokyo bathroom lesson, we picked up some dessert before calling it a night after a wonderful day of eating in Tokyo.
And naturally more milk tea
Panda bun with cream cheese from Lotteria
