[M2d]

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It helps tremendously to have a good hotel concierge who can make reservations for you; communication was much, much harder over the phone than in person.


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most service industry people we found in Tokyo had a very good command of english. (minor brag coming) that all didn't matter much to my wife and I, though, because we had my two english speaking cousins (spend a year in NZ learning english, so their command of the language was awesome) taking us almost everywhere for three stright days.

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How ridic awesome is the food?

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I'll be posting some food stuff later. Short answer is that most of the food was either ridiculously great, or completely screwed up. Not much middle ground.

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because of the aforementioned cousins, we really didn't hit up any "tourist" type of restaurants. we hit up places that they (locals) liked to go to, themselves. One evening, my cousin took us to a tremendous upscale fusion type restaurant that she had worked in where every dish was done to perfection and every dish's presentation was completely on point (sashimi course was served inside a 3/4 globe of ice about 6" in diameter. from that restaurant, we went bar hopping and ended up in my cousin's friend's bar in shinjuku, further stuffing ourselves on roasted kabocha, perfect yakitori, sashimi platters and other down home bar type food. the joints we hit that night were on complete opposite ends of the culinary spectrum, but both were amazingly good.

later dining ventures on our weekend included the best tempura I've ever eaten (It was my favorite food growing up and is currently one of my japanese benchmark dishes, so i've eaten a lot of tempura in my day) and the best sashimi/sushi I've ever eaten (and I've eaten toro straight off of a freshly fileted ahi tuna that had been swimming an hour earlier). it was so good for dinner that we went back for breakfast (yes, sushi for breakfast) the next two mornings, since we discovered that the restaurant was a 24 hour place.
for the record, it's been three weeks since i've been back and I haven't had japanese food yet (I usually eat japanese at least three times a week, between dinners out, dinners cooked at home and lunch at work). I just can't bring myself to eat the pale comparison that we have here in california.