Electric Town!

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
-- William Gibson, Neuromancer

My images of Japan prior to our visit were murky at best, overly influenced by bits and pieces of Shogun, Black Rain, Blade Runner (yes, OK, technically that was in LA), and Lost in Translation. By far the most most enduring vision, though, was from the opening scenes of Gibson's 1984 masterpiece. I was a bit disappointed on our initial evening train ride into the city from Narita, knowing we were passing by the streets of Chiba with no way to see what they looked like. (I understand there's nothing really compelling in Chiba, but still...)

But I knew that eventually we'd get to Akihabara Electric Town, the Tokyo district that's the electronics geek capital of the world and probably the one place -- with the possible exception of Osaka, where we unfortunately weren't visiting -- that could live up to the mental images I'd developed. The chance came a bit earlier than I'd thought; I'd left our camera charger back in the States by mistake, and in the quest to find a new one I took a train to Akihabara one evening while Forest and Wendy napped. The place was surreal: more neon than I'd ever seen in one place; tiny booths selling circuit boards, transformers, individual chips and just about every other part you could imagine; multi-level electronics-and-manga megastores; and pachinko parlors everywhere.
Since our camera was more than a year old, and therefore ancient by Japanese standards, I didn't end up finding a compatible charger and was "forced" to buy a brand new camera. I unfortunately had to head back to our apartment near the Nishi-Okikubo station, way across town, sooner than I would have liked. At least I knew we'd be able to take pictures for the rest of the trip!

Flash forward a couple of days to Christmas Eve, the morning after our Tapas Molecular Bar experience. We packed up all of our things, sent the bulk of our luggage on to our next major destination outside of Tokyo [Hakone] courtesy of a courier service in the nearby 7-Eleven, and took the train back to Akihabara, where we were going to be spending the night in a pod hotel. I wasn't thrilled at the thought, but Forest and Wendy had really wanted to try it, so I got out-voted.

The hotel itself, "Capsule Inn Akihabara" (the white building in the center of this view) didn't look very promising from the outside, but actually was well-maintained and seemingly well-run once we checked in. For some reason, they are completely closed from 10am (when the previous night's tenants have to leave) until 5pm, when they let people back in for the next night's stay. The floors are segregated, so Wendy and Forest headed up to one of the women's floors to put their overnight bags in a locker, while I did the same on a men's-only floor. We walked the couple of blocks over to the main Akihabara streets to explore a bit and find some lunch. With the possible exception of the Harajuku area, "Akiba" probably highlighted the most unusual aspects of Japanese city life and culture. One of the stranger aspects were the "cosplay cafes", where the waitresses dress up as French maids or manga characters. We picked a decidedly more tame destination, a small noodle shop. Even there, though, nothing was quite what would be expected in any other part of the world. We had to purchase our meal by using a ticket-vending machine at the entrance that [thankfully] had pictures of all of our choices. Rather than the fast-food ambiance that suggests, though, we were then treated to an excellently-prepared (and welcomely warming) sit-down meal at the counter. The rest of Akihabara was a bit overwhelming (especially our brief attempt at playing pachinko.) Forest had left her phone charger in France -- we must have been on the same wavelength -- so we stopped into several shops looking for a replacement, only to be told that nothing like what she needed existed in Japan, despite the fact that her phone was made by Sony-Eriksson. Seems that if something isn't the latest and greatest, the Japanese don't want anything to do with it!

By the time we wandered back to the Capsule Inn for the 5pm check-in, we were pretty beat, so we each went to our separate pods for a short pre-dinner nap. It was at that point that I discovered that the pods were approximately 196cm long (I'm 197cm tall). When laying out straight, I was just barely too long. Fortunately the capsules were fairly wide, so I was able to fit in diagonally.

Since we didn't have rooms per se, this was to be our only night where we couldn't have apéros before going out. We couldn't let Christmas Eve go without some celebration; we'd decided to go to the New York Bar in the Park Hyatt Tokyo hotel, on the 52nd floor of the Shinjuku Park Tower. The bar was made famous by the movie Lost In Translation, although sadly a certain someone was not anywhere to be found on the night we visited.
We hadn't realized that the bar didn't open until 8pm, so we had a small wait, but the place was absolutely stunning, with unsurpassed views of the Tokyo cityscape. They had a lounge band and singer, but as an added bonus we were serenaded with Christmas Carols by a visiting group of Harlem gospel singers. The Hyatts in Japan seem to run top-tier bar programs, and the New York bar was no exception. Unfortunately for me, though I wasn't paying attention to the tabletop snack mix and inadvertently ate a peanut, to which I have an allergy. Almost immediately, I lost all my appetite and wasn't able to even enjoy my martini, which considering the 2,000 JPY cover charge was especially annoying.

Since I was feeling pretty miserable and just wanted to crawl into my pod, Wendy and Forest went on to eat near Shibuya Crossing (which I was sorry to miss) and I took a train back to Akiba. Upon arriving, I was surprised to find that the seemingly near-empty hotel was now packed; all but one or two of the pods on my floor were occupied. The next morning, after meeting up with the girls again, we boarded a train for Hakone.

Our complete Tokyo album can be found here.

Tapas Molecular Bar

When I was trying to decide where to go for my birthday it was between RyuGin and Tapas Molecular Bar at the Mandarin Oriental. They both seemed so great, so different and so interesting- so we did both, not in the same night of course!

The Mandarin Oriental is a stunning hotel in the Nihonbashi area of Tokyo and the Tapas Molecular Bar is on the 38th floor offering amazing views of the city and a very interesting dinner option. Chef Jeff Ramsey serves just 7 diners a seating and 2 seatings per night. We were very excited and after talking with the chef for a few minutes we could tell he was glad that we were into molecular gastronomy and had been to some of his mentor's restaurants.

After a welcome cocktail he immediately dazzled us with foie gras cotton candy and deep fried shoestring beets (which as most of you know we don't ususally eat beets but these were good!).



And there was carmel corn (corn puree entrapped in carmel), a very tasty frozen manchego sorbet stuffed in an apple "cigar", pearls made out of seaweed served with beautiful shasimi and scallops with pumpkin sorbet. There were about 20 courses all together, small bites of fun and delicious food.

A couple of my favorites from the evening were the lamb chop that you had to eat in one bite as it was filled with jus, like a soup dumpling the jus exploded in your mouth when you bit into it! And also the miso soup which was suspended in tofu skin with powdered wakame on the side of it. As you put the whole "egg" in your mouth the flavors all melded together- oishi!





The desserts were just as fun- a "Blue Hawaiian" snowcone which shot smoke out your nose and mouth when you ate it, cheese cake that was niether cheese nor cake and then a fun tasting experiment with a super berry which turns normally bitter and acidic flavors sugary sweet in your mouth.



Chef Ramsey finished our very enjoyable evening by presenting me a birthday gift. An egg which he instructed me to drop on his counter. As I dropped it he smashed the egg open to reveal a tiny oragami crane, the inside of the crane read Happy Birthday!



We finished the night with drinks at Dazzle with friends of Murray's who live in Tokyo now. The drinks were good and well made, unfortunately that super berry was still making everything taste quite sweet! The bartenders here would hand carve balls of ice for your scotches and whiskeys, still a big thing in Japan. And I do think the bathroom had the best toilet in all of Japan, all the bells and whistles!

The Big Birthday part 2

Yeah! My birthday night in Tokyo! Martini's at the apartment and then to start the evening we thought we would find Mori's Bar as we had seen this interesting video on YouTube but the info we had was incomplete so we ended up having very nice cocktails at Muduro. The bar was part of the Hyatt in Roppongi Hills. We would come to learn that Hyatt's are THE place for cocktails in Japan.

We had late dinner reservations at Ryugin, which I had read an article in Food and Wine about and the chef Seiji Yamamoto. The restaurant didn't have an English speaking person on shift for the day we were reserved so the woman who had taken my reservation came in just to work with us. Over the top service.

A 12 course meal, complete with champagne, wine pairings and saki was served to us in a very moderately decorated room. It seemed that everything was muted to enhance the beauty of the dishes. One after the other came these gorgeous traditional looking creations but each one had something that made it whimsical, molecular or otherwise unique from what pure tradition would be.

House made bottarga, monkfish liver, shashimi, shark fin, sakura shrimp and seaperch were just some of the fabulous ingredients presented to us.



And then the most interesting dessert I have had- Candy Apple of Minus 196 Degrees Celsius. An actual lady apple filled with powdered ice cream. Break it open and take a bit and it is Apple Pie in your mouth. Beautiful and yummy!

Chef Yamamoto was kind enough to come out a few times to our table, our waitress playing interpreter as he doesn't speak any English. He wanted to know how we heard of him and the restaurant and what we thought of Japan and the food. He also took special time to sign my menu, no easy feet as there is no kanji for Wendy, but he wanted to make it personal and finally got it down.

He even walked us out to our cab and said goodbye. We were the last to leave the restaurant, I think it was 1:30am.

The trains had stopped running so we had no choice but to take a cab home, unfortunately the cabs in Japan are insanely expensive so $100 later we were finally in our apartment. Dayne fell asleep immediately but Forest and I shared One Cups and talked about our fun day!

I loved having my birthday in such an amazing city but also having two totally unique meals! Absolutely memorable. Oh and Forest's bday present to me was to have geisha make overs in Kyoto! Fun!!! (More on that later)



The next day we were a bit worse for wear- jet lag, lack of sleep, lots of drinking. So we slept in and took it easy. We planned on doing a loop of the city by subway and made our way to Shinjuku station. It was loud and big with huge electronic board displays outside.Our first stop was Harajuku and it was a beautiful, warm sunny day so we got off to explore the area, or stalk Harajuku girls as Forest and Dayne did!

The area was really busy, people everywhere and lots of shop keepers announcing their deals via megaphones on the streets. We wandered around and Dayne and Forest got shots of some Harajuku girls after deploying a surround technique to capture their prey!

My 40th Birthday in the World's Largest City

Happy Birthday to me! We decided to head to Japan for this year's holiday trip and I wanted to have my big birthday in its big city. The world's largest city with over 35 million people in the greater Tokyo area. Isn't that amazing? I can't even wrap my head around that number!

Dayne and I met Forest in the Narita airport and took the airport express into Tokyo, which took about an hour. We had rented an apartment right by the Nishi-Ogikubo train stop. It was very small but perfectly outfitted for the 3 of us and 30 seconds from the train station. After a very long lesson in all the different types of recylcing we were expected to adhear to from our property manager (glass, combustable, non combustable, food, etc) we walked over to the grocery store for martini makings and snacks. It was late and we were all exhausted after a full day of traveling so we decided to "do it at home" so we could get up early and head to the Tsukiji Fish Market.

6am the next morning I woke up Dayne and Forest eager to take advantage of us being out of wack with the time change to head to the fish market. I was greeted with choruses of "are you kidding me? what the hell time is it?!" but it was my birthday so they had to let me have my way!

The market was crazy even at 7:00am. And dangerous with small fork lifts buzzing everywhere, not caring if you were in their way or not. Huge tuna frozen solid were being broken down and sold off. So many different varieties of shellfish- most we'd never seen before- were on display as were live fish, dead fish, dried fish, eels, squids, monk fish liver and all other matters of things that come from the sea. The market is huge and every square feet is bustling.



After dogging forklifts for a while we decided it was time for breakfast. With the help of a local we found the line for the best sushi in Tokyo- Sushi Dei. It was 8:30 and the line was 2+ hours long. We took turns exploring the outer market shops, bringing back food for each other to try and holding the place in line.



After 2 hours we were finally in the short line near the front door and windows. Everyone was peeking into the very small restaurant, with just 11 seats, trying to figure out when their seat would be available. Finally the woman host asked us to choose either the 7 piece or 11 piece sushi menu and the next thing you knew we were sitting on impossibly small stools and all the staff was yelling "irasshaimass!!!" It was 10:30am.



We ordered beers and the sushi started coming. 1st up the most impossibly marbled fatty tuna I've ever seen. Then came sea bream, octopus salad of sorts, mackerel, sea urchin, egg, miso soup, maguro, LIVE surf clam, flounder, weird mushy small shrimp, maki, horse mackerel (YUM), sea eel (couldn't do it after Dayne and Forest's reactions) and finally a call your own piece. I was so stuffed that the only thing I knew I could make room for was that amazing fatty tuna. Forest asked the chef to give her his favorite, now how can that be safe? Forest got COD SPERM SAC! She said it was pretty good and announced to all that it was very creamy! LOL!

We tried to walk off our breakfast by walking around the beautiful Ginza area until we found a liquor store that Jim from Vessel told us about. Finally home to take a nap and rest up for the big birthday dinner- Tokyo style!