Tag - tokyo-restaurants

 
 

TOKYO RESTAURANTS

Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Dec 28, 2000
Looking back at the future
In honor of that particularly Japanese custom of creating instant tradition ("Since 1999"), this last column of the year peers forward by looking back. Here are just three of the many new places we have visited and enjoyed during the past 12 months but never got around to writing up.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Dec 14, 2000
Dining out in year-end style
With Christmas a mere 10 days away, it is unlikely that anyone has failed to make their arrangements for celebrations, either on the day itself or during the Yuletide run-up. However, just in time for the season of good cheer, overeating and loosening of purse strings, here are two places (opened in...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Nov 23, 2000
A night at the culinary opera
Let it be stated unequivocably and from the outset: The Food File is not a great fan of gastrodomes and flashy new mega-restaurants where style outweighs substance and quality is sacrificed at the altar of fleeting fashion. Nor are we enamored of restaurant chains, where menus -- no matter how titillatingly...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Nov 9, 2000
Now is the season of our great content
It's all too easy to take for granted a restaurant of the caliber of Les Saisons. Ensconced within the venerable portals of the Imperial Hotel, it is plush, self-assured and runs with the same effortless reliability as a well-tuned Bentley sports car. You just know that an evening at table is going to...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Oct 27, 2000
The highs and lows of izakaya dining
The ethereal, powder-blue fiber-optic lights that illuminate the entrance to Yui-an give a remarkable sense of stepping into another dimension -- a sensation heightened by the high-speed elevator ride to the top of the Sumitomo Building. With your brain suitably befuddled before you even get through...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Oct 12, 2000
Cardenas Charcoal Grill: Californian fare grilled to perfection
Fumihiro Nakamura does not affect the expansive personality and well-studied bonhomie of a born restaurateur in the classic European mold. Nor does he in any way exude the slick professionalism and marketing savvy of the streetwise MBAs who scheme up and preside over flash designer eateries for cash-flush...
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Oct 12, 2000
Californian fare grilled to perfection
Fumihiro Nakamura does not affect the expansive personality and well-studied bonhomie of a born restaurateur in the classic European mold. Nor does he in any way exude the slick professionalism and marketing savvy of the streetwise MBAs who scheme up and preside over flash designer eateries for cash-flush...
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Sep 28, 2000
Trendy slurping in Azabu-Juban
All things must pass -- especially, it seems, the good stuff. So a final farewell, then, to the old Azabu-Juban we used to know and love, with its funky, friendly mom 'n' pop stores, cheap nomiya and overpriced wine bars, and its faintly musty smells of onsen and kimchi.
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Sep 14, 2000
Hannibal: Tunisian flavors in Shin-Okubo
Don't roll up at Hannibal with ideas about mysterious Middle Eastern souks, exotic belly dancers or desert caravansaries. Nor should you expect ancient classical motifs and provender of Punic proportions. Just forget you ever saw the movie "Casablanca" (and don't even mention "The Silence of the Lambs")....
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Sep 14, 2000
Tunisian flavors in Shin-Okubo
Don't roll up at Hannibal with ideas about mysterious Middle Eastern souks, exotic belly dancers or desert caravansaries. Nor should you expect ancient classical motifs and provender of Punic proportions. Just forget you ever saw the movie "Casablanca" (and don't even mention "The Silence of the Lambs")....
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Aug 24, 2000
Al fresco evenings in Heisei style
Just when you feel it's safe to venture out of the air conditioning to enjoy a drink or three in the mellow evening air of the late summer, that's about the time most beer gardens are starting to think about shutting down for the year.
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Aug 10, 2000
Spicing up life on the Shonan coast
This is hardly the most obvious name for an Indian restaurant. It started life some four years ago as a friendly little Bengal-accented cafe-restaurant in the back streets on the other side of the station, quickly making a name for itself as a reliable spot for authentic Indian cooking. Then three months...
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Jul 27, 2000
Obana: Heat got you down? Eel thyself
Obana is certainly not the most illustrious of Tokyo's unagi restaurants. How could it be when most of the flash money lies west of the Ginza, not up in blue-collar Arakawa-ku? But there are plenty of people, especially those of humbler birth, who will go to the grave swearing by the name of their ancestors...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Jul 13, 2000
Giang's, Cyclo: Far away, yet so close to Hanoi
It's getting to be that time of year when it feels as if this part of Japan has been towed down to Southeast Asia and temporarily moored somewhere in the Mekong Delta. If only that were so. For us it's not the muggy weather and tropical downpours that we complain about -- it's the dearth of creative,...
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Jun 8, 2000
Fresh innovations at home in Tsukiji
Urban dining myth number one: The closer you eat to Tsukiji, the better quality the fish must be.
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
May 25, 2000
On a culinary cruise in Akasaka
We have numerous restaurants which bear the name of their chefs, owners or svengalis. But Denis Allemand is perhaps the first to proudly boast the name of the man responsible for its interior design -- whose main work in Japan up to now has been producing deli-diners in airport departure lobbies for...
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
May 11, 2000
French with a difference
We have no shortage of bargain-basement French-accented bistros scattered around the metropolis. But for my money, Tete-a-tete is the cream of the current crop. I could reel off about a dozen cogent reasons why I rate this little place so highly. But there's only one that you really need to know -- it...
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Apr 27, 2000
Ohmatsuya: Down on the farm, just off the Ginza
You could call Ohmatsuya rustic -- but only in the most Ginza sense of the word. It sits just one floor above the brand-name bustle of the street, inside a modern multistory building little different from any others occupying that premium patch of real estate. Step inside, however, and you could have...
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Apr 13, 2000
Bangkok's never too far away
You can't get authentic Thai food in Tokyo south of Kabukicho -- at least that's what the conventional wisdom would have us believe. Indeed, as with any such sweeping generalization, there's a kernel of truth to it -- as long as what you're after is hawker food that's rough but ever ready, gentle on...
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Dec 23, 1999
The best of the rest(aurants) of 1999
Before our memory cells get erased by the momentous celebrations and the post-millennial hangover, let's pause for a moment to consider some of the many places we visited and enjoyed in 1999 but which, for whatever reason, never made it into print.

Longform

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