May: Japan Edition

Author

Jessie Chen
August 31, 2025

A very belated issue because there was too much to say... Forewarning there’s a big thought dump at the end, read if you’d like 😅 Also I just discovered how chopped these emails look like on mobile. If the formatting/order seems weird please just know that it’s optimised for desktop 🤪 

shroom burger

Shake Shack (Osaka)
Goofy but we saw this outside of USJ & decided to have it for lunch. Good call because the park food was giving pop-up café (cute & unappetising). The Shroom burger was v yummy 👉👈

mackerel teishoku

Miyazaki Sakaba Ebisu (Kyoto)
This random 3.9 on Google, station restaurant lives in my head rent free. Recommended by our tour guide, this was my first taste of deep fried mackerel & certainly not my last. It’s rich flavour is the perfect compliment to being crumbed & fried. 🤤

ebi filet o’

Maccas (Kyoto)
I usually avoid fast food restaurants while overseas but boyfriend insisted. This Japan exclusive prawn burger was tasty & well balanced.

blueberry danish

Train Bleu (Takayama)
The highest Tabelog rated pastry place in little Takayama & rightfully so. The pastries were very light but comparable to top tier Australian ones. The sweet products were all fruit forward, showcasing elite Japanese produce. They tasted like you could get away with eating more of them. A dangerous place.

negitoro, ikura, zuke don

Uogashi Shokudo (Kanazawa)
One of my favourite meals of the trip hands down. Located at Kanazawa station was this $15 lunch deal with plenty of roe, marinated & minced raw tuna… This is now my preferred form of tuna; because of the increased surface area the flavour is more concentrated, & the fat effortlessly melts in your mouth. I miss this so bad.

other mentions

Bonus Mentions
Image omitted but consider splurging on expensive Japanese strawberries at least once, they are deliciously soft & sweet 🥰

Lovely sakura mochi but I haven’t had a bad one so I think most traditional places would be fine.

The tempura at this little izakaya in Kyoto was the best we had, & the drinks were good too but they didn’t feel foreigner friendly & the menu was limited to bar snacks.

Usually Japanese curry just tastes like salty vegetables to me, so it’s rarely my first choice. Kanazawa curry has a deeper flavour due to the use of chutney, I like it more.

Not a full list of everything I enjoyed, just stuff that stood out to me throughout the trip!

matcha, cookies & cream donut

PG donuts (Osaka)
Random spot that had some of my favourite donuts ever. Pillowy, with a slight glutinous chew, not too wet, dry, dense, cakey or bready. This was the perfect texture to me & the matcha flavour was *chef kiss*.

assorted dango

Jumondo (Kyoto)
Delicious, flavourful mini dango, cute plating, lovely staff. We tried the Kurogoma (black sesame) Shoyu, the Shiromiso & the Mitarashi Kinako.

hotel brekkie

Hotel Alpha One (Takayama)
I try to feature places that you could realistically visit but am including this for personal reasons. I wouldn’t say you should stay at this hotel. It’s a basic, ill-located business hotel because we booked too late.

That being said, the breakfast was banging. Picture one week of a fried food diet & you walk into a vegetable buffet (with crunchy options 🙂). It was home cooking in it’s final form; everything tasted clean but well-seasoned, with harmonious, fresh ingredients. Just healthy, wholesome, delicious food.

chirashi, croquette, chawanmushi

Kanazawa Market (Kanazawa)
Many touristy street food markets are weaker in food quality but this one was good. The croquettes, arrowroot mochi, & Chirashi (from Iki-iki Tei) we had here were excellent. Deliciously fresh seafood & I can see why Kanazawa is known for it.


cheeseburger

Shogun Burger (Tokyo)
The highest rated burger on Tabelog in Shinjuku, & 6th highest rated in Tokyo. We had the Teriyaki, the Cheeseburger & a limited special burger. The wagyu beef quality makes them insanely moist, rich, irreproducible umami bombs.

Their flavour combos are phenomenal. You can’t go wrong with Teriyaki, bf’s pick was the Cheeseburger but the special they had matched our taste perfectly, being sweet, savoury, spicy & tangy. Just recalling it is making me salivate I’m so serious... I don’t know how it would be improved upon.

Anti-Treats
The food in USJ, as aforementioned, is only good for photos.

Komefuku (Kyoto) seemed popular with both locals & foreigners. However the tempura was under seasoned & the batter was not impressive. Their sushi was good though.

With Menya Sho, I thought the Shio ramen was nice but nothing crazy. I’m a pork girly & I didn’t like the chashu, the way they smoked it tasted bad? 😵

I’ve had more bad soufflé pancakes than good, I think they’re hard to get right... Micasado & Cafe’s was a no. The batter had no flavour & the toppings weren’t good either.

Disappointed by Tokyo’s parfait game… Initial Omotesando was my least favourite.

Kaneko Hannosuke is a reputable tendon chain. They cook a different style of tempura that’s darker & harder, possibly fried more than once. I found it too hard & oily. The portion sizes were silly, the women I saw left like 70% of their bowls uneaten…


This was my third trip to Japan (omitting a family trip where I didn’t have free will). My first visit I walked into restaurants at random, probably spent too many calories at Family Mart as a naïve uni student, & occasionally found spots off of TripAdvisor (of all things, but there weren’t as many resources back then, also my frontal lobe was not developed). On my second trip I went wherever my friends or host families wanted to go.

I had a lot of thoughts about my food finding process this time, because I finally had the opportunity to try whatever I wanted. I knew that if I tried a viral place & didn’t like it, it would pmo so that route was avoided, for this trip at least (I do want to visit some next time).

Beforehand I thought I would be open to commuting to the best spots. But to be honest I really wanted to sight see, & just have faith that something good would be nearby. Despite building a map of saved restaurants, they were often out of the way, in the opposite direction, I was exhausted after exploring & did not want to commute or do any more walking than I had to, et cetera.

At first I gathered spots purely from Tabelog but it was rough. We’d commute to restaurants & there would be a long line, or they would be closed early, sold out for the day. I guess because everything is made fresh & they value minimizing wastage, they prefer to make less than what they could sell instead of overstocking. Furthermore, being out of the way meant there weren’t good alternatives in the area. After this happened a handful of times I got extremely frustrated & opted to just look at what was well-rated on Tabelog in our vicinity. It worked well enough, although occasionally the same problems would occur.

Ultimately I found that a lot of the top rated, highly visited places were not noteworthy, & the ones with fewer visitors, but still highly rated were my favourite. I know this is a wholly unoriginal take, but had thought this was a more of a Maps exclusive issue, & the tastiness gap between these was far larger than expected. Another thing I found was that Google Maps ratings are honestly not bad. I had known this from prior trips but was intrigued to see that I often agreed with the Maps assessment more than that of Tabelog. I suspect residents care more about value for money & service than tourists, so affordable, large portion size venues tend to be the most acclaimed. In future I would probably look at Maps primarily, followed by Tabelog to confirm where to go.

So yeah I think the quantity of standout foods I experienced was not as high as I would have liked, due to the initial learning curve, & circumstantial limitations. Tokyo, & surprisingly Osaka were the weaker of the cities in terms of food. However I enjoyed my trip, sightseeing, activities & would certainly go back to Kyoto & Kanazawa to eat more, also they are beautiful cities. Thank you for coming to my ted talk 😳 

Love xoxo

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