Food and Beverages

All 17 branches sit in and around Hakodate. A burger built on Hokkaido fried chicken, an omurice whose rice tastes nothing like ketchup rice, and a flight home that turned out to be a Pokemon aircraft.

A sea urchin bowl over 10,000 yen sits beside one at 3,000. Hakodate morning market is a place you choose before you enter. What drives the gap, and what to read at the stall front.

A Hakodate restaurant run by a seafood wholesaler. Choose from the tanks; the crab, oysters and crab fried rice all delivered. It was also priced for visitors, and that is worth saying plainly.

A fresh lamb Genghis Khan restaurant inside a Susukino building, going since 1956. We queued in the corridor for an hour. Why fresh lamb is a different food, and what the smoke does to your clothes.

Days in Yokohama with nothing planned: climbing the hill to coffee on the Bluff, the conversation that kept going after the museum, and an ordinary afternoon at Hammerhead.

Three places I ate in Yokohama: astonishingly tender octopus in Minato Mirai, a properly meaty burger by the Red Brick Warehouse, and beef and seafood on the teppan at a hotel grill.

We compared three udon shops in Kagawa: Udon Baka Ichidai, Zaigo Udon Honke Waraya and Teuchi Udon Gennai. Kama-butter udon after an 80-minute queue, kamaage udon in a thatched farmhouse, and Gennai’s slightly sweet broth. Waraya was the best — and the trip also showed me how good Tokyo udon has become.

A morning on both sides of the river at Tha Tien — a porcelain tower you climb by the handrail, and the temple that was Thailand’s first university.

Lunch at Toyosu Senkyakubanrai before an exhibition: the Edo-style lane, what a 3,000 to 5,000 yen seafood bowl actually buys, Maruri Suisan’s kaisendon and uni tub, and the parking service where spending more buys free hours. At eleven there was no queue.

The nakkopsae I ate in Haeundae stayed with me, so when the same Gaemizib name opened in Shin-Okubo in May 2026 I booked a table and drove out. What nakkopsae is, why orders start from two portions, and how the toned-down heat actually lands.