Robbie Swinnerton has been eating and writing his way through Tokyo since 1980. Here’s what he knows.
Robbie Swinnerton, one of the foremost foreign-born writers on Japanese food culture, first came to the country in 1980—a time, he says, when “Tokyo was kind of like dropping off the edge of the end of the world.” Most of the city was still built of wood, a dense weave of little neighborhoods and narrow alleyways. The yen hadn’t yet been revalued, and Japan was still poor. Foreigners were not expected to eat Japanese food: teppanyaki steak or tempura was as “exotic” as it got, Swinnerton says. Getting anywhere required knowing Japanese, because the address system was impenetrable and taxi drivers navigated by intersection, not street. “You had to do it Japan’s way or the highway,” Swinnerton says.
What happened next is one of the great urban transformations of the modern era. The yen was revalued in the mid-1980s, affluence arrived, and Tokyo exploded into the megalopolis it is today. Foreign chefs came, Anthony Bourdain came, but the big game-changer for the food world, Swinnerton says, was the arrival of the Michelin Guide in 2007. Suddenly the news was out that this was one of the great food cities on earth, a fact that the city’s chefs and their suppliers had long known and were ready to prove. Hungry foreign tourists steamed in, and what had been a closed culinary culture opened into something more porous and more exciting: a two-way conversation between Japanese tradition and the wider world that continues to accelerate.
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