Your essential guide to the greatest feast on earth.
Tokyo is the greatest feast on earth. Not New York. Not Paris. Not Bangkok. All of these cities offer sprawling, beautiful food cultures worthy of a lifetime of exploration, but none can compare with the depth and breadth of deliciousness proffered by Tokyo’s culinary legions. First of all, it’s the size. New York City has some 30,000 restaurants; Tokyo, 160,000. (Take a moment to let that sink in, please.) But Tokyo’s preeminence as the world’s most exciting dining destination isn’t a quantity thing: it’s a quality one. There are a dozen factors that make Japanese food so special—ingredient obsession, technical precision, thousands of years of meticulous refinement—but chief among them is one simple concept: specialization. In the Western world, where miso-braised short ribs share menu space with white truffle pizza and sea bass ceviche, restaurants cast massive nets and try to catch as many fish as possible, but in Japan, the secret to success is choosing one thing and doing it really well. There are people who dedicate their entire lives to grilling beef intestines or slicing blowfish or kneading buckwheat into tangles of chewy noodles—microdisciplines with infinite room for improvement. The concept of shokunin, an artisan deeply and singularly dedicated to his or her craft, is at the core of Japanese culture. If you want to know why Japan’s food culture has no peer, look no further than the shokunin. These are people who pursue perfection down to its last decimal point, whose persistence and focus wear away at the sharp edges of life’s great challenges like a stream of mountain water over a granite stone. Tokyo is the city of ten thousand shokunin. If you come to Japan to eat, you come for them.
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