Tokyo's Hidden Restaurants

Above, next door to Ginza's Wako Dept. Store are several floors of restaurants,
including a French one that I tried out in 2006.  Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Finding places in Tokyo is a near-impossible task (it can be done, but it takes a lot of work). This is also true in trying to find restaurants.

The Boston Globe has an article on finding those "hidden" restaurants of Tokyo.

They begin with:

When I first went to Japan 10 years ago, I carried several guidebooks and plotted out a bunch of meals. Little did I know the impossibility of what faced me. 

For a variety of cultural and historical reasons, Japan has not been that open to outsiders. It wasn’t until Commodore Matthew Perry of the US Navy arrived with his infamous black ships in 1853 and literally forced the Japanese to trade with the West that the nation abandoned its isolation. Japan traded reluctantly. Subsequently, the 1923 earthquake and the bombings of Tokyo during World War II diminished the city’s accessibility. Street signs and numbers of buildings don’t always make sense. Even today most signage is either hidden or written in Japanese. 

Lucky you if you manage to find the restaurant, cafe, salon, or bar in your guidebook. But say you do, there’s still bad news: To order you often have to read and speak Japanese.

Author Steven Haas will tell you about restaurants in Tokyo that are worth finding.

One thing I have found about many Japanese restaurants is that they will have pictures of different meals and all a foreigner has to do is point out what you want to the waiter or waitress.

To read the full article, go here.