A Food Critic’s Guide to Tokyo

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. Tokyo now has more Michelin-starred restaurants than any city on earth. It has neighborhoods that have reinvented themselves many times over. It has a public transport system of exquisite efficiency and punctuality. It is, by most measures, one of the most livable large cities in the world. It’s clean, safe, extraordinarily well-organized, and possessed of a culinary culture that functions at every level, from the three-star counter to the smoky yakitori alley under the railway tracks, with a seriousness and a refinement that is genuinely unlike anywhere else. Swinnerton has been writing about that culture—mostly for the Japan Times, where his column, “Tokyo Food File,” has run for more than 25 years—charting its transformation from the inside, which makes him the perfect fixer for this series. He lives now in bucolic, coastal Kamakura, about an hour south of the city, which is as far from his adopted hometown as he’d ever want to be. Here are his suggestions for getting the most out of a visit. Continue reading Access this and all our other premium articles by joining our membership program. Plans start at $6.50 per month and include twice-weekly digital features, access to in-person events, and more.