A Second Attempt

Woke up at 5:00am today in an attempt to get to the Tsukiji Fish Market early enough to avoid the long wait for sushi. This time, we were too early, by some 24 hours. I should have read the fine print: Tsukiji is closed on Sundays.

Our consolation prize before heading home to crawl back into bed was a chirashi from a stall right by where we got our ramen yesterday. Not bad, but not quite as good as what I hoping for. And, well, you know the fish must have been at least a day older than it needed to be... :P

When we woke up for the second time today, we headed over to Odaiba. I'd thought that it would be fun to try out restaurants by the Iron Chefs, and at the top of my list was my favorite Iron Chef, Hiroyuki Saikai. Instead of going to his flagship restaurant however, I decided to try out his Bistro Cafe La Rochelle, which I'd naively imagined to be something comparable to Thomas Keller's Bouchon. I was sadly, sadly mistaken. It serves buffet-style French food, and I'm appalled Sakai-san would attach his name to this place. The food was totally dismissable, and about the best thing I can say about it is that they had some really good cherry tomatoes in the salad bar.

After the disappointing lunch, we made our way to Kapabashi-dori, a street filled with stores that specializes in kitchen and restaurant-ware. Everything from dishes, silverware and kitchen tools to chef's outfits and the plastic display models.

When we were done, we headed to a place I've been wanting to go to ever since I first heard about it -- Harajuku -- but was never able to go on a Sunday due to one scheduling conflict or another. Why Sunday? Because that's when the cosplay people come out to play:

After getting all the shots I wanted, we headed over to the Meiji Jingu, a Shinto shrine dedicated to the deified spirits of Emperor Meiji and his consort, Empress Shoken. It was in the middle of a dense forest, that while very beautiful (as my wife assured me), was completely beyond my comprehension as my allergies just increased by a couple orders of magnitude. As several points I could barely see because my eyes were tearing up so badly.

We finally got out of there and things eased up a bit as we strolled down Takeshita Dori. We got as far as the Omotesando Hills where we spied a shop selling French macarons. Alas, they looked better than they tasted, and fell far short of the ideal.

Today was definitely not turning out to be a very good food day. Lesson learned: stick to Japanese food while in Japan.

So once again, we went and asked the concierge for advice: where do we go for good tonkatsu? (Something I'd been hankering for after reading Winston's attempts to make them.) Answer: Maisen on the 9th floor of the Tokyu department store. And she was right. As usual.

And because we had such a good time there last night, we returned to Sakura Onsen again, this time with two hours to spare - enough time to also get a massage. Bliss...