It’s hard to go wrong in this gastronomic Valhalla, but in a city with more than 100,000 restaurants, some FOMO is bound to set in. Keep in mind, there’s more to Tokyo than sushi and ramen (for the latter, we recommend Motenashi Kuroki, in centrally located Akihabara), but former Bones chef James Henry declares that Sushi-Ya served up “hands down one of the finest meals I have ever eaten.” Food writer and cookbook author Katie Parla found bliss at Sushi Sawada, where, on the third floor of an office building in Ginza, “Sawada-san and his wife serve a 20-piece omakase at their wooden bar—the experience is so intensely precise, and the raw, marinated, smoked, and seared fish are so perfectly aged and seasoned that if you don’t tear up during the meal, you’re surely dead inside.” Enough said.
The 82-year-old Tsukiji Fish Market has yet to be relocated from its original site near the Ginza shopping district to the Toyosu district, so make a point to hit any of the stalls for a raw tuna breakfast. Beyond sushi, pastry chef Dominque Ansel’s vote goes to Ginza Ichigo, “a kaiseki-style restaurant that specializes in the most incredible oden, the traditional Japanese stew with fish cakes in dashi broth” and Melinda Joe, a food columnist for The Japan Times, suggests Kudan in Gakugei-Daigaku for “a casual izakaya experience with seasonal tempura.” And we totally trust comedian and Italophile Aziz Ansari when he says, “It sounds sacrilegious, but the best Margherita pizza I’ve ever had was at Savoy in Minato.”