Day 2 - Tokyo Surprise Seafood

The sun is out and we still cannot see the edges of Tokyo, no matter how tall the building we're in.

It was more onigiri for Lisa this morning for breakfast, but Jon changed it up and had strawberry cream filled waffles. Everyone was satisfied with their decision. After solving a few technical problems with our game, we headed out to meet Nabu Saisho, our personal guide and Sushi chef for the morning.

About 3 months ago, Jon had the brilliant idea of getting a personal tour and private lunch with a sushi chef through the Tsukiji fish market. We met Chef Nobu Saisho outside the Lawson kombini (convenience store) next to the market at 10am. Nobu-san walked us through the market, pointing out his favorite and recommended foods and souvenirs as well as the ones to avoid because they're at ”tourist prices”. He purchased fresh (and sometimes still living) delicacies along the way to prepare for us back at his restaurant. We both purchased some souvenirs. For Jon, it was premium dashi soup stock blend from a high quality and very old dashi ingredient store, premium soy sauce, chopsticks, and yuzu chili powder. For Lisa, it was hinoki wood sake cups and a royal blue paper crane chopstick rest.

Nobu-san walked us to his restaurant in the heart of the Ginza shopping district and began to prepare our scrumptious lunch, omakase sushi. At the market we had expressed surprise at seeing fresh still on the stalk edamame. Surprised at our surprise, Nobu-san nonetheless picked some up and prepared it fresh along with Okinawa sea salt. It's best we don't know what we're missing back home, because this was the best edamame ever. I don't care what they say; fresh is better than frozen.

As we nibbled away on our edamame, Chef began making our sushi. He started with bluefin tuna, then horse mackerel, snapper, mackerel, squid, and a type of fish that has no real English translation. Then he began to prep the two types of fish he bought for us at the market: a shellfish that's a combination between muscle and scallop along with two still living prawns. When he broke into the shellfish, he found two tiny prawns stowaways, and kept them in a small dish. He moved on to their larger cousins, and beheaded and deveined the shrimp in front of us, slicing them open to serve on top of delicate rice. In less than 2 minutes we went from interacting with two living prawns to eating them.

Then came the fun part, each of us got to make our own sushi under Chef's private tutelage. We each carefully placed the sushi on our palm, balled the rice, and lightly pressed the fish and the rice together using only wasabi as an adherent. See the video in the Google drive for complete demonstrations. It was an amazing experience. One we will never forget and it has made us better nigiri makers as a result. Chalk one up to Jon's brilliance.

But all good things must come to an end, as they say. With lunch ended, we headed north to the Tokyo national museum in Ueno Park. Roughly a quarter the size of Central Park and nonetheless houses several museums, a zoo, and broad walkways.

Our tickets to the national museum give us access to four separate museums. We visited two: the Japanese history gallery and the archeology museum. Although the collections on display are nowhere near as extensive as say the metropolitan museum of art, this makes them more of a reflection of Japanese perspective on history and their ancient past. Jon was particularly taken with the metal work sword displays, whereas Lisa was captivated by the pottery of the Neolithic period. The exhibit on Japanese woodblock printing was illuminating. Basically every layer of a print, each line and color have their own hand-carved wood block and the painting is built on successive pressings of ink to paper. I recommend any number of YouTube videos to describe the process. Until you see it's hard to describe.

Dinner tonight was some of the best tonkatsu (fried pork cutlets) either of us have ever had. For only $15 we received two pork cutlets, a mound of cabbage, a large bowl of rice, a never-ending pot of barley tea, and miso soup. No wonder the line for the restaurant was out the door and down the street.

Although we walked the Ueno Park neighborhood after dinner, we agreed it was time to head back to the hotel, do some laundry, and go to bed on time. While we wait for the laundry to finish it's 200 minute cycle, wash and dry, we're having a beer and hot chocolate in the lobby enjoying our final view of the Tokyo Tower all lit up for the night.