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"Fran Kuzui"
Tokyo
Savoy Pizza and Cheese Shop Shibuya
We consider ourselves fabulously lucky every time we snatch up one of the ten counter stools or the three-seater table inside the triangular shaped and miniscule Savoy Pizza. Up a few steps as the street curves around behind itself, this smallest of small restaurants is easily missed; the space seems carved out of the corner of a building, almost like the bow of a ship. The best way to find it is to look for the clutch of hungry people hanging around outside, waiting for their slice of Neapolitan-style heaven. It is the kind of place that one is told about and then hesitates to tell more people lest the line outside never end.
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Soba Combo Watanabe
We crept down an almost unmarked flight of stairs, then through a dim, winding corridor and finally pulled back a noren curtain to find ourselves in the world’s only Ippudo ramen location that serves soba noodles instead of ramen. As we seated ourselves on stools around the U-shaped counter, the aroma of tonkotsu (pork bone) broth reached our sinuses and informed us that we had arrived in a place like no other. Shigemi Kawahara opened his first Ippudo ramen shop on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu in1985 and over the next 15 years became a revered ramen master by winning numerous ramen championships on TV.
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Drink Like a Local
Editor’s note: This is a new installment in an occasional series about where to wet your whistle in true Tokyo style. Every Tokyo neighborhood has its standing bars, usually near the train station. Azabu Juban’s most popular, Juban Stand, is located on a backstreet running parallel to the shoten gai shopping street. It spills out onto the sidewalk, where old kegs offer patrons the chance to drink a few beers while enjoying life on the street. Inside, a standing area snakes down the bar to the back, ending with a jumble of stools and stairs leading to a small balcony with a few wonky tables for those who prefer to sit and linger.
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Tsurutontan Roppongi
The West has gone gaga for noodles, Japan’s most cherished comfort food. Hungry diners pack secret soba dens in Los Angeles for bites of hand-cut anything; they line up to plunk themselves down at sparkling counters offering $100 ramen tastings in New York and pick through ramen au beurre in Paris looking for the next new taste. In Tokyo, ramen masters are now competing for cult status within a ramen culture imported from the United States. Soba chefs are newly coveted for their skill in grinding, rolling, cutting and plating and are praised as master craftsmen.
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Café Sakura
Roppongi’s Café Sakura serves as a restaurant and seating area for a bundle of businesses under the same ownership. There’s the Café with table service, the Wine Shop Sommelier (retail wines straight from the vineyard at considerable discount), L’Atelier du Pain (a Japanese-style bakery and cheese shop) and the French patisserie Coco Ange. Put them together and they enjoyably represent a Japanese take on the Western idea of “happy hour.”
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Uo-Katsu
Before Roppongi Hills rose from the warren of rambling streets, aging wooden homes and traditional Japanese ways nestled amongst embassies and Korean barbeque joints, Azabu Juban was a sleepy section of Tokyo, moored more in custom than the flashy markets and designer boutiques to come. The main shoten gai, or shopping street, was a classic example of Japanese daily life. Small mom-and-pop stores catered to neighbors, and after the third or fourth visit anyone could be a regular. The vegetable man would disappear into the back of his stand and produce a perfectly ripe melon before you had to ask; the flower vendor waved at her customers even if they weren’t in the market for flowers; and the shoe repair man admonished everyone for not shining their shoes regularly enough.
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Gontran Cherrier Shibuya
It’s a common fantasy: Accidentally locked in a bakery, forgotten overnight, we quickly eat everything in sight and fall into a sugary, carb-filled dream of sweet-spun bliss. Sequestered away where nobody will find us until morning, we wake from time to time and continue to eat cakes until we sleep again. Short of that happening in this lifetime, we frequently daydream of walking the aisles of bakeries, latte in hand as we pull pain au chocolat and sticky buns from racks, consuming everything in a hurried rush before we’re asked to leave.
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