Tokyo 2019

A beautiful hotel right in the heart of the business district called Nihonbashi. There are lots of shops and restaurants around it to visit, especially if you walk 10 mins down the street to the Kanda train station where there is a mix of western bars and local food joints. Tokyo is extremely safe to wander around at night but it is quite spread out so bring some comfortable waking shoes!

Specialty Japanese pear martini at Xex, a more westernized cocktail bar. The martini was extremely smooth although I couldn’t really taste the gin as much.

Try their seasonal fruit martinis. They also had raspberry that evening.

Tokyo station, built in 1914, is a central gateway for many trainlines and the famous Shinkansen 🚅 high speed trains. Its red brick facade was recently renovated and is just beautiful!

This teppanyaki restaurant was recommended by the hotel was unfortunately overpriced. Our mistake for listening to the concierge for taking us to a tourist trap. I would have rather gone to a local joint. Our bad!

The Misukoshi department store was Japan’s first department store and built in 1904. Japanese department stores have a certain serenity to them, not to mention the wonderful food court, usually on display in the basement.

Pick little bites to eat of your favorite Japanese delicacies in the basement.

The famous restaurant is know for their Unaju, Japanese grilled eel dish. I love Japanese eel and unfortunately the restaurant didn’t meet our high expectations (even my local Japanese friend thought it was just ok). To make us feel worse, we learned that eel are being overfished in Japan.

They have different sizes for the Unaju dish depending on how many eels you want. The largest portion had three rows of eel.