A food tour of Monzen-Nakacho district of Tokyo

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On my travels, I’m a food tour devotee and in such a place as metro Tokyo, population 37 million, with a rich culinary history, I humbly accept tutelage. Eagerly.

My husband and I loosened our belts and joined an ultra-marathon of eating and drinking on an insider’s tour of the Monzen-Nakacho neighbourhood or as locals call it, Mon-Naka. “A magical slice of old-school Tokyo, where the city’s ancient spirit and modern-day creativity live deliciously side-by-side”  the Culinary Backstreets tour company says of the district. It’s an old, traditional district with impressive shrines and temples and artisanal food spots.

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On the tour, we even participated in a goma tako ceremony at a Shinto shrine, where monks chanted, prayed, played taiko drums and lit a fire over which we held our possessions to purify minds, bodies and spirits. Our guide Mairi loves the unvarnished residential neighbourhood so much she hoped for it to stay undiscovered — as she was guiding a group of tourists.

Our first stop introduced us to fukagawa meshi, a clam fisherman’s dish specific to the neighbourhood and dating back to the Edo period (1603 to 1868). In 1939, it was deemed one of Japan’s five famous rice dishes, but the dish all but disappeared when the nearby clam sandbanks were reclaimed in the 1950s. The dish has now become a thing in the neighbourhood.

“There’s a real revival now,” Mairi said. “It’s nostalgia. So many restaurants here are making it and people are coming here from all over the city to try it. Long ago clam fishers cooked them in sea and fresh water and created two versions — bukkake style with a clam, miso and green onion broth poured over rice and the other, takikomi style, with the rice cooked together with the clams and soy sauce.

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At the rustic Fukugawajuku restaurant, on the grounds of a centuries-old shrine, we had takikomi and five other dishes. “There’s a number of words for rice,” Mairi explained. “Okome is uncooked rice whereas gohan means cooked rice but it also means meal. Meshi, as in fukagawa meshi, can mean cooked rice or a meal. People used to eat rice with their three meals every day,” she said. The upper class ate and used polished white rice as currency and the lower class ate brown rice — that is, until the upper class started to suffer from beriberi due to thiamine deficiency.

Next stop: a Japanese pickle shop for tsukemono, the collective word for pickles, an important part of any meal in Japan, whether around the family table or at a lofty kaiseki.

“People like to have a lot of colour, texture, and flavour. That’s why pickles are really important,” says Mairi. They also cleanse the palate and add a kick to the meal. We tried four kinds from the shop and the shop owner treated us to her own invention — pickle brine mixed with soda. It was surprisingly refreshing.

We got lively at the next destination — Orihara Shoten, a shop with 200-plus hard-to-find artisan sakes and a standing tasting bar. The sake was poured into glasses rather than the traditional masu, the square wooden cups, originally used for portioning rice. (Made from hinoki or cedar wood, they have antibacterial properties.)

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“With the masu, you drink out of the corner,” says Mairi. Thus, the Japanese expression for hit the corner is a call to drink. Now, many bars will pour sake into a glass sitting in a masu, spilling it over.

Sake shops and breweries often display a sugidoma, beach ball-sized ornament made from Japanese cedar sprigs during sake-making season. As the sugidama turns from green to brown it signals that the new season’s sake is ready. Orihara Shoten sells snacks to accompany sake tastings and that is how I came to try my first (and my last) chewy flounder fin.

A visit to a wagashi or Japanese confection shop called Fukagawa Iseya Honten showcased a dizzying array of Japanese sweets (although never too sweet), including daifuku, namagashi, dango (steamed, on skewers), dorayaki, manju, and wafer-shelled monaka. The showstopper was matcha mochi with a white chocolate filling. Sheer bliss!

Then, a return to the sauce at Umeshudo, a shop devoted to all things ume, a relation to apricot and plum and full of health benefits. The products, from Wakayama prefecture, include umeboshi, a pickled ume and, more to the point, umeshu or ume wines and drinks made with gin, brandy and other alcohols.

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“Wakayama is the largest ume producer,” Mairi says. “The fruit is known to combat high blood pressure, osteoporosis, diabetes and has fat-burning and antioxidant effects.” So, the logic went, what would be the harm in finishing our umeshu tasting with a rich Wakayama ice cream with an umeshi pourover?

At Maguro Standard izakaya, which specializes in a tuna menu, we turned up the volume.

“You can be as loud as you want,” Mairi announced. “Nobody cares how loud or how drunk you get. That’s the idea.”

Most izakayas start you off with an otoshi, a light appetizer, for which you’re charged — the cost for a table. The three kanji characters in the word izakaya mean stay, drink, and place and they were originally alcohol shops but seats and snacks were added, says Mairi.

“Now, there’s all kinds of food at them.” We tried tuna four ways — powdered tuna, showered over french fries, bluefin tuna sashimi with nori wraps, tuna and green onion sauce grilled table-side, and tuna fritter.

Eating and drinking continued at another izakaya, Sanriku Karigoya The Oyster Mans, yes that’s correct. The high-octane owner —“I’m the Oyster Man,” he laughs heartily as we enter — runs the izakaya with a big heart. In 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and 10-metre-high tsunami devastated Miyagi prefecture, destroying its 300-year-old oyster farming industry.

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The Oyster Man opened his restaurant to help rebuild the industry, selling only Miyagi oysters, which are grown in nutrient and plankton-rich waters that make for an extra creamy and delicious product. Along with a variety of raw oysters, we had fried oysters, oysters gratin and oyster stout. We also tried a non-oyster curiosity — a warty sea squirt, otherwise called sea anemone or sea pineapple, 80 per cent of which hail from Miyagi prefecture. They kind of look like tiny reddish pineapples and you tear off its skin to eat it. Not a fan.

And with that, the six-hour food and drink sojourn in Mon-Naka was over.  My husband and I retraced steps  to the wagashi shop for treats to add to the ume drinks we’d bought in small bladder packs to take home.

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