00:00:00 John Daub: Hello! Welcome to Tokyo. I am home after like what seems like 10 days of traveling on the road to Sado Island and then to Kagawa, to Zensuji, where I just got back to Tokyo last night. Kind of decompressing a little bit. So today I wanted to take a question that I got from a viewer a couple of weeks ago when I asked for them. And this one was interesting. I had the hardest time to find good local restaurants during my first visit to Tokyo. First time anywhere is really hard, especially a foreign country. How would you find good restaurants in Shibuya, for example?

00:00:35 This could be Shibuya, Shinjuku, Harajuku, anywhere in Tokyo or Osaka for that matter. And, you know, the answer I thought was kind of obvious. So when I got this question and I first saw it, it kind of was a head scratcher to me. It was like, doesn't everybody have the same apps and looking at the same places? And that's not the case at all. Everybody has different ways. I think that's the case of doing this. Some are better than others. We also have a Discord server. We're going to have some call-ins from people, maybe take some questions as well as the live chat here and discuss it. But I want to talk about how I find local restaurants.

00:01:11 The first way is, of course, I live here, so it's going to be word of mouth. I hear some things from friends. Friends will share places that they visited. I might call up some people. I remember just a couple of weeks ago I called my friend Matt Alt, who also is a resident of Tokyo for a very long time. And I asked, where's a good restaurant to go? And he made a couple of really good suggestions. And I didn't go to any of them actually because I knew them. But it's always good to ask friends and get feedback from people who are living here.

00:01:42 You can ask the information centers. You can ask, you know, people on the street for that matter. But the thing is, before... And I'm talking now about not about me, but about tourists. Before you even come to Tokyo, you had best do some research. That means going online and finding some of these restaurants that you might want to go to. Make a list of neighborhoods and restaurants that you might want to go to. And then when you get here, you can investigate them. If you walk by them, you'll recall them. But there are too many restaurants and there are too many tourists here. A lot of them are packed. Some of them require reservations. Without that, you won't even get in these days. So it makes a lot of sense to do your homework.

00:02:24 So what do I do for local restaurants? All right. So restaurants in Tokyo in particular, they are changing. Yo, Mr. Tsubasa, how you doing? Changing. Ohayo gozaimasu. I see everybody in the live chat. It's always changing. So, like, I find every three to five years, places that were there have turned over maybe once or twice. And there's a new place. And you have to go online for this. There's no other way to do it. Places that you might have gone to the first time you visited Japan might not be there. It might be. Some restaurants have been here for centuries. Some restaurants have been here for a week. So it's always good to check online.

00:03:04 So what I normally do, one of the assets for Japanese is this one here. Let me pull it up onto the screen. So I type in Shibuya restaurant in Google. Okay. And what I get is a website. Hey, Bradjo Studio. Nice to see you again. So what I get here is a bunch of hits. And the first one there is Tabelog. And Tabelog has been around for a very long time. They have a pretty big database. It's in Japanese. But I found that you could change the language to English, which means that you have the local data, local reviews from Japanese, not tourists writing in here, showing some of the top places in English. I think that's pretty interesting. And I'm going to show you why maybe local Japanese sites are perhaps better than some of the other ones.

00:03:57 So these are some really fine restaurants. But I noticed that in Tabelog, you look at the top places. Okay, maybe that's not for me, but there's a place where you can also change the filter. So perhaps you want to look at another specific area. You want to look for Yakiniku. You want to look for a certain date or a certain time. These restaurants might not be available to you, despite the fact that they're highly ranked and they're right in front of your face here. So you have to maybe put in the date that you want to go to see what might actually have tables, which place might actually have tables. But what I liked about this Tabelog is you can also look by map, which also helps in proximity to where you are. Also by cuisine, by food. And again, you're going to get translated local reviews. There are some expats and some foreigners here, but most people that were using Tabelog, I believe, are not from are from here in Japan.

00:04:55 The good go to go to for almost everybody. I talked to in particular is this and I can't I was really kind of surprised that more people weren't using I'm going to zoom out a little bit more using Google Maps. Google Maps is sort of like I don't know, like it's so easy and everybody has it. It's not just for navigating from one place to the other. It's a social media and you can get in reviews from people. So I put in just restaurants. So just looking around for places that perhaps you'd want to go. I'm going to scroll over. This is Shibuya Station here. OK. So you see there's a ton of places listed here with reviews. These numbers are pretty accurate. Anything above three point eight is usually pretty good, I find. And most of the reviews are pretty spot on honest here.

00:05:52 So let's say I push in this sushi restaurant near the railroad tracks here. It looks pretty good. It's not a Michelin star restaurant. Reviews are really high. Sometimes you don't have to go to Michelin star restaurant to get a really good. It says there's Michelin level sushi restaurants. So I thought it was a sushi restaurant that competes. Prices were cheaper than that. But the overall cost compositions, which is a good idea to get a course, is thirty to forty thousand yen, which is about two hundred dollars, which is kind of a lot of money. But if for high end sushi, you're probably going to tell the difference. Absolutely you will. It'll be one of those experiences that changes your life sometimes. And honestly, you probably can't get into a Michelin star sushi restaurant without a reservation months in advance. So there are other places that are almost as good, maybe more reasonably priced that are available. So I kept on searching.

00:06:46 What else do I want near the Harajuku area? This is closer to a multi Sando here. You can see look at this. This is like a vegan bistro here that looks highly reviewed. Four point seven. I go in here and I look at the newest reviews quite often. There's a place where you can find the newest ones. And this is just a week ago. So I'll post on IG recommending this restaurant. I decided to try it. You can see the pictures look pretty interesting and it's all vegan. And that was kind of shocking when I looked at this like, really, this is vegan? Well, I might not. Despite the fact that I want meat, sometimes a vegan meal is pretty satisfying, too. I can I can tell you that after yesterday's live stream eating at a vegan Shokobo, which is a Buddhist temple. I'll show you that in a second here. So I kept on searching and I found this place. It was highly reviewed. This is another steak place. Oh, my goodness. It looks so good. Again, I went to the newest reviews because those are usually the place could have gone out of business or what I make sure that the reviewer he's got a lot of reviews. So he's. This isn't paid for by what it could be. But look at the pictures on here. Highly recommended. It looks absolutely delicious. Looks maybe more on the high end, but you're certainly going to get a really delicious meal. It's local run this place, local business, not a not a chain restaurant.

00:08:23 So you can find out if it's a chain restaurant or a local restaurant just kind of by by looking and searching here, I'm looking for just for pizza. You know, I live in. I live in Tokyo. Sometimes I just want a slice of pizza or something. But, you know, not all pizza places are equal. And this is this is where the Google math really comes in. You can get pictures of it pretty, pretty good. So this one looks four point five reviewed. And I looked at the pictures and I'm like, yeah, you know, New York South pizza is OK, but it looks like cardboard to me, I'm sorry. Some of the reviews that here's not not a good one, but I always go for that. This is 17 hours ago. And. I also look at the reviewers profile to see if he's done a lot of reviews before and that gives him somewhat reputation, but I look at this. This is like a really overcooked piece of New York pizza. It looks kind of cardboard ish to me and it looks smaller than a New York slice. But, you know, if that might be what I'm looking for, but it is highly reviewed. Again, it makes a lot of sense to go in and look at the reviews before you decide to go to the place. Don't just look at the number of ramen.

00:09:33 So I went in and searched. And of course, you're going to get a lot of ramen places around the Shibuya area here. Do you notice on the top there there's a button where you could say search this area. So if you just scroll around the maps, you can search around Tokyo with your finger and then push search this area and it'll bring up more restaurants. You can zoom in and out and search more restaurants. So this is like if it recommends Ippudu, Ippudu Ramen. I'm kind of like that's like a chain. That's maybe not what I want to go. I want to look for a local place. You can find that. And if you're looking for high end or low end, the Google, the great thing about the Google Maps is that you can, again, also use the filters and you can find what your price point is.

00:10:13 A lot of people will go to Instagram. But I want to say this about influencers somewhat, somewhat suspicious of the reviews. And they always make the food look better. And often if they're working with a restaurant, they're getting paid. They're, of course, going to get the best looking food. You just never know. Again, not all influencers are the same. I don't consider myself an influencer, although, you know, I guess I am. I don't know. I consider myself more of a storyteller. So influencers are. Hey, champagne Sumos here. Do you like Oyaku Donburi? I do. Oh, yeah. Oyaku Don, I love it. Oyaku Don is a weird dish. It is certainly local to Tokyo. I believe it was invented here at a place in Ningyocho Street from Ningyocho Station. And there's always a line and it's a little bit pricey because it's the birthplace of Oyaku Don and Oyaku Don is an egg and chicken mother and child. It's it's a pretty freaky name, but it's an amazing dish. It's egg. And usually it's not like a fully cooked egg. So it's got this really nice, creamy consistency. And the Japanese eggs are so good. You can eat them raw. Don't worry about it. And the chicken and like and it's usually juicy chicken and the egg maintains the juiciness of the chicken. If you think really deep about it, it's kind of a nasty dish, but I always I always love it. And that place is great. You can put a little bit of spice on top of it. I would recommend Ningyocho right across the street. But you can use Google Maps and find it. Just type in Ningyocho Oyaku Don and you'll be able to pick up this restaurant. I think it's a little bit pricey for what you get, but it's guaranteed to be an experience because it's the birthplace of the place.

00:12:07 Katsudon is probably better if you can't eat. If you can't eat pork, then Oyaku Don might be the way. Katsudon is a deep fried breaded pork cutlet. Juicy, crunchy on the outside, juicy on the inside with that meaty taste on top of a bed of rice with egg around it. Oh, my Lord, it is top five for me every time. Top five. Yeah.

00:12:28 So there's another another another website that I would go to again. Like if you just plan to come to Shibuya, just here's a video that I took not too long ago walking around Shibuya. And you can see here it's just like there's so many restaurants. If you're looking just walking around the street looking for restaurants, you're not going to find what you want if you don't plan. There's too many of them. There's too many chains and a lot of them are not very good. So if you just walk in the streets, you're probably going to have a decent meal. But you can always do better if you do your homework. So if you like, I hate those red hot dogs. I got sick a couple of times from them. And from the from the dye, I think there's some sort of chemical in there that I'm allergic to.

00:13:10 If you just walk around, you can see there's just just restaurants on the second and the third floor, which you can't see on street level. And you're looking for you're looking around the city. You're going to find places targeting tourists. It's usually going to be not really well priced. There's nothing wrong with those places in the first floor. But again, if you do your homework, you're going to find places that are a lot better. I think, you know, the hub ale, the hub pub is one pub you could go to. But there's a bunch of other places that are a lot better than the hub these days. So, again, like if you're just coming to Japan and you walk around Kabukicho, there's so many options, you're going to be overwhelmed with them. And you're going to spend an hour or two looking for a restaurant without a reservation. And you're going to end up at just eating McDonald's, which is like a really big shame, I think nobody should do that ever.

00:13:58 Well, that's not true. You should eat McDonald's Japan maybe once on your trip to compare what it's like with you want McDonald's back home and then you can get a better idea of the quality of the food. Nothing. What's wrong with that? You might even want to get a Domino's pizza or a Pizza Hut, but don't make Western food here the cornerstone of your trip. Try to search online and find local restaurants. The chains are fine, too. Usually they're quite well set up with tourists with iPad like devices that have menus in English, which make it easier. You can change back and forth the language to make sure the prices don't change and you don't have dual pricing, which is something that Japan has been considering. But I haven't seen too many places that are enacting this, especially since the yen is starting to get stronger. And the currency is coming back to back to earth, back to earth.

00:14:41 So let's turn to our Discord server here. I'm turning up the volume here. Hello. Hi, 821. How you doing? Audio check. Hello, John. Can you hear me OK? I can. Nice to hear from you. How's this? How's the stream? The audio OK? Yeah, seems fine on my end. All right. That's good to know. Let's see. We got a couple of audience members here. Not too many. I don't know if Peso might not be around. He's been in Japan many times. But if you have any questions or you want to share your experience going around Tokyo or Japan searching for restaurants, that'd be really great to hear from you. Anything to add? Hello. Hi, 821. Not at this time. All right. We'll be waiting for some hand raisers. Just let me know when you see somebody. Sure. Thank you. Peso isn't online. That's a little odd. I miss Peso. Yesterday. He left us a little note that he's busy right now.

00:15:38 Oh, OK. A couple of days ago, I went to Zen Suji. Here's a picture. This is the screen. The thumbnail for it. I didn't have a lot of time to set this up. This is Shukubo, which is Buddhist cuisine. It's 100 percent vegan, no meat, no alcohol for that matter. And they're very creative with it. And I made a video showing the food from this. This is made on a leaf, grilled on a leaf, I should say, with the miso taking on a little bit. It's a very good flavor. Tempura. Check out this video. And I think it's going to be really fascinating since all of us that are watching our foodies are very interested in finding some of the best restaurants. This is saying that a Shukubo is an experience in itself, not just for the food, but for the experience of staying in a temple. Now, this is each Shukubo is what it's called. The temple stay is different. Look at that. She's a gelatinous substance is actually it looks like Maguro, but it's actually, as I said, like a gelatin type of thing. That you put in a mustard sauce, which is just really delicious, including this rice that is cooking right in front of you, which is so you can't get any fresher than that. And this one made usually this chawan chawan mushy is made with eggs, but they used tofu like a kind of an interesting way to make it. I had some issues with this one. You can watch on the live stream what happened there. That's also a good note. But yeah, this is something that was online a couple of days ago as a live stream. Forty minutes. You get a complete full course on what I ate when I was out in the countryside. Again, that is not Maguro, but it's set up to kind of look like it. I know the Buddhist monks are pretty creative in the kitchen there. And my take away is from it. If you if you can catch that live stream from a couple of days ago, that'd be pretty cool to be pretty cool.

00:17:32 The next one I want to introduce you to and I'll be checking in to see if we have any hand razors is the site. I think it is a resource that a lot of people use, but maybe you have to be a little bit careful with is this trip advisor. And TripAdvisor is meant for tourists. This isn't something for local. So when you talk about local restaurants, these are usually tourists reviewing it, not any Japanese reviews. There might be a few. But TripAdvisor has, of course, a really good website. You can see on the side. I went in and tried it out for you to give you an idea. These are the top restaurants in Shibuya. From. TripAdvisor, which is a little bit different than the rankings of the other places, which is interesting. But I saw like the Ninja Experience Cafe, probably definitely definitely set up for foreign tourists. Nothing wrong with it. Is the food any good? I'm not really sure, but it was interesting to see that in the top five. So I think I went in there to kind of look at the food and wasn't sure whether or not it was good. But you could see once again the filters in there. So I could find different restaurants or a cafe. You can do lunch. You can do the the online platforms, mid-range or cheap eats or both. Whether or not it's it's highly rated, the kind of food that you want. I like the way that they have these tabs. So you can search out the local restaurants. It'd be good to write non-chain restaurants as well. And then as well as the area. And then by doing this before you even get on the airplane, you're really setting yourself up for success when you come in and search for restaurants. Because you can't do this blind. A lot of these restaurants are not on the first floor. Some of them are in alleys that you might never, never have gone to. This is the most recommended one. And I looked at it like, yeah, I can see why. Nabe is a food that absolutely you should try, in particular in the winter that you'll just love and like a hot pot pretty much. And you can see the tourists that went in there very English menu friendly. So you can understand the menu. Very tourist friendly place. So I got very high reviews. The good thing with with TripAdvisor is that because it's made for tourists, you're going to get tourist friendly places and that could be a good thing for you. I like the fact that they have a map that you can just search on as well. So that's kind of a kind of a good thing.

00:19:50 I use my iPhone WRX turbos in the house. Nice to see here. So I think that that's going to be probably. Yeah, like I think Chunko Nabe is also really good. That's probably best in Ryogoku, which is Sumo town because they have so many of them. They make a lot of it. So the turnover is high. So you're always getting fresh ingredients. If the restaurant is not very popular, I always after watching Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares a little bit too many of them. It gives me makes me a little suspicious of local restaurants, too. But in Japan, usually the reputation is more important than the money. And you don't see too many poorly run restaurants, but you will. It's not like exclusive to just America that that there's some nasty restaurants out there that I've gotten food poisoning here in Japan as well. Mostly from ramen from shops where they did not. Throw out the soup, perhaps. And I got really bad stomach aches the next day. So it's good to stick with a popular ramen shops that usually have customers. You can tell when you go in there and don't order stuff that that is not so popular or low on the menu. Sometimes you can just ask what the recommendations are from the guy sitting next to you is often better than the chef just saying in particular to not popular places like what does he have that looks pretty good. I'll have what he's having. I've done that before.

00:21:08 We don't I'm surprised we don't have any takers here. Anyone who wants to join the stage and and talk about it. So we got a quiet discord today. I don't know, but I want to say thank you. So, Jim, I guess we're not going to take any questions. Do we have any in the chat? No, not right now. I left a note there, but not at the moment. Mike isn't working. Really? I think it's my mic working. OK, it looks like it should be yesterday's. Yesterday's, Mike, I had the wrong wire and road hat makes you use roads mics. So if you use a non road USB to lightning wire, it doesn't come on. So I apologize to everybody. Yesterday, audio was not really great. And then Suji Champagne Sumo. Have you been to the mom and pop restaurants in the small inns always? I find like the mom. And pop places are the places that probably need the most love. And you can tell you can tell. But also, like sometimes if it's pops and he's a little bit older, he can be a little bit angrier, I've noticed. And sometimes if he's had bad experience with with tourists, he's he you know, there's some issues with mom and pop shops. I don't I don't want to talk too much about it. It's rare, but I've been into some places in in highly touristed areas where they're just fed up with tourists, maybe from wasting food or just not having manners or, you know, trying to tip, which is something that you should not do, despite the fact that you want to. I think tipping is wrong. We could talk about that in another live stream. If you have a question about that, leave your tipping questions or any questions in the comments below, and I might cut it out and use it and make a live stream answering it like I am right now.

00:23:04 So I want to say thank you to our questioner this time, who is a fleas app. Who has this? Thank you. Please. I appreciate it. Like the name. That was a great question for you. Nobody here on the stage yet. Any questions in the live chat? Let's see here. We got Sarid writes in here. What would can I recommend? You mean like for restaurant home cooking? You know, it's interesting. It's hard to find home cooking. So I would look for restaurants that that might be mom and pop so you can try some home cooking type of places. And you get them more in the countryside for sure. One of the things when I went to Zen Suji and tried this tour that they were trying to do on trying to put on. They had this thing at the information center from a mother, just a normal citizen who came in and was teaching us. We were tourists. I live here, but I was pretending to be a tourist. How to make like the local sushi, which actually is sort of cooked and using meat. And it's like a Meishi, which is a mixed up rice with with the local beef and it was so good. And then she put it in a cup and she made it made it so presentable like it was a restaurant. And I said, this is one of the best things. She home cooked everything and it looks so good, but it tasted different than it was in a then you would have gotten in a restaurant. You can tell you could tell what that mother's love that she put in it, but she cooked it for tourists. It's genius. So I was just so moved by it to have a local mother come in and cook for us. And the same kind of food that you would cook for her. And she's like, Oh, that's the kind of experience that I think tourists just don't get. So I was really appreciative of that on the tour. And I gave that pretty high marks.

00:24:46 CMF is here with a hand raised. Let's bring you up on the stage. See if we can get you here. I'll invite you to speak. You can come and leave a question. Be nice to hear from from somebody watching. I guess you have to accept the invitation, right? That's right. Yes, that's the invitation. So see CMF, you have been given the invitation. You have to accept it to get up on the stage and you'll be able to speak. Ask a question. We got a couple of other ones here in the chat. Again, I always hope these live streams are useful. Usually can get all the information you want the first 10, 15 minutes. Are there sites will rights in here other than Tabi Tabi log that Japanese people use? There are. Hot Pepper was one. It was a free paper and they had a lot of reviews. But I can't remember if anybody uses them anymore. They used to have. They were pretty much advertisements in a free paper that you could pick up in the local area. So Roppongi would have Roppongi free papers. But I found that people would use them as doorstops or to kill mosquitoes or something. Nobody really respects the free papers. And the ads are quite expensive. It was about 50,000 yen for one small ad. So I don't know how it's doing anymore in the Internet age, but Hot Pepper was one. Hot Pepper JP. I think it was called Google Maps reviews. I think it was called Rants. There are some good ones and bad ones. But I always look at the local, the Google map, the guide and see how many how many reviews the guide has given and how many stars they have, like I am a six star guide and I leave reviews sometimes with photos. I wish I could upload more videos to Google Maps, but it doesn't allow me to do that on iOS. It's Android thing. But the Google Maps is good, but you have to filter it to the newest five year old review, probably not going to be as useful as one last week and see the reviewers reputation. And then if they have any pictures left, a photo doesn't lie. So that pretty much sums it up. Instagram is also good. You can use hashtags to find it out. If you see a good restaurant and you're like not sure about the Google review or Yelp, I think Yelp is something they have here, but it's not something that I use in Japan, so I can't tell you about that. But that might be something that's here. I know Yelp was trying to get in and I had a friend. And his name is Dean. Not not the dean that's on the show. Another dean, Dean Fuji, who was a part of the Yelp team in Japan. But they were a startup here. And I don't know if they were able to compete very well.

00:27:34 What is your recommendation on making reservations when you don't know Japanese? Do it online if you can. I've made reservations off of Google Maps before I've made reservations off of just the website. You can go to Google Maps and go to the website off of Google Maps. And and quite often they can do online reservations there. You can use Google Translate, copy paste the link into your computer into Google Translate, and it translates all the website into English. It's good enough for you to be able to make a reservation. The second thing you want to do is to call them or have your hotel call them. And and just to confirm that the reservation was received. Sometimes that's not a bad thing to do. In particular, if you really don't if you really want to make sure you get that reservation, if you are just totally overwhelmed with the process of making reservations and language and you just want to make it super easy, you can use a travel agency like Rakuten Travel is one. I don't know if Tokyo Cheapo is doing this kind of stuff yet, but there's a bunch of them that you can make reservations for with a tour guide. And having a tour guide is a huge benefit. In fact, in the next month, I have a video with me and Matt Alt going to Shimbashi, taking you to some interesting local restaurants. So this is a topic that's dear to my heart. And I go around with a guide from Rakuten Travel and I was really wanted to try this experience out. It rained really badly. But Matt was was game and the two of us went around to these local establishments. And we're going to I'll show this to you in a couple of weeks, but for sure it was a good experience. But having a local guide, you pay more for that. But it's not that much more. Actually, it works out to be pretty good. And you can try more than one restaurant as a result. And having that local guide, it gets rid of all the reservation requirements because they do that for you. So that might be something that you want to go and having an English speaker there. It's like going with a friend I found. And, you know, sometimes if you're with a family, that could be pretty good. If you have kids that may be more friendly, if they're with some stranger, that might end up being a pretty good thing for a family of four, I'm just saying. I can see that me using that in the future with Leo, let's just say, depending on how he behaves, he's not the best behavior if it's just the three of us. But if there's somebody there for the first ten minutes, he's very shy and very well behaved, I should say, but he's normally very well behaved. It's just, you know, it's he's he's three year old.

00:30:11 Hey, John. John, can you hear me OK? Yeah. OK. There's a question in the fireside text by Dominic Illuminates. OK, so the question is, John, what is your favorite sushi place? Local and chain. Wow, that's a great question. So local and chain. It's I think a lot of, you know, I always say sushi is on my because it's it's mid range, it's made by trained chefs. I know. I know the ingredients regularly, daily. And I know that the turnover on their sushi is high. So it's fresh because it's always crowded. I always go to the one in Skigi Market at the Honten, which means the main store. The Honten has a reputation of having the best of their chains. Sushi chefs, you can get the counter. You certainly need to make a reservation. If not, you're going to wait at peak times for up to an hour or more. And then usually people bugger off and go to the 15 chains, 15 other sushi zanmai around the area, which you're going to get a pretty good experience there, too. But there's something special about the Honten. That would be my favorite. There are there is a Nemuro. All right. This is inside inside information for sushi. I don't know if it's still there. Peter and I went to Nemuro, which is an East Hokkaido. It's a place like tourists never go there. All right. It's it's like very rare to go to Nemuro. It's it's pretty deep up there in Hokkaido. It's the easternmost point of Japan. All right. It's like it's like a post town, like an outback town. And they have a sushi, a Kiten sushi restaurant experience from local fish. So good. All made sushi chefs outstanding. They have a chain in Tokyo, a branch of it. It's not a big chain, a branch of this Nemuro sushi in the modern Uchi side of Tokyo Station. I haven't been there yet. I'm just saying. It's really good. There's also a Kiten sushi restaurant in Kanazawa, which is out of sight right near Kanazawa station that I just loved. Just you all have to do is check Google reviews and you'll see there's like a thousand of them for this chain. That's a little bit on the on the mid range. You know, Kiten sushi, conveyor belt sushi or sushi go around has an image of being cheap. I typically don't like to go for that because the sushi's are too small and they're of dubious quality, even though they could be fresh. I can tell that it's not by because I've eaten too much sushi in my life. But I would go for places that are not big, super sized chains. But a Kiten sushi shop that has maybe five other shops probably going to be really good because they're still local and they've been successful enough to expand to four or five locations. That's a sweet spot. If it's got 100 locations, I'm pretty sure that they're trying to maximize profits like every restaurant is. But I always found that. There's a lack of authenticity. And usually the sushi chefs are more like short order cooks where they're just taking a piece of fish and slapping it on the top. They're not real sushi chefs per se. But again, a sushi chef has to train for seven years with a sushi chef as an apprentice. So they better get paid at the end of such a long apprentice and have some pretty darn good skills. But you can tell the difference when you have a good sushi compared to one from a low end sushi. Restaurant. I appreciate that question. Thanks. Hello. Hi to one for reading it off to me. I appreciate that. You're welcome.

00:33:51 We got one more in the fireside text right now. Oh, this is from Gift D. Tragend. And the question is, what about good Filipino restaurants? You got me there. You got me there. I don't know. Filipino restaurants. I don't I don't know. The only Filipino food that I've had in Japan was work. Were cookies that I think Joy gave to me or I don't know. I haven't had any any I haven't been to any restaurants, Filipino restaurants, but I appreciate the question. I don't know. I'm sure there's there's so many of them because we have so many tourists in the Philippines visiting and a lot of Filipino residents, now many of them will go are working in specialized fields like nursing and medicine and engineers and I.T. But some of them, I guess when you have families, second or third generations born in Japan might start Filipino restaurants. I'm not sure. I don't know. What do you guys think? Let me know in the comments below. Maybe I'll go check it out. Go with Eric Sir six. He knows all the all the local cuisine. I think he's a great resource to try. Try messaging Eric Sir six, you know, bless his heart. He goes to every single he I think he makes an episode. I don't know if it's more for him because I don't know how many people are searching for like like West African food in Tokyo. But I think he's just curious. But he takes his curiosity to another level and goes and investigates places that probably are not getting a lot of attention by other YouTubers. So big shout out to Eric Sir six. You got to love him for for being very varied, very varied with his his restaurant going and you're not getting a lot of view for West African cuisine, just as an example, but you know, he's bold and will. I go to he goes to where no man has gone before. Sometimes so very good. Any good spots for for in Tokyo? You know, that's that's an interesting one, because I can't tell if the the folk places that I go to are chains or not, I usually get Vietnamese restaurants when I'm really hungry and I'm on the go. If I see one, I'll stop in. And usually they're like food courts and they're usually pretty good. And I don't know if they're chains or not, because I never heard of them before. So I always figured that they're not. I should ask. But I I can't say that I have the place that I used to go to. There was a place in the Shibuya, Monte Sando area I went to about 15 years ago. It was out of sight. I was going there somewhat regularly, but I don't think it's not in business anymore. It's been torn down and a new building is there. So it's hard to say again. The restaurants come and go. So quickly. Another reason why you should use online places before you go and check the most recent reviews for like a question, it sounds more correct. Yeah, I don't know. Where is the place where the vending machine next to the tire shop? That's in Sagamihara. That's kind of far away. It's very inconvenient to get to without a car. Was it Sakigahara or Sagamihara? I can't remember. There's a link in the description of the video that I made on it. It's got like 350 views, probably because everyone wanted to see Scotty. I don't know. And I don't know about Ukrainian restaurants. Thanks for asking about that for any of the any of the restaurants. I haven't been to a good Ukrainian restaurant. I don't think I've ever had Ukrainian food. I've had Romanian cuisine and I thought it was out of out of sight with some good Suica and you know, but I had that Romanian food in Romania, so I can't say for sure that we loved it. Can I went with me? Sagamihara. Thank you, John Doe. Yeah, I've had Romanian food before and it's out of sight. The traditional stuff. It's amazing. And I recommend highly if you could find a Romanian restaurant, but you don't see too many of them. I don't know if Ukrainian food is too much different. Maybe kind of a fusion. I'm sure it's different, but I've had Russian food in Russia. I don't know. I've been to Moscow before. I took the Trans-Mongolian Railroad across from Beijing to Moscow. Took like a took a week. Oh, no, it took 10 days because we stopped in UB Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia. I think that we say UB in Mongolia for two days, which is so worth it. Except don't try the fermented horse milk, which has one percent alcohol. The locals drink it. Your stomach is not ready for that. Trust me, don't drink fermented horse milk in Mongolia. You're not ready for it. You're you unless you've been in Mongolia for at least a week. You will have something from that. OK, and I think it's not pasteurized as well. So, yeah, this I had an issue with it. And let's just say it was pretty bad and not in a good way. I mean, there's no good way with that, which is why I said pretty bad.

00:39:10 I got a couple more questions here. I think we've got a question in fireside chat. All right. Let it roll. OK, so this is from Bob Koblob. And the question starts like this. Always wanted to try four floor, three floor, two floor restaurants, which always seemed like hidden gems since it's not as widespread of a concept in the US, they seem intimidating, though I think tourists less frequent in those. Are upper floor restaurants generally better or worse than street level ones? So that's the question. Yeah, that's that's a good question. I look people when when restaurant owners try to find a location, if you're too high, it never works out too well, let's just say, because people can't find you, but the rent is much cheaper. So you get the you get what you can and you hope your online presence is strong because you need to have an online presence to have an up floor high floor restaurant to be successful or very good word of mouth. If you have good, good food, you're always like. Made cafes typically would go higher because they could get into the people would just look at for made cafes and that's something they would search for. So you get a lot of curiosity. But when it came to restaurants, that's a harder thing. You'd have to be unique or something that some people are looking for. I don't know. I don't think that there's any difference in the quality just because it's a higher floor, sometimes it's a smart thing to do. You have to ask yourself this. All right. There's a lot of older buildings in particular. You have to get in elevators and you get up there. The rents cheaper, the higher you go, unless there's a view. And like if you're the 34th floor, you're probably pretty good restaurant. All right. Like Tokyo Dome, 34th floor is probably pretty good. Is it 43rd floor? Look, I think if your fourth floor or your seventh floor in a seven floor building, like if you're paying a little bit rent, that's probably a smart thing by the by the restaurant owner, but you have to have something that's different than the other floors and something to get people up there. But I haven't had any problems or issues with the floors having inferior quality based on the floor level. It's just going in and trying it out. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised you get out of the elevator and you're like in a whole new world, like you've done something with the restaurant. That's incredible. One of the places is the Akita restaurant in Ginza, where there's a Nama Hage like a monster, a Oni that roams around the restaurant sometimes after nine p.m., which is way too late. They say he comes by the Akita Shinkansen. So sometimes it takes a long time for him. It was past Leo's bedtime. I took some friends there. Nama Hage didn't come out till nine p.m. and you should have seen Leo's face. He was like, freaked out, like, what is this? And I said, Leo, that's the guy who takes you to the woods and makes you a man. He's like, oh, I don't want to go, daddy. And he was clinging on real hard with that. But that's a pretty cool experience. And I think it's on the fourth floor of a building that's a little bit older in Ginza. And they're doing well because they have a good concept. Great place for sake or to try Akita cuisine in Tokyo. I would highly recommend that as well as the Kochi restaurant in the Kochi store in Ginza, I think it's the second floor. They've got some really good food with Yuzu Kosho. One of the condiments there, some great chicken, really. And tataki with the fire char grilled fish. I call tataki. What is that fish? Katsuo, fire grilled katsuo, which is a bonito fish. It's so good. You can get that the Kochi store and you can see them with the fire and the hay as well, like I've shown you, you don't have to go all the way to Kochi to get that kind of stuff. Tokyo is pretty special with that. When it comes to local restaurants, you can get local restaurants from other prefectures because they all have what's called satellite stores inside of Tokyo. In fact, if you look just search in Google Maps satellite store, you'll find a lot of the prefectural stores and many of them are in Ginza. The Miyazaki and a couple of them are in Shinjuku. They're usually around Tokyo Station. Yorakucho has the Hokkaido one and there's a Fukuoka one. There's a bunch of them. In the same building, Osaka used to have one there, too, but I think they've gone under. Yeah, it's now Godiva Bakery, which is pretty cool. Used to be the Osaka satellite store. The Kyoto satellite store is now inside of a Lawson's underneath in the basement of the what do you call that building? The International Forum. And you can get Kyoto stuff inside of there.

00:43:42 Hello, 821. If there's any more last questions in the chat, I will take it. If not, we're going to end the live. Live live stream. What say you? OK, let's see. This is from Shusai. I've been watching many people buying and renovating a key. Yes. What is your opinion on that? Is it worth it? Is it safe? All right. Non food related. This is this is like the wild west right now. So I got a chance to meet Chani in Chani. I'm going to go to the restaurant called Chani in Japan. She's down in Wakayama. She was talking with her and her experience is really a good contrast to Daryl and Natsu, who you saw on this live streaming channel. Thank you. Hello, 821. I'm going to hang up now. OK, thank you, guys. OK, so I talked with Chani and I talked with Daryl and Natsu again. And Daryl and Natsu have an have an Akiya and you saw it's a beautiful place. The integrity of the building is solid wood. No issues. Chani, but an Akiya that had termites had an amazingly bad experience. It was really challenging, but, you know, a very positive person. So she can make the best out of any situation. I'm sure I'm not sure. I don't know if she kept it or sold it or what. But it's it's it's something you really need to look deeply into. It's not business in Japan. Business is war. There's an expression people will swindle you. Business in Japan is not honest all the time. Trust me, as somebody who lost my channel from certain things that I don't want to get into. I know that business is not exactly an honest business.

00:45:31 Michael Sassano, how you doing, brother? Aloha. Any chances there's Hawaiian food places in Japan? There are and we'll get to it. We absolutely will. And Sarah in Tokyo went to a new restaurant that sold okonomiyaki and takoyaki. It was the first time that I've been find it here. I finally got to try it. Loved it. Find an amazing cake made or crepes heaven. If you find a good place, it's also another reason to come back and to see if it's still there or to eat it again. It's a great, great homecoming. If you have you find that that metal pond with whipped cream right out of the oven and you come back after three years and you try it again, that's a good feeling to get back to the Akiya. Thank you guys to get back to the Akiya question. Look, you cannot do this if you have to come to Japan to find to look over the Akiya. There's no question. Please don't get swindled. I've been swindled in Japan. Business is war. It's they look for win wins, but win win as much on your side as if a win win is a win win, but sometimes one party will win more than the other. And sometimes a win for you. Oh, you got your Akiya, but it's more of a win for the owner because it's it's got so many problems you're going to pay as much as a new house for it. So just keep that in mind. There's lots of pitfalls. There's lots of pitfalls. But there's a video with Tokyo Lama about Akiya. So that'll be an edited video on the main channel coming out probably in the beginning of winter, probably come out around December. But he's still working on his house. It's fantastic. But we're at a stage now where it's finished and I could go back because I've been making this video for like four years with him for the pandemic. You got to love Tokyo Lama Jaya. He's a great guy. And we'll finish up this video probably around winter and it'll be a mock up of all the stuff that he's done as a collaboration. His channel has grown by leaps and bounds since then, since I first saw him when he was doing his house back before the P word, before that era where nobody can come to Japan. So, yeah, he's got a lot of good advice as well as Darryl, who maybe will try to get back onto the show, maybe through a Zoom call. I wish we had a little bit more time. I wish we had a little bit more time to talk with Darryl and Natsu about their Akiyat. Just a shout out. They're so thankful. They got so many comments and responses from you guys after watching that video. Three hundred thousand views on that stream. So I appreciate it. They're doing their best to try to answer as many as possible who contact them. But perhaps we'll do another live stream with him and we can answer some of those questions to everybody on the audience because there's always a follow up. I like to hear you. I like to hear you chat with Chani. Yeah. You know, in the thing is we had one person in the group, no fault of his, no fault to him. Just everybody has different preferences who didn't want to be filmed. So I shouted I felt a little bad in the vegan, the shojin yori episode that I did. And go check that out. It's really good. I felt a little bad because sitting across from me as I'm eating this, this delicious food is is is Chani and then sitting across from her is Christina, who is another influencer, also a pretty good consultant, multi multi linguist can speak so many languages. Very smart person, I think also from Wakayama, I believe. And I wanted to promote what she's doing, too. But she was next to a really nice viewer named Mark, who who didn't want to be filmed. So I couldn't shout out her channel. So I felt kind of bad about that. But, yeah, we had some really great people. And at the end of the live stream, I got a chance to shout out her channel. But maybe she should have joined me for the for the dinner. I don't know. I never I'd had met her before. And in such a very good hearted, wholesome person from Australia, love what she's trying to do and a fun person to travel with as well. So we had a good time. Thanks, guys. I know she's got a lot of viewers who watch the show as well. That's really cool.

00:49:40 If you have any questions, any time, you can leave them in the comments below. If it's a good one, I might pick it out and make an episode like this about it. I'm going to do a Patreon Q&A. I haven't done it much this summer, but try to get some of our Patreon supporters questions in here as well. Patreon's been a little bit quiet. Probably my fault. I got to be a little bit more proactive. The postcard for this month. You got a couple more days. I have it right here. Maybe I don't. Hold on a second. This month's postcard. It's from the Square Watermelon Harvest. The watermelon is right there. Do you see it? It's on Leo's desk right there. So it's unbelievably almost two months in. It's doing pretty well. So this is the watermelon harvest. All of them that they shipped around the entire country. They do a couple of them, but this is the big, big one. This is this month's postcard with a picture on the back of the entire team. Almost all of the farmers that farm. And in Zen Suji and me and my watermelon. And you can see it looks the same as it did. Does in this picture right here. So you can get that on Patreon and helps us support the channel. Ario has got a green square and a watermelon. That is awesome. Good one. Good one. And if you're a member of the channel here, you get the special emoji that you can use. Look, there's filters. Look, this one makes me cute. How nice is that? It's kind of creepy. I think this normal me is good.

00:51:16 All right, everybody. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in another live stream tomorrow as we start to end this summer. Thank goodness. It's another hot, sunny day outside. I'm looking forward to fall coming, although I hope to see my friend Jessup and Danny and hit a beer garden soon. That'd be really cool. I haven't done that in years. That's the one thing. I don't drink a lot of beer or alcohol anymore, but it might be good to go out there with some friends. And just have one night atop a beer garden with some friends. Be very good. Maybe we'll stream that soon. Matane. And Typhoon, maybe this Tuesday, I'll try to update you guys and let you know how this this shakes down here in the city of Tokyo.