Covering the globe
BEST WORLD TRAVEL
Continued from page 11
Tokyo on a plate, Japan
Like Hong Kong, Tokyo is a city obsessed with food. At the legendary Tsukiji fish market, the world’s largest, you need to watch for the crowds of foodie tourists, Tokyo Lonely Planets in hand, as much as you do the turret trucks that fly around this 23-hectare area at breakneck speed. We have breakfast at one of the dozens of sushi restaurants that line the lanes around the market and know we will never again eat sashimi so fresh. One of our group stops at a stall where yakitori skewers are cooking on a charcoal burner. It’s whale. He buys one and somehow eats it. ‘‘It’s like liver,’’ he reports back. He has no desire for another.
The night before we’d eaten at the Pandora steak house, down an alley and up a few flights of stairs in the Shinjuko district. This restaurant has occupied this same spot for 40 years and as a result looks well lived in, in a good way. We take our seats at one end of a teppanyaki grill about the size of a ping-pong table. At the other end is a couple who, we discover, have been dining here almost weekly for 30 years and the chef cooking for us tonight is the same chef who has cooked for them every other night of those past 30 years. They smoke constantly throughout their meal and remind me of Jack and Vera from Coronation Street. Plates come and go of perfectly cooked seafood, vegetables and wagyu beef, washed down with pints of Sapporo. It’s a perfect meal for a chilly night.
The next night we take the train to the Tsukishima district and Monja St, home to the 60-plus restaurants here that all specialise in monjayaki, a kind of fried pancake-like batter with different kinds of ingredients – steak, seafood, noodles, vegetables, etc. We’re shown how to prepare one on the hot plates in front of us then it’s up to us to look after ourselves. The restaurants are all pretty much identical in size and appearance so odds are you’re guaranteed a good and relatively inexpensive time at whichever one you end up at.
A night at the Mandarin Oriental is far from inexpensive but for an amazing culinary experience in one of the most stupendous dining rooms imaginable, it’s hard to beat. On the 38th floor of this luxurious and achingly stylish hotel, where the lights of Tokyo stretch in all directions as far as the eye can see, is the Tapas Molecular Bar. Here, plates of stunning food are served sushi-bar style with the chefs creating these marvels right before you. I thought I’d tired of the whole molecular gastronomy schtick but no – this was fresh, exciting and fun. And the bathrooms, with floor to ceiling windows, are, quite simply, the best ever.
Resort romance, Cook Islands
After a flight from New Zealand which arrives in the middle of the night, we get to Crown Beach Resort and Spa tired, hot, sticky and a bit grumpy after staying up way past our bedtime, but it takes only one look at our courtyard villa’s private plunge pool to get us back in the right frame of mind. There are many good things about this resort: the proximity to the beach; being on the sunset side of the island; the spacious, stylish, high-ceilinged villas; the on-site spa where I will have the best massage of my life.