The sushi MAGICIAN

Rachel Lang from Melbourne tour company Plan Japan is the fairy godmother of Tokyo’s impossible-to-book restaurants. Thanks to her personal connections, she waves her magic wand and you’re in, writes Alexandra Carlton.

It’s a Sunday night in Tokyo and the eight seats at Shinsuke Mizutani’s thick cedar sushi counter are full. The young chef is shaping perfect nigiri bites one at a time for his customers – a piece of iridescent mackerel on top of a lightlyvinegared lozenge of rice and a delicious of-the-season slice of fish called isaki, which translates into English as the rather less appealing ‘chicken grunt’.

Two couples bookend the counter, and in the middle is Rachel Lang, owner of Melbourne-based tour company Plan

Japan. The Perrier Jouet is flowing and Rachel chats easily in Japanese with the chef, even buying him a sneaky drink toward the end of the evening, which he sips surreptitiously, out of sight of the other customers. “Shinsuke is like a little brother to me,” she says later. “I always know I can bring overseas guests here and he’ll take care of them beautifully.”

The whole omakase meal feels relaxed and comfortable, mostly because her friendship with the chef makes it so. Japan is a country layered with centuries of tradition, etiquette and hierarchy; a millefeuille of manners. And nowhere do you encounter this more than with food and restaurants.

Not only are there all sorts of rules around how you eat specific foods (never drag all your noodles into the soup at once with your tsukemen ramen, always eat your sushi piece the moment it hits your plate during omakase, for example) but even getting a booking at the country’s best restaurants is a minefield of courtesies and connections. Sushi Shinsuke isn’t quite in that league – your hotel concierge should be able to help you with that one. But there are some where even the mega-wealthy can’t pay their way to the front of the queue. Names like Sugalabo, Amamoto and Sushi Sugita spring to mind. Rachel, however, is like a Japanese restaurant fairy godmother. Thanks to her genuine friendships with these chefs – she spends her downtime drinking beers with them – she can wave a wand and make it all happen.

Rachel is like a glass of Perrier Jouet herself: blonde, bubbly, dressed in a flippy Adidas golf skirt and sneakers, or a Louis Vuitton bag and coiffed hairdo at night. Endlessly smiling and energetic. She speaks flawless Japanese thanks to her time at a full-immersion Japanese language school in her 20s. When her two Australian children, Dylan, 14, and Sienna, 11, were born, she decided they would speak Japanese as their first language, despite the fact that they were raised in Melbourne.

“They went to a Japanese school on Saturdays, they only watched Japanese television, they had a Japanese babysitter and only played with Japanese kids,” she says. To complete their immersion, she would take them to Japan regularly, so they’d understand the culture. They were only allowed to start speaking any English at all after the age of five.

It was during these trips that Lang’s friends and family in Australia began to ask for tips on what to do and where to eat in Japan – and in particular, how to get into the impossible high-end restaurants that are so difficult to book.

The endlessly effervescent Rachel began making connections and that’s how Plan

Japan was born. Now, she can secure seats that nobody else can. “I think Sugalabo is probably one of the hardest restaurants to get into in the world,” she says of the coveted 20-seat French restaurant helmed by a chef who trained for 17 years under Joel Robuchon that has no reservation system and no set opening hours.

“It’s introduction-only, so you absolutely have to know someone, there’s no other way.” Recently, Rachel received a request from a top Australian chef to take a group of eight of his friends to Sugalabo with only a couple of month’s notice. The restaurant is usually booked out for over a year, even for their absolute VIP guests. The solution? She charmed the chef to open the restaurant on his day off.

Of course a food tour booked with Plan Japan won’t be only wall-to-wall luxury and Michelin. Rachel mixes it up – it might also include a laneway ramen tour, an edgy night in front of the tabletop grills of a top-ranked yakiniku restaurant, or maybe crawling the city’s coolest bars (she can even arrange happy hour with a sumo wrestler, if that’s your jam).

Whatever your itinerary looks like, you’ll get a taste of Japan that you almost certainly couldn’t uncover for yourself.

“Japan is a country that everyone wants to understand and get right inside of. But without the right relationships, you just can’t,” Rachel says.

Not unless you have someone like her on hand who can part the curtains (or noren) that traditionally frame Japanese sushi restaurants and lead you to the treasures inside.

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