Kitchen Town • Japanese Curry • Yodobashi Camera

Kitchen Town/Kappabashi

This is where Tokyo’s restaurants get their kitchenware and it’s a great place to visit if you want world-class knives, unique kitchen gear, or a souvenir for your favorite chef back home. Read this for an idea of what it’s like.

Japanese Curry 

I first had Japanese Curry at an old-school Japanese diner (Kouraku) in Little Tokyo (downtown Los Angeles), long before I went to Japan.

What I didn’t know at the time was how popular this dish is in Japan. It’s been modified from the original Indian version to suit the Japanese palate and become its own style of curry. Japanese curry shops are everywhere in Japan and they’re a tasty and affordable way to fill your belly while you are traveling there. I usually order the katsu curry, but you will have plenty of choices and can choose various curry, rice, and meat/seafood/veggie combos. 

There are many good curry shops. Here is a list of top-rated ones via Bib Gourmand. While I encourage you to explore and go to specific top curry spots, I don’t limit myself to those. Standard chain curry shop curry is also very delicious, Coco Ichibanya is my favorite of the chain curry shops and is very easy to find. 

You can see on their menu how many options they have, including spice level, type of curry sauce, amount of rice, extra toppings, and sides. The standard pork cutlet curry is 907 yen or 928 yen (tax included) depending on the region. That’s $6.04 - $6.18 USD. It’s a big serving and very filling. In LA at Kouraku, the same dish is $19 USD before tax and tip. Another example of Japan not being as expensive as people often assume. This dish is eaten with a spoon, not chopsticks. 

Yodobashi Camera 

If you’ve ever wanted to mix camera shopping with going to a driving range and eating a meal all in the same building, then this is the place for you. Yodobashi has multiple locations, but the one in Akihabara is the biggest. It’s a nine-floor behemoth of an electronics store offering more choices than you can imagine. It has cameras, headphones, DJ equipment, and pretty much anything else you could imagine (including a restaurant and driving range!) Just go and experience it for yourself.