No trip to Tokyo is complete without a trip to the Tsukiji Markets for a seafood breakfast. This visit was even more important as the Tsukiji Markets will be moving away from their current historic site to another location at the end of this year.
Not being particularly keen for waking up at the crack of dawn to line up for the famous sushi restaurants, we headed into a tiny restaurant called Tsukiji Itadori Higashi Store in a random alleyway. Compared to last time, there seems to be a greater emphasis on grilled sea urchin. Having not yet tried it, we headed in without a second thought.
The restaurant was tiny, fitting only 2 relatively small 4-seater tables in our area. Regardless, we received warm hospitality from the ladies that ran the restaurant. As soon as we sat down, we were presented with a laminated A4 page, filled with pictures of the various types of seafood bowls you could order.
We ordered (clockwise from top-left) an Aburi-kaisen-don (炙り海鮮丼; ¥1,680 + tax), an Aburi-uni-teishoku (炙り板ウニ定食; ¥1,180 + tax), a Salmon-don (サーモン丼; ¥980 + tax), an Ootoro-don (大トロ丼; ¥3,680 + tax) and an extra serve of Aburi-uni (炙りウニ; ¥800 + tax).
The restaurant had a rule that each person had to order at least one item for themselves. This makes sense to me in such a busy environment where space is quite important to each shop - imagine if a table of 4 only ordered one seafood bowl to share.
For Jellybao who doesn't eat raw stuff, she got the 炙り海鮮丼 which is a Grilled Seafood Bowl. Although the freshness was still there, I personally find the raw seafood more special and worthy of a try at Tsukiji. The sauce on top was also a bit lacking in flavour. However, if you don't eat raw food, this bowl is still a way for your to enjoy yourself at Tsukiji. Note that the seafood isn't fully cooked - it is more like they assembled a raw seafood bowl and then scorched the top of the bowl with a blowtorch.
I opted for the 炙り板ウニ定食 because the grilled sea urchin was the reason we were there! I was expecting the set would just come with plain white rice, but it actually came topped with tuna mince. Nice surprise! Taste-wise, the sea urchin tasted like a melted savoury cream, different from the texture you normally get from raw sea urchin. To some degree, it tastes like butter so it would be impossible to eat the entire portion on its own.
Mum went for the サーモン丼 which was surprisingly cheap - overall I think salmon is relatively cheaper in Japan compared to other fish. Despite the price, the salmon was incredibly fresh and the fat distribution is a lot better than the salmon we have in Australia.
Dad had been nagging about getting ootoro for two entire years so we had definitely had to get it. To be honest, it wasn't really melt-in-your mouth and it wasn't that special. But dad said he tasted the difference and that it was awesome (which explains why we got so much more ootoro in the following days). However, we did come into agreement that this particular bowl was not worth the $40 that we paid. In the remainder of our trip, we saw cheaper and equally, if not better quality ootoro at other markets (in Osaka and Kyoto) and even department stores.
With our bellies filled (with the exception of the very sad Jellybao), we headed out to explore the rest of the markets. We split up with our parents as they were looking for stuff to buy back home and Jellybao and I were more interested in buying food to eat right there.
Every little alleyway is lined with a variety of stores selling crabs, fish, dried scallops, fruit and pickled vegetables. The market is famous not only with tourists, many locals were at these stores making their New Year celebration feast orders. If you live in Japan, many of these stores will even ship it to your house, so you can experience the freshest seafood wherever you are in Japan.
To start us of, strawberries. We got a box of white strawberries and regular red strawberries. Both were a lot sweeter than what we have in Australia. I preferred the white strawberries because they were sweeter, but the rest of the family liked red strawberries better as it had a stronger berry flavour.
What's not captured in the photo is that one of the strawberries rolled off Jellybao's hand onto the floor and we both screamed like crazy. Reason why I screamed? 1 pack of strawberries cost us 20 AUD...so we picked it up and put it back in the bag so we could wash and eat it later :P
CREMIA~~ Having missed out on Cremia last time in Japan, I instantly jumped at the first opportunity I got (it turned out to be my only Cremia as there was just so much to eat). It was super strange because the store that sold this was a fish store and there is just this random line for ice cream. The ice cream is extremely milky, the flavour is very strong kind of on the UHT/powdered milk level. A better parallel would be that the Meiji Oishi milk level, but I know not everyone would have tried it. At ¥500 a pop, it may not be for everyone...but then again, we willingly pay for expensive artisan gelato more often than we need to.
Tamagoyaki is also a super popular item at the market so we jumped in line and got ourselves two (in hindsight, we should have just shared one). They asked if we would like grated radish as well, but I don't particularly like the taste of radish so we went without.
One last scenery photo of Tsukiji to finish off this post!
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