Food Tours · Tour

Five Stops, a Bomb Mural, and Drunkard's Alley

Three hours in Shibuya, five food stops with a drink and a dessert included, and ten guests at most. You meet between the Hachiko exit and the Shibuchika entrance rather than at the statue itself, which is sensible: the statue is the most crowded meeting point in Tokyo. Inside the station passage hangs Myth of Tomorrow, a thirty-metre mural Okamoto Tarō painted in the late 1960s showing the instant of an atomic detonation. It was lost for decades, found in Mexico in 2003, and installed here in 2008, and several hundred thousand commuters walk past it every day without stopping. The eating happens on Center-gai and in the streets off it, where the seasonal menus change often enough that the tour does not run the same route twice. You pass Shibuya 109, the cylindrical fashion tower that set Japanese teenage style for two decades, and the Mega Don Quijote, which is a category of its own. The stop that most people remember is Nonbei Yokocho, whose name translates roughly as drunkard's alley: two lanes of bars built in the 1950s against the railway embankment, most of them the size of a small kitchen, surviving between the towers. It ends in the department store food hall under the station, which is worth seeing on its own. Guided in English, up to ten guests, moderate walking. Vegan and vegetarian versions are available, which is rare in Tokyo. Family-friendly, with chicken skewers substituted for beef for children; passport copies are needed for children of ten and above. Minimum drinking age applied is twenty-one. There is an optional karaoke after-party. Stops can change with restaurant schedules, holidays and weather.