Food Tours · Tour

Three Guests, Two Hours, and a Historian on Perfectionism

Three people maximum, which is the smallest cap of any tour here, and a guide who has lived in Japan for a long time and approaches the market as a historian rather than a food critic. The subject is not what to eat but why it is like this. Japanese food culture rests on a long-standing pursuit of perfection in narrow specialities, on the way Shinto treats purity and season, and on what Buddhism did to Japanese diets over a thousand years of shifting rules about meat. Two hours is enough to lay that out properly for three people, and not enough for twenty. You start at a unique Buddhist temple, the Honganji, whose Indian-modelled architecture makes the point about how Japan absorbs things, and then walk the Tsukiji outer market, which since the wholesale auctions left has become a bazaar of specialist food shops. The tasting runs through tender beef, grilled eel, shellfish, sushi and sweets, with some of the freshest tuna anywhere. Snack samples are included; meals are not, so you buy anything more substantial yourself. Guided in English. Wheelchair accessible throughout, suitable for all fitness levels. Meet across the street from Tsukiji station exits 1 and 2, standing clear of the coffee shop door.