While it may not be the first thing that springs to mind when you think Japan, coffee culture is alive and doing very well there. Around the streets Tokyo, you’ll find many a great coffee shop, from the super old and traditional to bright new modern places. Tokyo is in fact home to one of only 6 Starbucks Roasteries in the World. We’re not the biggest fans of Starbucks but we do like another US Coffee Shop you can find in Tokyo and that’s Blue Bottle Coffee. On a lovely sunny day, we headed on down for a caffeine fix and a bite to eat.

The sunny weather made it a perfect day to sit outside on their terrace overlooking the streets of Omotesando, one of our favourite areas to do some shopping in. We ended up ordering a black coffee and a yuzu lemonade. Both were excellent with the coffee in particular being excellent.

As always, we were a bit peckish so we ordered a light bite on the side. First up was just some poached eggs on toast. Super simple but so good! The eggs were perfectly poached (you can see how nice and gooey the yolk was from the pic) and the bread was a super thick slice of toasted shokupan.

We also ordered some beignets that came with a tiny little pot of maple syrup next to them. These were as light as air but so much tastier. Even without the maple syrup, they were sprinkled with sugar and so were already sweet enough but they were crispy, light and we went through these 5 incredibly quickly!

The whole place looked great but these 3 coffee making beakers particularly caught our eye. This place is absolutely perfect for a chilled out afternoon with really tasty food, delicious coffee and just a relaxing atmosphere. If you’re in luck and the sun is out, grab a seat out on the terrace and enjoy!

Blue Bottle Coffee, 3 Chome-13-14 Minamiaoyama, Minato City, Tokyo 107-0062, Japan

Cheers, JL

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Our trip eating our way around Asia continues from Taiwan onto Japan and Tokyo. Much like Taipei, Tokyo has a special place in the OJT Family’s hearts and the food there is amazing. There’s so much there on the cheap and cheerful side that’s just so tasty.

We love a good tonkatsu and so we headed on down to Tonkatsu Wako in Shibuya. Keep on reading to see what we thought.

So in Japan, you normally get Tonkatsu made either with a pork tenderloin (sort of like the pork version of a beef filet) or a loin steak (sort of like a sirloin). I personally am a big fan of the loin steak as it has that lovely flavourful strip of fat at the top. When we were there, they were doing a seasonal combo of a loin tonkatsu with fried oysters. Damn, this was so good!! The pork and the oysters were fried to perfection. It was incredibly crispy with lots of little wispy bits and not at all oily. Easily one of the best tonkatsus I’ve had for a long long time! The fried oysters were also pretty amazing.

We also got the tenderloin and fried shrimp combo. This was equally as well fried. The tenderloin was the tiniest bit dry but the shrimp was fresh, plump and just delicious.

All the meals at Tonkatsu Wako come with unlimited cabbage salad, rice and miso soup. I really like the cabbage salad at tonkatsu restaurants, it’s always so refreshing and the miso soup was particularly impressive considering it was free and unlimited. It even had a bunch of clams in it. It just all comes together into a great meal!

This meal was delicious. It was pretty casual but just every little bit of it was done really well and who doesn’t love fried meat and seafood?! Good tonkatsu is surprisingly hard to find in London so I will always try to get one tonkatsu meal in each time I go to Asia. This place will definitely be pretty high on my list the next time I go back to Tokyo.

Tonkatsu Wako, 1-16-14 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Shibuya Subway Building 1F

Cheers, JL