Itadakimas

One of the great things about dining in Japan is that it tends to feel like an adventure. Not only are you frequently trying new things, but often the restaurants take quite a bit of finding: partly because Japanese addresses are not so precise as western ones and partly because of the concept know as "kakurega" or hidden-away restaurants.

So what does it take to be kakurega? It's not enough just to be on the 5th floor of a narrow Tokyo shopping district building. That's commonplace in high-rise Tokyo. No, to be kakurega you really should be in an office building, or under a bridge, or round the corner at the end of what looks like a service tunnel...

I've always been amazed at how my Tokyo friends not only know dozens of these places, but also seem to have an instinct for finding more, whether they've been to the area before or not. It's like they can smell them.

Based on this adventure principle on my last trip to Yokohama Kristof and I wandered down a few badly lit urban-industrial streets and finally found a little place in what seemed to be an otherwise closed post office that specialised in skewers of chicken meat: skewes of all hearts, all gizard, all liver? No problem.

So next time you're in Japan, try asking "kakurega resutoran wa doku des ka?" and see where you end up....