Wednesday 2 April 2008

Tokyo Food Show

Food heaven is right down the street from our hotel: Tokyo Food Show. It's a high end grocery store that has the standard produce, meat and dry goods sections, but the store also has a huge, sprawling gourmet prepared goods area. The variety and quality is amazing! Fancy pants yummy everything--Japanese food, Chinese food, Italian food, American food, chocolates, pastries, tea, coffee and so much more. If you're a picky eater and not sure about eating at many of the local spots, come here. My mouth was too busy hanging open to take more pictures, but you might get the idea with these few pictures. One interesting thing is its location--it's underground next to the train station, which is very convenient but still seemed like an odd spot to me just because, well, it's next to the train.

Here is one of the many prepared food shops (they are all considered their own individual store--you pay separately at each one).

YUM, pastries. These pastries are so delicious. I'm learning that when I think something is blueberry, it's actually red bean. I got what I thought was a blueberry filled doughnut and what I thought was a blueberry muffin type thing, and both were red bean! I also got what I thought was blueberry yogurt and it was also red bean (I like blueberries a lot). I'd prefer blueberry, but the red bean was good too.

Fancy spread or preserves of some sort. They had lavender and clove spread here, and all kinds of other interesting flavors. *Update: these are not preserves at all--they are all honey! (Duh, no wonder they are all about the same color.) I tasted one today and it was great.

A whole section of decorative and maybe edible flowers.

Interesting cantaloupe-like fruit with funky antennae stems. Is that what a regular cantaloupe stem looks like? These must be something really exotic based on the prices we saw. At first we thought we must be reading the prices wrong, but we thought out the math a few times and yes, these are expensive. The price in the center says 16,800 yen--that is about $168 dollars. Very special cantaloupe indeed. But that could be for a few of them. Another price sign says 5,250 yen--about $52.50 dollars so I'm not really sure. Still, that's expensive. The fruit in general was very expensive here, granted most of it isn't in season yet. A small pack of strawberries was about $6 and a small pack of raspberries was $10.50. The prepared foods are very reasonable for the quality though. I got a salad, some pork dumplings and a blueberry smoothie (this time it was actually blueberry) all for about $8.

They package just about everything here. Single onions, tomatoes and potatoes were in packaging.

Check out their web site for more pictures. Looking at them might make you hungry though.

4 comments:

Tess Kincaid said...

Your photos are gorgeous! I am enjoying them every morning...gives me a little mini trip to Japan!

Jaimee McClellan said...

The food is displayed like artwork...how pretty! I'd want to buy everything in sight.

caroline said...

i decided what i want from japan. one of those cantaloupes.

Amy said...

I love that your blog is the first thing that comes up on a Google search of Tokyo Food Show! I soooo miss that place. It truly is food heaven!!!