Tokyo has a reputation for being expensive. That reputation is built on people eating at the wrong places. Here’s how I ate better than I have anywhere in the world, three meals a day, for basically nothing.
Breakfast: convenience stores are not a compromise
A Japanese konbini is not a 7-Eleven. The egg salad sandwiches on milk bread are better than most cafe breakfasts I’ve paid £10 for in London. Onigiri come in dozens of varieties and cost about 80p each. Hot coffee from the machine outside. Total breakfast spend: under $3. Do this every morning. Feel absolutely no shame.
Lunch: the standing soba shop
Tachigui soba shops sit inside pretty much every major train station in Tokyo. Buy a ticket from a vending machine, hand it to the cook, get a bowl of buckwheat noodles in sixty seconds. Tempura soba is around $4. Hot, genuinely delicious, and you’re back on the platform in fifteen minutes. Peak city eating.
Dinner: Yurakucho under the tracks
The alleys under the elevated tracks near Yurakucho are lined with tiny izakayas — maybe eight seats each, run by the same families for decades. Yakitori skewers, cold Sapporo, salarymen loosening their ties after work. I paid about $12 for more food and beer than I could finish. Nobody spoke English. Nobody needed to. Point, clink glasses, eat well, repeat.
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