I cannot believe how quickly that went by. I blinked and it was over, but somehow dragging three suitcases from Narita to Nakano-Shinbashi and buying new sheets at IKEA still manages to feel like it happened ten million years ago.

I returned to Tokyo on a whim — a whim that took three years and some change to realize, mind you — but …

Read more

As soon as I let go of my ego and accepted that I’d look like a stupid tourist here, the better my time got, and I think the better I integrated, too.

But the thing is that I don’t want to be a stupid tourist here. I want a routine, I want to feel integrated, and I want to feel like this belongs to me.

I have a handful of haunts I keep …

Read more

I’m going to talk about writing, because these two weeks are when I actually started doing it in earnest. Looking back on my journal from this period, I kept writing some refrain of “it feels weak – but I just need to publish it.” I was trying to follow the mantra I’d been repeating for the past year: it doesn’t need to be good, it just ne…

Read more

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” he said as we left the restaurant. “It’s just roast chicken and potatoes.”

I, however, had fallen in love.

Now I gatekeep the happy hour at Kayao because I don’t want it getting too packed. I crave their leche de tigre oysters regularly, and if I ask nicely enough the chef will send me a half-order so I’m not ringing up a $26 charge for six. Akiro Handroll Bar recently opened its second location in Chicago after a successful run in Madrid (an anomalous choice of second city, but I’m certainly not complaining), which ended up being my favorite new Chicago restaurant in ‘25.

Naturally it follows that one of my strongest food opinions is that Peruvian cuisine is criminally underrated outside of the culinary world. That’s changed a lot in the past few years, but I still think it has a ways to go with the general public.

When I told people that Den and MAZ were my two Michelin hopefuls in Tokyo, they looked at me funny and asked why I wanted to try Peruvian food in Japan, which is a question that always made me laugh because I can’t imagine it having been posed if I’d said Sezanne or L’Effervescence, which are French, instead.

Yes, of course I wanted to try Peruvian food in Japan. Japan is literally encoded into their cuisine’s DNA. One subset of Peruvian cuisine is Nikkei — dishes influenced by the country’s modestly-sized Japanese population, who immigrated over for employment opportunities in the late 19th century. Nobu’s miso black cod is a world famous global export of that lineage. And Nikkei doesn’t just run parallel to Peruvian roots — the modern version of ceviche, their national dish, carries Japanese influence as well.

To be clear: MAZ isn’t doing Nikkei. It’s doing Peruvian cuisine structured around the country’s megabiodiversity while using Japanese produce. That distinction was what caught my attention. These two cuisines represent different extremes – native Japanese food tends to be light and delicate while Peruvian cuisine is most certainly not, so a marriage between the two should fall somewhere in the middle. And because both cultures care deeply about geography and seasonality, I felt that commitment to authenticity would be honored here.

The space and vibe

After hopping out of my Uber at 8:28 for an 8:30 reservation, I glance around the giant complex grateful I didn’t opt for taller heels and take off at a brusque speedwalk (☝️ not run) in some general direction that thankfully turns out to be the right one. When I get to the restaurant I see a sliding wood door recessed into a stone wall facade, the thin lettering of the restaurant’s name nearly vanishing into the rock. Don’t worry about missing it, because there are three Michelin plaques right next to the door.

A member of the team is waiting for me there and enters the code to let us in, which kind of bums me out because I wanted to punch it in, but they don’t let you do anything when you pay hundreds of dollars for a meal!!!

The space is tiny and dark. Chicago’s Cariño still holds the record for the smallest Michelin restaurant I’ve dined at, but MAZ isn’t much bigger with a total of seven tables in the space.

The vibe is also damn near the polar opposite of Den’s, where I dined the week before — stark slate grays and browns dominate an incredibly minimalist and impersonal space. There’s no vibrancy here at all, and I immediately wonder how it compares to older sibling Central. It’s cold and visually dark, completely lacking any windows – it almost feels like you’re in a manmade cave. It’s barren in a way I’m not a fan of.

And the atmosphere is classic fine dining. Rainforest sounds play over soft ambient music. Conversation is muted and formal. Service is very sharp and attentive as I hear the team switch effortlessly between Spanish, English, and Japanese with the other patrons around me. The vibe is luxe, and even the warm towels provided between courses are imbued with citrus. If you’re familiar with the Chicago fine dining scene, it reminded me a lot of Ever and Oriole. That means it’s firmly on the formal end of the spectrum — again, a sharp contrast from the atmosphere at Den, where chef Zaiyu was walking around showing us photos from his fishing trip (on the Amazon!!).

The meal and experience

My experience begins with a walkthrough of Peruvian ingredients at a counter you’re brought to when you first walk in. I love the impromptu lessons on geology and pre-Columbian Latin American food, and I’m told nearly everything presented will show up throughout the meal, at about an 80/20 balance of Japanese to Peruvian ingredients. The ingredients from Peru are sourced through their biodiversity research project back home known as MATER. This became the first of many times that evening I wished I had the opportunity to dine at Central first – I kept getting the impression that I was experiencing the sequel before the original.

I’m seated and order my drink. I get one of the only Peruvian wines I see on the menu, an orange wine known as Italia (no, I don’t know why it’s called Italia). I only learned about orange wines recently when a friend ordered one at Lardon during my goodbye Chicago tour that was really just an excuse for me to hit up my favorite spots before I left. Sorry friends, I used you all for selfish and greedy purposes. But your exploitation at my hands was worth it, because Lardon has been one of my favorite finds this year!

I tend to prefer white wines, so I figured I’d like this, and I was right: it’s slightly dry and not too sweet. Educating myself on alcohol has been burning a hole through my wallet in Tokyo, but damn if it hasn’t been worth it nearly every time. This city has blown me away in nearly every capacity.

Then I’m introduced to the restaurant’s concept, which is presented as a journey through altitudes toward the Amazon rainforest. I believe it’s an exact mirror of Central’s concept. Each course is also paired with a texture or illustration that reflects it. I thought these accents were cute, if a bit gimmicky, until I learned that some are custom illustrations, and then they grew on me a little bit more. I also have to mention that I absolutely loved the tableware here. It was fun, unique, and very faithful to the restaurant’s identity.

However, I do think the concept could use a little more refinement. It’s meant to be a journey through elevation, but I felt it jumped around without enough narrative as to why. The sourcing is obviously incredibly meticulous and extremely well done, but the actual progression of it just didn’t feel as cohesive.

As for the main event, I knew that the food would be a winner from the very first course. To start, the meal is so visually striking. I’m not sure if I’ve ever had a more beautiful meal in my life, and the flavors and textures were meeting that visual beauty in spades. I feel like a part of the reason the space is so minimalist is to let the food shine, and shine it does.

Coastal Seafloor (-10 MBSL)

The clam three ways is a very strong start. I’m breaking open a citric ice cream to fish murugai clam out of the most delicious ceviche I’ve had in my life. Raw akagai clam is blanketed in a gelatin “dumpling skin” among Japanese seaweed and vegetables. The hokkigai and seaweed in gelatin ends up being one of my favorite bites of the meal, full stop. The flavors in that one are reminiscent of South Asian flavors to me for some reason, but I couldn’t exactly tell you why.

Jungle Pond (185 MASL)

The next course is my first time having turtle. This is what I love about Japan – I’ve tried raw horse, tongue, neck, gizzards, fish eyes, and now turtle here for the first time. The turtle is served two ways, as a sausage and stew. Both are delicious, and the stew has so much going on that I’m struggling to tell which part was the turtle meat. It almost tastes like a Peruvian peanut minestrone. The veggies on top (yes, those little squares everyone was asking about on Insta) were delicious and provided a nice contrast. Eating this felt like half the dishes I had at Oriole – a lot of “I have no idea what the hell I’m putting in my mouth, but it’s absolutely delicious”.

Cold Sea Water (-5 MBSL)

Next was the obligatory Hokkaido scallop course, and at this point I’ve had scallop so many times on tasting menus that I’m starting to feel a little insulted. Do chefs really think we’re that easy to impress just by adding scallop on the menu?

It turns out this is the most unique scallop dish I’ve ever had. As he presents it to me, the chef says I may have noticed that the gelatin-like scallop emulsion is meant to mimic the ceramic ware. I nod like I did (I didn’t). Thankfully, it’s not clever at the expense of being delicious. The leche de tigre, heavy on the cilantro, is so good I want to cry.

Andean Plateau (2820 MASL)

I try wagyu tongue for the first time and don’t like it, but that’s not really the fault of the dish. The flatbread is incredible. And since we’ve been talking so much about the intentionality behind the sourcing, this was one of the standout courses about how smart they are about it. This is the only time that beef is used on the menu, because the Andean plateau is the only place in Peru that cattle can be raised.

Pacific Current (-20 MBSL)

A great salad: sour, acrid, citrusy, weird in the best way. No notes.

Ocean Haze (-35 MBSL)

The ocean course features grilled octopus and cod roe, and since I can’t see any of the actual ingredients again I’m not quite sure, but I’m pretty sure this is milt, not roe. And this is what I hate about Japan – I think I’ve just tried cod sperm sacs for the first time. I’m a little pissed to be eating them, but they taste fine.

I feel like now’s a good time to flag that gels and foams feature frequently in this meal, so if that isn’t your vibe, this may not be for you. I don’t think it falls into the fine dining trap of being dominated by them, but if they bother you, they’re definitely here.

Woods in the Highland (3200 MASL)

This was the only course of the meal that felt like it needed a second draft, and the pork meat was a bit tough. The vegetable that resembled chestnut, however, was absolutely delicious with the dipping sauce. I also loved the way this was presented within the edible clay, which featured during the pre-dinner geology lesson.

High Jungle Rainforest (750 MASL)

It’s delicious. This pomelo-based fruit assortment for dessert seems a bit simple on its own, but the lemon verbena and coconut really elevated it a lot, and the lightness of this dish made better sense in the context of the course that followed it. It’s meant to act as a palate cleanser before the heaviness of the chocolate.

Amazonia (840 MASL)

This chocolate course is sourced directly from their partners through MATER and, in my opinion, translated the most directly to the restaurant’s vision. I adored it – everything got rated a 10, at minimum. I’m so mad that I had to enjoy this after I was already full because it was so good. It was fun, and playful, and holistic, using every single part of the cacao plant. For a project so focused on sustainability, this was a really impressive example of it.

Final thoughts

In short, MAZ met my incredibly high expectations. The menu concept is so unique among the breadth of Japanese and French Michelin restaurants in Tokyo, and well worth it for that alone. The food is exceptionally beautiful and even more delicious, and the entire team was amazing—service is polished and deeply professional. I will say that it’s very classical and by the book, almost in a way that it doesn’t let itself breathe. And once again, I left with the distinct impression that I had experienced the sequel before the original. I don’t mean for this to come off as a criticism, but rather a desire to see more. Part of me asks whether it’s a question of creative control: MAZ is clearly informed by its predecessor, and I have zero doubt that Central deserves those flowers, but its gravity can be limiting, too.

With the Tokyo food scene being as cutthroat as it is, and in the context of MAZ being Central’s younger sibling, I wonder if the restraint of the space is a deliberate choice by the head of hospitality and/or head chef. For that reason, I’m eager to see what they can do on future projects that don’t operate within a pre-existing framework.

I don’t ever do much research on high-end restaurants before visiting them — I glance at the menu and let the rest surprise me — but I regret not doing that here. Sometimes context is unavoidable, like in the instance of Den — the dog is Instagram famous, for Christ’s sake. But with MAZ, I wish I’d read up more on it first, because so much of its story is tied to Mater and Central. I think I would have enjoyed the meal even more with some foreknowledge on these things. I also learned during the meal that Santiago Fernandez is leaving at the end of March, which makes me both want to see what he does next and return to see what changes after his departure. (The new head chef and head of hospitality are apparently a Japanese-Peruvian couple, which is just about the cutest thing I’ve heard in my life).

Being Venezuelan himself, I’m also curious as to whether he will embark on a more personal project next. I guess these questions of identity are top of mind after having visited Den less than a week before. I really wasn’t expecting to get there first, but I’m happy it worked out that way, because I don’t think I would have had the perspective to ask them otherwise.

If you care enough about a restaurant’s identity standing on its own and you don’t plan on exploring the rest of Central’s ecosystem, I can see you being disappointed by this aspect of it. If it’s going to be so integrated into Virgilio Martinez’s larger ecosystem, they could even lean into that research group and larger restaurant network more. Intrigue me enough that I’ll want to visit Lima or wherever else you decide to branch off next!

I can connect it to how I felt visiting bw cave (after getting banished from an attempted walk-in at The Bellwood), then The Bellwood (after showing up a half hour before open to avoid repeat exile), then the SG Club (by this point I’d done my homework—they accept basement walk-ins starting at 9pm. This isn’t advertised anywhere. You’re welcome.)

These Tokyo sister bars have incredibly distinct identities, but experiencing all of them separately gave me so many a-ha moments where I was like “Oh! Okay! I see how this all connects now!”. I found the running theme of the creators’ visions, and that’s a very satisfying thing to do. It felt like I was on a treasure hunt. I’d like to feel the same when I eventually visit the other projects in this group. I don’t want to feel like I’m experiencing the same concept in Lima, or Tokyo, or wherever else Martinez decides to branch off next.

But at the end of the day, this is about the food, and the food was fucking incredible. This ranks pretty far up there among my favorite fine dining meals. I would happily visit MAZ again, I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of project Fernandez takes on next, and I’m very excited to see what Central has in store for me when I make it to Lima one day.

Visit date: February 19th, 2026.

By the end of week three, I was so frustrated that I wanted to throw my hands up in defeat and bin it. If they wanted to be a super exclusive stupid club that I couldn’t get into, FINE! I didn’t care!!!

But why did I want to go here so badly? Honestly, I think this quest turned into a bit of a sunk-cost fallacy. It’s been nearly a decade since I learned about Den, so I couldn’t really give you my original reason. It’s just been so long that I wanted to go that I felt I needed to go at this point. And I couldn’t afford it when I first visited Japan in 2022 (which was the year they were voted best restaurant in Asia, so if I struggled to get a seat now, imagine then). But it still felt like a written law of the universe that the next time I was in Tokyo, I would dine at Den, and if that meant I had to run myself up the fucking wall to get this reservation, then so be it.

The restaurant’s conceit is an eclectic take on kaiseki, which is traditional Japanese haute cuisine. Their reputation is playful, inventive, and way less stuffy than traditional fine dining. I suppose if I had to point to any motivation beyond the stubborn insistence that I just wanted to go, I’d be getting Japanese cultural cuisine and a fun experience in one, plus there would be a cute dog around. What’s not to look forward to?

So the very next day I continued my usual Sisyphean task of dialing the restaurant right at noon.

Busy tone again. I will kill myself.

Thankfully, another thought occurred to me before any corporeal harm to cellular device or body could occur. I remembered a comment on reddit saying that the reservation calls ran long—around 7–8 minutes. So instead of rage-redialing a dozen times in the span of 60 seconds, I waited a few minutes, then dialed the number again.

“お電話でんわありがとうございます。。。”

I stood there slack-jawed before realizing I needed to say something before she hung up. “Uhh, uhh, おはようござい—”—it’s noon—“こんにちは! 英語を話しますか?”

“Yes! How can I help you?”

“I’d like to make a solo reservation for whenever you have availability. I can do basically any day until the end of March.”

“Any day…!”

“Any day!!!”

“Give me a moment.”

“Unfortunately, we are fully booked for the next two months…but…we had a cancellation.”

She pauses.

“Could you come…tonight?”

ええええええー？！今日？？？？？

I went from believing this was a bust to learning I’d be having dinner there that night in the span of five minutes. Life can change so quickly, it is really a beautiful thing.

Before we hung up, she had me ensure that I’d received the email they had just sent my way.

And it had a strange note about the entryway. That’s…weird. One of the most famous restaurants in the world couldn’t afford to change the signage on the door? Maybe because they had just moved into that new space…? Because the old restaurant DID explode?!

Anyway, that was a mystery to solve for later. I roamed Tokyo for a few hours thinking about how beautiful this world was and how easy life is, and then it was time for dinner.

I approached the restaurant and met the weird door.

The entryway led directly toward the host stand, with various knickknacks strewn on the path there. It felt like I’d wandered into someone’s home, or at the very least, not a Michelin star restaurant. I’d never been to a fine dining environment like this before.

I was greeted at the host stand by my waitress, Noriko, and brought to the kitchen-table counter. As I sat down, I noticed a mysterious, faceless man in a black suit dining alone in a private room, visible only through an obscured circular window. Noriko caught me levitating slightly off my chair to get a peek at him.

“A guest from Brazil,” she explained. “A friend of the chef’s.”

She offered me a choice of handmade handkerchiefs, mentioning they were made by a friend of the chef’s, to accompany my meal.

I was seated with two Japanese couples to my left and a Korean solo traveler to my right. Shortly after, an American couple took the last available seats beside us. I lasted about five minutes of us awkwardly leaning around each other to photograph the space before turning towards my solo neighbor.

“So…where are you from?”

After our introductions, Jin from Vancouver told me with a sardonic smile that I’d picked the handkerchief he wanted. What can I say, I have very good taste.

The course immediately opened with a twist: a monaka wafer, typically offered as a traditional sweet, sandwiching foie gras, pickled daikon, and persimmon paste. It was very pastelike and cloying, an interesting blend of flavors.

Next followed a scallop dumpling with rapeseed leaf and yuzu (every goddamn tasting menu in the world has a scallop course). The rapeseed was thick with an iron-heavy flavor, layering very nicely with the yuzu, and the dumpling skin was razor-thin. This one grew on me the more I ate.

I heard the couple to our right commenting on the food. Feeling sufficiently emboldened, I craned my neck to peek over at them. “It’s good, isn’t it?”

With this the four of us fell into steady conversation with each other as the meal progressed.

Den’s plating is simple, almost minimalist, but it’s fun. The next course was their famous dentucky fried chicken, and the chicken wing was crispy and juicy, sour from the pickled plum rice stuffed inside.

Next was the sashimi course, an aged sawara (Japanese Spanish mackerel — no, I don’t know why the fish is both Japanese and Spanish) with wasabi and nori seaweed sauce. The sauce looked like mulukhiyah, which was deeply triggering to me, but thankfully it was much, much more delicious than green snot soup.

And while I didn’t get the drink pairing, Noriko offered me a shot of sake with the sawara course so I could join my fellow diners. We kanpai to Chris and David’s anniversary, and to me and Jin’s travels.

After the shot, I turned the cup over in my hand, admiring the unique shape. It reminded me of a shark egg.

“These are custom ceramic cups that were made by a friend of the chef’s,” Noriko chimed in. Serious points to the hospitality here — I can’t believe they’re anticipating my questions before I even ask them.

And I’m starting to realize that damn near everything in this restaurant is crafted by a friend, gifted by a friend, or designed by a friend. I felt like I needed an hour of poking around to ask the team about all the odds and ends scattered throughout the space.

I always write notes on my phone at tasting menus—my friend Josh tells me this is gonna scare restaurants into thinking I’m some high-profile reviewer, but if a chef sees a gigantic keylight getting pointed at the food and still believes I’m exercising the discretion a reviewer needs, that’s their problem.

And usually my notes are just on the food – tastes, vibes, a rating. But at Den, they’re interspersed with stories from the people around me – Noriko’s favorite ramen spots, highlights from Chris and David’s recent visit to Vietnam, Jin’s worldwide restaurant shortlist. I’ll include them all at the end of this piece.

Beyond what I was learning about the meal, I was collecting memories that were precious to other people—what drew them here, where they’d been that they loved, and where they were excited to go next. We lit up over the destinations we’d shared, swapped tips for where we were headed, and discussed why we wished to see or experience certain things. I only wish I understood more Japanese so I could hear all of the stories around me — not just the ones being communicated in English.

The next courses turned out to be my favorites of the night: the “20 vegetables, 20 ways” salad, with each veggie on the plate prepared a different way. The kale chip, aged potato, konbu seaweed, and tomato were my favorites. After that, the beef cheek stewed in dashi broth with deep fried brussel sprout and sweet leek was absolutely heavenly. It was very rich and robust with a gamey beef flavor, and the vegetables were perfectly textured and paired with it beautifully.

The head chef and owner wandered over and started showing pictures of his dog to Chris and David.

“Puchi,” he said, pointing at a photo of self and dog on the phone.

I squinted at the scraggly little white and brown thing on the screen. “Puchi like Italian fashion.”

“YES!”

(I know that Puchi just means “tiny” in Japanese, but I appreciate that he indulged me anyway. You can follow him on Instagram here.)

I cannot talk about the meal at Den without talking about Zaiyu Hasegawa. His restaurant is basically one gigantic, neon-lit sign that screams “ME!!! ME!!! THIS IS WHO I AM!!!”

The son of a geisha, he sought to highlight the traditional Japanese cuisine he grew up eating at home. His mother worked in Kagurazaka, a neighborhood known for its kaiseki and French influence. That neighborhood was also where he worked his first job as a chef.

The next day I traveled an hour south to Kamakura, where I fell into conversation with a Swiss family while walking on the beach. They spent much of it telling me how completely they’d fallen in love with Kagurazaka during their stay in Tokyo. At the time, I didn’t even know the history it shared with the meal I’d just had the night before. How’s that for serendipity? I ended up writing much of this piece hopping between its various cafes and patisseries, and I’m hoping to squeeze in another kaiseki meal there before I leave Tokyo. Recommendations welcome.

Zaiyu’s wife Emi Hasegawa, affectionately referred to as the “big boss” by the team, is the front of house manager. I watched her effortlessly flit between tables in her kimono, chatting breezily with guests as if they were all old friends (hell, some of them probably were) while directing the team as well. I felt like I’d gotten access to their supper club that they had somehow managed to scale into a Michelin-starred restaurant.

As for my subjective thoughts on the food, I’m someone who likes extremes of flavor and indulgently elaborate presentations – which I knew was basically the opposite of what Den was offering when I walked through the door. But that’s also why I wanted to go here. I knew it wouldn’t be aligning exactly to my tastes, and that was exactly why I should be there.

Kaiseki cuisine is characterized by seasonality and letting the natural flavors of ingredients shine. For that reason, the flavors may seem delicate to those with different palates. If you go in expecting, well, extremes of flavor or elaborate presentations, you may mistake that intentional simplicity for a lack of impact. While Hasegawa does do some quirky things with the food, the meal isn’t translating itself for you. It is still kaiseki, so frame your expectations accordingly.

It’s also worth mentioning that the iconic mainstays like the rice-stuffed chicken wing and salad-twenty-ways have been on the menu for over a decade. Those already familiar with Den from the hype may also feel disappointed if they only walk in expecting new gimmicks. (Though Noriko did tell me that the menu changes for repeat diners. Then after seeing the imminent despair on my face quickly added that it’s way easier to get a second reservation after you’d already suffered once!)

This is why I highly encourage doing your own research by trying a traditional kaiseki meal before going to this one. It will help you better appreciate the creative twists that may pass you by otherwise. And I imagine there are so many tenets to this meal meant to evoke nostalgia that completely passed me by. There’s a whole layer I’m probably missing, but that didn’t make the experience any less special to me. If anything, it made me want a second visit.

So no, it wasn’t my absolute favorite meal in Tokyo, but it was pretty damn far up there. And I think it’ll definitely be the one I remember most. My advice to you? If you get a seat at the counter, lean into it: talk to your neighbors, talk to your server, and let the night give you one—or two, or a dozen—new things to learn.

And while Hasegawa doesn’t speak much English, he still made such an effort to connect with us, at one point coming over to show Jin and I pictures of the fish he caught on a recent trip down the Amazon River (as one does). I can confidently say this is the first and last time I’ll ever be delighted by a guy’s fishing pictures.

Our next courses include grouper, bonito flake, and pickled cabbage soup. The flavor leaned acidic thanks to the cabbage, and the broth was lovely — the grouper wasn’t my favorite and I found it a bit chewy, but I don’t really like grouper in any context.

The clay pot rice with mushrooms, and kinome leaves with dashi broth and pickled vegetables, were so divine in their simplicity. I wish we didn’t get this at the end of the meal, because I would have eaten two bowls of that rice if my stomach would allow it.

We all had a laugh at my expense as Noriko and I relay the story of my reservation troubles (turns out it was her I had spoken to earlier on the phone), and how they just so happened to have an open seat on the day I finally got through.

“Maybe it was fate, then,” David remarked.

“Maybe.”

Meanwhile, my fellow solo traveler got through on his first call. Consider the handkerchief revenge, Jin.

“By the way,” someone asks—I think Chris, because it definitely wasn’t me (I’d completely forgotten about it at this point)—“what’s with the door?”

“Le Gaulois was Zaiyu and Emi’s favorite restaurant. After it shut down, they bought the space and kept the name on the door as an homage.”

Of course.

I just had so much fun. And even though I can’t understand much Japanese, I could tell the whole room was having a good time, too – conversations buzzing, laughter spilling over the tables. At one point, I heard a chorus of surprise behind me and turned around: Emi and the team had just gifted an older woman a bouquet of flowers. She was completely startled by it, face flushing red and beaming in delight as she accepted the bouquet. I got the distinct feeling that whatever you give here, they return tenfold.

And after having experienced nearly a dozen fine dining meals at this point, I’ve come to learn that the way the team behaves is an excellent reflection of the head chef’s personality. At Den, everyone seems genuinely at ease — like a busy home kitchen at full tilt during a dinner party (okay, maybe not the best comparison to make when you say people are “at ease”, but you get the point). I later learned that some of the team have been with the Hasegawas for over a decade, and I can very clearly see why.

The meal concluded with a black bean ice cream with kiwi and red bean topping, paired with a light tea. I loved both. I’m usually really anal about getting the details down with my notes, but I was too busy talking to remember the exact tea I drank – sorry!

Hugs were exchanged (yes, including with Hasegawa – he’s notorious for them) as we all got up to leave. I’m a sap, but I think there’s something really special about sharing meals with people you will almost certainly never see again. Goodbye and live a beautiful life!

As the hapless plebeian taking public transit home, I was the last guest in the restaurant. As I gathered my things (gift, bag, another gift) and looked around the space one last time, Puchi trotted over to the table beside me and hopped up onto a chair that had been left pulled out. Planting two paws up on the table, his tail wagged as he glanced around expectantly. One of the waiters materialized from the kitchen to place a bowl of water in front of him, which he began lapping up immediately.

It was like something out of a cartoon.

Chef caught me staring incredulously, and without skipping a beat, pointed at the bowl of water and said “sake.”

I burst out laughing. “No!!” I said in mock protest. “He’s too small!!”

I was presented with one last gift as Noriko left to grab my coat – chef motioned for me to wait as he rifled behind the host stand before procuring a small bag of something.

“Chocolates,” he said, pressing it into my palm with a wink. “For Valentine’s Day. Made by…”

Yep, you guessed it, a friend.

Despite doing this for over fifteen years, the experience didn’t feel gimmicky or performative. In a city as fast-paced as Tokyo, Zaiyu and Emi Hasegawa and their team at Den are a haven of incredible hospitality. My experience at Den is, to me, emblematic of the very best of Japanese culture and cuisine.

It was also an unexpected source of inspiration. I think I learned something very important here about what it takes to endeavor on a creative project and have it succeed — it’s gotta have your heart behind it. Behind the vision, behind the menial work, behind the people helping you bring it to reality. If that’s missing, it’s nothing. It was a really nice reminder to have, considering the reasons that brought me back to Tokyo in the first place. Not to be woowoo with it, but I think it’s another really sweet piece of serendipity that I finally got in on the day of love.

Chef Zaiyu’s family and interests are celebrated openly throughout his restaurant, but never in a way that felt egotistical to me. It’s in a way that says they’re the loves of his life. Love imbibes every corner of this space. It feels like I’m dining in someone’s home, surrounded by a lifetime of their stories. It’s a very human story.

I really feel like I got to witness something special here.

Visit Date: February 14th, 2025.

Noriko’s ramen recommendations

• Ramen Maikagura

• Ramen Nishino

My fellow travelers’ recommendations

• Mai Chau (Vietnam)

• Avana Retreat (Vietnam)

• Les Galinas (Provence)

• Quince (San Francisco)

• Maito Restaurante (Panama)

• Intimo (Panama)

• Tua Madre (Portugal)

• Borkonhya Winekitchen (Budapest)

And because I have very good taste, these are the ones I gave them

• Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi (NYC)

• Torrisi (NYC)

• Art’s Cafe (SF)

• Lardon (Chicago)

• Akiro Hand Roll Bar (Madrid/Chicago)

• Oriole (Chicago)

• Indienne (Chicago)

• norm tea house (Tokyo)

• cafe ataraxia (Tokyo)

After drinking my body weight in green tea, getting nose-punched by wasabi a million times, and running around looking like a headless chicken and/or stupid gaijin, I’ve finally settled in to write this piece.

Read more

So I jumped at the chance when I saw Aman Tokyo offered a high tea experience. If you aren’t familiar with Aman, it’s a premier luxury hotel brand, a tier above the Four Seasons but below Cheval Blanc (in my opinion, anyway). Known for their exclusivity, most Aman properties are deliberately remote, requiring multiple transfers to reach. As their first inner-city location, I knew Tokyo was one of the only properties I could realistically experience anytime soon. Even just getting to see the lobby would feel like access to something normally out of reach for me.

Is it tacky to want to experience a luxury brand that badly? Yes 🙌🏼 but I don’t really care. I seek out exclusivity and accolades because I want to see what’s possible. That’s why having this fall short felt so disappointing.

Besides, the brand name wasn’t the only pull factor. I also loved that they theme their courses around seasonality, something I’ve come to learn Japan takes seriously. That signaled intentionality to me. So beyond the premium tea, which I knew would be easy to come by anywhere here, the food was what I expected to justify the price.

My last reason for the visit was that their bar was on my shortlist anyway, so I hoped to hit two birds with one stone.

If you want to skip the next section, I’ll save you my complaining with the verdict now: it sucked.

I’ll get into the good and the bad, in case you’re considering it yourself. At 12,000 yen (~$76 USD as of February 2026), it’s definitely a splurge.

The good

The lobby is visually stunning. Sweeping floor-to-ceiling windows flood a beautifully designed postmodern atrium with natural light, and a sleek minimalist aesthetic offers a chic urban luxury vibe. I was practically gaping in awe as I stepped out the elevator bank.

The lounge shares an open space with the hotel lobby, which means you get to keep that beautiful atmosphere around you while sipping tea. For me, though, it was a bit of a detraction. This was probably my least favorite high tea setup ever — the space felt structured more like a bar than somewhere to sit idly with friends and chat. But that’s subjective; some people might prefer it.

Sometimes there’s a koto instrumentalist playing while you have tea, though they weren’t performing during my visit. I timed my reservation for sunset and was rewarded with sweeping golden-hour views of Tokyo once the blinds lifted, which I highly recommend doing too (just don’t time it too early, or you’ll be staring at black screens for most of your meal).

And while they were few and far between, I’ll give flowers to the parts of the meal I enjoyed. I ordered the Ichigo Drop, and despite my initial skepticism about how good strawberry milk could really be, it ended up being my favorite part of the meal. The fruit syrup was perfect, deliciously balanced between sweet and tart.

Most of the sweets were great too — the strawberry pavlova was probably the best bite I’ve ever had at a high tea. With how delicious the strawberry milk and sweet offerings were, I’m thinking the café downstairs might be the better move if you’re looking for an “Aman experience” without the full price tag.

The bad

Save for the exceptions I mentioned, most of the food was just bad — nearly everything tasted dry, flavorless, and like it had been sitting out for a while. I’ve had better bites at teas that were a half or third of Aman’s price.

I hate commenting on service unless it’s noticeably poor, because it’s usually an asshole move, and it always comes off like “the hostess didn’t smile at me enough :( and that made me sad 😔”. But this was bad in a “I’m struggling to even get what I paid for” way.

I had to flag someone down ten minutes after the food arrived just to order the tea, and getting anyone’s attention after that felt like pulling teeth. It wasn’t communicated that refills were free, so I ended up getting way less than what I paid for. By the time I was being ushered out well before my two-hour limit, I was eager to leave. The whole experience felt like they were managing a revolving door of customers without any customers actually waiting.

Basically, most of the food wasn’t good and it was clear they wanted me out of there as quickly as possible. That’s understandable if a place is busy, but this wasn’t. The Sakurai Tea Experience the week before cost half as much, has a fraction of Aman’s space, and never once rushed me. And teatime is meant to be slow, dammit! If you’re gonna charge me $80 for a single pot of tea and ten bites of food, at least let me enjoy your lobby!!

Aman’s high tea felt like a beautiful Instagram photo op that stopped there. Vibes off. Food garbage. $20 cocktail that tasted like Lemon Brite. Worst of all, I could sense a man who worked in asset management at the bar. Maybe he cursed the place with his evil BlackRock energy (yes it’s actually capitalized like that which is so scary). I was not having a good time!

All roads lead back to Chicago Restaurant Week

A disappointing experience is nbd. Life goes on, I mourn the waste of money and cry into my Fendi bag, etc.

But the whole experience felt oddly familiar, and I was scratching my head trying to figure out why. The rushed pacing, the diluted quality, the tiny portions…then it hit me like a truck. I got Chicago Restaurant Week’d!!!

What the fuck does that mean???

Getting Chicago Restaurant Week’d is when a prestige brand compromises on its reputation by trying to get away with offering a mediocre experience that stretches its staff thin just for a quick buck! It’s the pinnacle of greed-induced enshittification!!

Here are a few examples. The most disastrous may be Asador Bastian’s Restaurant Week offering this year, documented here and here. To summarize, they didn’t communicate that their Restaurant Week menu was only available to the people who had reservations at 4:00 or 4:30.

While that was a PR disaster, my least offensive experience was Esme’s restaurant week menu. Dining at a 1-Michelin-star restaurant for $60 sounded incredible! Unfortunately, it fell slightly short. Thankfully no sins were committed beyond a slightly disappointing meal, but my friend and I left devoid of any interest in returning for the full menu after that. Lowering that veil of exclusivity to a disappointing product had hampered their mystique in our eyes.

Boka had the opposite problem. From 2021 to 2023, they offered one of the best Restaurant Week deals in the city. Unfortunately, greed eventually caught up to them. A wave of social media virality in 2024 led to the restaurant cutting reservation time slots in half to push more people through the door. I remember staring in horror as I approached the restaurant for my return visit that year – surely these hordes of people waiting around outside couldn’t all be spillover from the evening seating?! I would’ve turned around when I saw the frazzled host stand if it wouldn’t have put me out of my prepaid $60.

The quality of the food had taken a huge hit compared to the year before. The staff were visibly tired and overworked, rushing to address a packed space. No one looked like they were having a good time, and if I hadn’t had such a good experience the year before, it would have left me with no interest in ever returning for their full menu.

Maybe brands don’t care if the more accessible experience is worse because they assume the people coming for the cheaper experience and the people they’re trying to attract for the full one don’t overlap. That’s obviously shitty for us, but it’s a likely reality. Why bother courting someone who won’t even be a return customer?

It’s also shitty for them, because we live in the age of social media and there are assholes with too much time on their hands writing thinkpieces about it.

Granted, I’ve been simplifying the problem a little bit. I’ve been wringing hotel and restaurant owners by the neck as amorphous boogeymen for most of this piece, so let me cut them some slack.

It’s a fact that operational costs have skyrocketed since 2020 and food service already operates on a very tight margin. As the economy worsened, we all gradually had to accept that everything was going to keep getting a little bit worse. That clearly extends to the human factor, too. Why should the service people owe me polish when the job they worked so hard for isn’t compensating them enough to make ends meet anymore? Sometimes strain isn’t the result of greed, but factors outside our control.

I don’t know why one of the most exclusive brands in the world chose to offer something like this at their Tokyo property (beyond suckering people like me in who were looking for brand name recognition). If you’re a luxury brand and you want to do something less exclusive like a tea or drinks service, it needs to live up to your reputation. I walked in with high expectations because Aman’s whole thing is that it doesn’t covet mass appeal. I expected something exceptional and what I got was an experience for the same price I would’ve paid in Chicago, at a much lower standard of quality. When this is the result, the whole offering ends up coming off as cheap and greedy.

If you require exclusivity in order to maintain your craft at a certain standard of excellence, that’s fine. But when you offer us normies a peek behind the curtain, you’d better make damn sure it lives up to the reputation you’ve built for yourself if you want to keep that intact.

Luxury isn’t cheapened by more people gaining access to it. It’s cheapened when an establishment compromises on their final product in the name of greed. And in the middle, it’s the people creating or delivering the product who end up getting stretched thin. Exclusivity can’t be manufactured.

Luxury is tacky when it becomes a parade for class performance and social posturing rather than a commitment to refining a craft into excellence. In order to achieve that refinement, you need to be doing something special, you need to be properly compensating the people who make it happen, and you need to be mindful of your reputation as you pursue scalability – am I ensuring that everyone gets a premier experience?

If the answer is no, don’t bother.

Tokyo may be better known for its coffee culture, but in a city this large and culinarily serious, tea definitely still holds court. One of the most popular options among visitors is the Sakurai Tea Experience, located in Omotesando’s famous Spiral building. With English booking available and course offerings starting at roughly $40 USD, it’s not exactly hidden or inexpensive – so why’d I book it? Well, I had just arrived in Japan and was looking for a structured crash course into different varieties of Japanese green tea so I wouldn’t spend the rest of the trip gawking at menus. The value proposition for me was to see if I would actually learn anything from the experience.

The Setting

Tokyo has an abundance of beautiful architecture, and the Spiral was one of the buildings I was most excited to visit. A beautiful postmodern hall located within an arts complex that spirals up to the top level sounded like a beautiful venue to explore. It was beautiful, but unfortunately didn’t quite live up to my expectations. I’d fallen victim to clever tricks of perspective once again, having expected the actual spiral part to be, well…longer. Thankfully, a student art exhibition that happened to be on display that week softened the blow, and I got to kill the hour before my reservation time admiring their work.

Up on the fifth and final floor, Sakurai’s venue offers a quiet respite away from the hustle and bustle of the concrete jungle surrounding. I walked in through a glass-paned entryway to a small room with a reception counter and merchandising setup neatly stocked with dozens of varieties of tea. After checking in, I was led to the tea-tasting room in the back – a small, but modern and sophisticated eight-seat setup flooded with natural light. Large windows overlooked the bustle below as patrons quietly enjoyed their tea, speaking together in hushed tones.

The Experience

I chose the Gyokuro-centered course, which is built around the Hoshun cultivar sourced from Uji, Kyoto’s most famous matcha-growing province. Gyokuro is a rare, premium Japanese green tea that differs from classical sencha by being grown in the shade rather than directly in the sun. Most Gyokuro is sourced from the Fukuoka, Kyoto, or Mie prefectures.

The first pour came in an adorable little ceramic cup barely larger than a shot glass. I took a tentative sip of the pale green tea and was shocked at the flavor – this is a total umami bomb. Honestly, it was one of the strongest umami flavors I’d ever tried, and I never would’ve guessed that the vehicle for that would be a tea. I could see it being incredible as the broth component of an ochazuke, which is a brothy rice dish made from dashi and green tea.

I was then served a second steep, which largely tasted the same – unsurprising given how strong the flavors in the first course were. My first round of traditional Japanese sweets (known as wagashi) followed. The dried, sweetened black soybeans known as kuromame were so good I could’ve eaten a bag of them, and the chestnuts in jelly were delicate and sweet.

Kuromame is prepared by simmering rehydrated black soybeans in sugar water for several hours. They can be eaten fresh in their syrup, or dried. It amazed me that such a delicious flavor arose from such simple preparation – they almost tasted like black milk tea.

The next course introduced the third and final strain of the gyokuro, this time steeped with freshly-sliced apple. This course was the most complex and intriguing, as the tea harbored all of the brightness and notes of the apple without any of the sweetness. Being the third steep, that overwhelming umami flavor had mellowed out significantly, and the Gyukuro had muted into a normal tasting green tea, which paired beautifully with the apple.

Another snack course followed that I totally wasn’t expecting: the gyokuro leaves from my tea had been assembled into a small plate with a dashi broth poured over, then seasoned with a light ponzu sauce. I took the tiniest bite, expecting another flavor bomb. What it actually ended up being was the best savory bite of the course. The leaves were incredibly tender, and mild enough that they had basically become a vehicle for the ponzu at this point. It was almost like a milder form of spinach – textural, vegetal, and savory, brightened by the ponzu. I could’ve eaten a bowl of the stuff – which you shouldn’t do because I think you’d succumb to a caffeine-induced heart attack. But at least you’d die happy!

The next segment of the course shifted to hojicha, where I got to choose from a wide variety of strains. I selected Minamisayaka, described as one of the more aromatic options, and they weren’t kidding – I could smell the roasted leaves the moment they entered the room.

The flavor was warm and toasty, almost reminiscent of Earl Grey, though a bit gentler in structure. Despite the pronounced scent, the tea itself was mild and easy-drinking. A small savory plate of pickled spinach and radish accompanied it — these had a pungent, almost smoky flavor. They were incredibly unique, and I’d never tasted pickles, even here in Japan, quite like them before.

A second infusion of the Minamisayaka was served, which in my opinion was the weakest serving of the course. The roasted character had faded considerably, leaving a tea that felt a bit thin compared to the earlier gyokuro progression.

Then came the final course, where I was prompted to choose between three different wagashi. As a certified yuzu fan, I chose the yuzu jelly wagashi. It was served alongside the final tea course, a matcha sourced from the mountainous Kirishima province of Kagoshima.

The matcha was creamy and nutty, less aggressively grassy than many ceremonial matchas I’ve tried – the tea master explained that it was because these were first flush, the youngest and most tender leaves harvested in the early spring. The wagashi jelly was sweeter than I was expecting, with the yuzu appearing more as an aftertaste than a key note. I would have preferred a sharper citrus flavor, but as a closing bite, I guess a more delicate flavor was the intention.

Beyond tasting and learning about the different varieties of tea, witnessing the craftsmanship and attention to detail as each course was prepared was so cool. The staff seemed to float around the room, maneuvering instruments and pouring teas at sounds barely above a whisper, effortlessly switching between Japanese and English as they introduced different courses to locals and tourists alike. The pacing was relaxed, which gave me ample opportunity to observe both flavor and technique.

Even having ordered a smaller course menu, my experience took about 1 hour and 20 minutes. Set aside a bit of time for this, anywhere from 1-2 hours. Kick back, relax, and enjoy a beautiful tea tasting course. As you leave, the staff will offer to show you the teas you tried that day from their merchandising display in case you want to purchase some to take home with you.

The Verdict

Is the Sakurai Tea Experience touristy and expensive? Yes. Did it satisfy my desire for an in-depth crash course on Japanese teas, and function as a relaxing and enjoyable experience to boot? Also yes. The experience was idyllic and informative, and the staff are consummately professional and helpful. I’d absolutely return to try one of the larger course offerings or a tea cocktail, and converse with the staff a bit more on teas throughout Japan. It’s an excellent info-gathering opportunity.

If you are a fellow tea enthusiast who doesn’t know much beyond the basics on Japanese teas and is looking to learn, this experience is worth booking. If you’re already sourcing single-origin teas from Mie and understand the intricate nuances behind different steeping temperatures, I think you’ll find this ridiculously overpriced. But if you find yourself in the area, maybe stop by for an a la carte tea cocktail or wagashi treat, and use the opportunity to load off all your burning questions about tea to the English-speaking staff (within reason – they’re busy!)

This was refined, informative, and genuinely relaxing, an idyllic break from the chaos of Omotesando below. It’s a modern setting steeped in sophisticated tea cultivation and craftsmanship, and functions as a great introduction to Japanese green tea – just ask yourself whether you’re willing to drop +$40 USD on a course offering first.

Did the five daily servings of caffeine fail to stunt your appetite and leave you ravenous for actual food? Check out Hamburg YOSHI right next door. The hamburg sets are relatively affordable and absolutely delicious. Don’t skip the egg mixed in rice. (Also known as TKG — the Japanese love abbreviations, and I learned that one from my teacher Rei, which stands for tamago kake gohan)!

A woman in Sedona (where else) once told me that talismans of protection don’t work unless they’re gifted to you by someone else. I reacted gutturally to that. I abhorred the idea that protection was something you had to earn by being loved. Unfortunately I’ve more often than not found her proven right.

So whenever I travel, I put on the ev…

Read more

The driving force behind most of the solo traveling I’ve done in my twenties has been to find a place that could become home. I was sick of being an observer, a consumer, a passer-by — and it felt like anything I tried to grow inevitably fell flat, because I knew I wasn’t happy with where I was. But even after all my travels, I couldn’t really find one American city that felt like home.

With many places explored under my belt without a definitive answer, I decided to at least take some time away to reflect on my career. So for a month last year I based myself in Vegas, far from any distractions. Vegas, of course, sounds like the polar opposite of an environment that would be “distraction-free”. I suppose that’s partially why I chose it. No one in that godforsaken city would be on any personal meccas but me. I even like Vegas, an opinion that often solicits bewilderment in anyone who even vaguely knows me — I’m not exactly a gambling addict with a penchant for sniffing coke in overpriced nightclubs. But I do love absurdity, and Vegas has this in bounds.

The city stands as a living, breathing monument to man’s hubris, situated smack in the middle of the desert where summer temperatures and water levels seem distressingly committed to remaining inversely proportional to each other. Slot machines whirl in labyrinthine casinos devoid of clocks, calendars, or any other pesky objects that could warn you of just how much life and money you were siphoning away to the house. It’s loud and raucous on The Strip and not much elsewhere, save for the Air Force base in the northeastern city limits. The city then just kind of…ends at its outskirts, with dry, flat desert spanning out as far as the eye can see. Drive far enough west and you’ll eventually hit Death Valley, the hottest and lowest place on earth. They really did build a city atop of the bowels of hell.

And it fucking rocks. The southwest as a whole is weird, rugged, liminal, and refuses to let itself be defined — it’s got a don’t give a fuck attitude that reminds me of Chicago, in its own way.

It also has access to some damn good nature, which was the reason I’d give people for why I was going here when asked so I wouldn’t sound like a pretentious asshole. I bought the annual parks pass once I arrived, and paid the $80 fee off in less than a week — I was hiking or driving through Red Rock nearly every day during my stay.

The solitude that Vegas provided did help a lot. I felt like I could breathe, and I devoted a lot of thought to what I wanted to do with this life.

Towards the end of the trip, a volunteer opportunity won me a free ticket to one of the largest annual conferences in the games industry, The GDC Festival of Gaming in San Francisco. I grew up with video games, watching the craft balloon from a niche nerd hobby to the cultural juggernaut it is today. Whenever I ponder writing fiction, it often comes to mind in the form of a game. I figured that getting a firsthand look at the state of the games industry would show me whether trying to break into it was worth pursuing.

Dear reader, it was fucking terrible.

What I witnessed was a very sobering mirror of the advertising industry — swathes of talent wandering around with stacks of resumes as company executives rubbed shoulders without interacting with the rest of the community at all. Somber mentions of layoffs and unsteady gig work solicited sympathetic nods at every other event, and general doom and gloom at the state of jobs, politics, the world, etc. was abound.

It was then that I decided to take a more practical path. It was a decision borne of anxiety, not dreams, but at the time, the choice seemed very clear to me. I could be pragmatic and comfortable or I could become a poor and destitute dreamer.

Chicago

I tried so damn hard to plant roots in Chicago within jobs I thought I could perform well in, an education that on paper would be great for my career and align fairly well with my strengths, and in places I thought I could finally cement myself. Nothing held. At 27, this started to feel really scary. I didn’t mind failing so long as it meant I was trying something, but it felt like doors weren’t even opening at all. Constantly I asked myself whether this meant I wasn’t trying hard enough or if these things simply weren’t meant for me. Was I caught up in a socioeconomic cycle outside of my control, or did I simply not possess the capability to build the life I wanted?

Simple goals like “find an apartment” turned into months-long endeavors as a squeezed market and skyrocketing demand made finding decent places a herculean endeavor. There was one instance where I was riding an elevator up with a married couple from Los Angeles to view the same unit. I’d be racing them to submit our applications once the tour was done. As we went up, they exclaimed to me their disbelief over how cheap the rent in Chicago was compared to their home city. Naturally, they ended up getting the place. It certainly wasn’t any one individual’s fault that demand kept squeezing, but damn if it wasn’t hard not to feel bitter when this situation kept repeating itself over and over again.

Job applications presented a similar story — the white collar gig economy continued to balloon as bloated conglomerates realized they could cut costs by perpetually cycling through contractors rather than retaining full-time employees. This led to senior level contributors who’d been in the game ten years competing with new grads fresh out of college for the same roles.

Facing this much opposition when you really want something is one thing. Not really wanting the things I was pursuing made it 10x worse. I simply didn’t have skin in the game, and I began to hate the city and my job. In truth, I knew I wasn’t just a victim of the markets. I had incredibly high standards that made it difficult for just about anything to meet my expectations. I held them because I knew, even then, that I didn’t really want to build a life in Chicago at all. I resisted because I thought I would be fine if I had just the right place, had just a little more time, and found a job I could actually stand. Ultimately, I just needed to make more money, and then I could do what I wanted.

More money did not come. Shortly after securing a unit well over budget in a neighborhood I didn’t really like, I received a job offer in what I thought would be my dream role in my dream industry, at one of the top companies in the field. It was at an airline, so I’d be getting plenty of opportunities to travel. I’d be relocating internationally and making near double my salary. So I didn’t renew my sublease.

A week after my sublease ended, the company withdrew their offer and ghosted me.

I sat there in bed, staring at the rejection on their career portal. It felt like I had officially hit rock bottom. But the nice thing about hitting rock bottom is that it makes very clear what you actually want to do — and what that moment of clarity told me was that I wanted to go to Tokyo. Tokyo was the farthest I’d ever gone alone. Tokyo was the city I had loved most from my travels. I loved the creative thrum, the culinary scene, the fashion, the absolute sprawl. I didn’t know if it could be mine, but I wondered why the fuck I had been procrastinating for so long to return to it.

2025 was a yearlong string of trying to force my feet into shoes that didn’t fit. And in the humiliating throes of being pushed away from things I didn’t even really want, I realized that I was trying to live my life backwards. “One more year in Chicago.” “One more degree.” One more raise, one more job, a little more money and I’d finally be able to do what I wanted. What I finally realized was that I just needed to start. Could I fail spectacularly? Sure! But better to fail spectacularly doing something you actually like than fail at the “safe” option.

I made a promise to myself from that point forward. I needed to do whatever the hell I wanted and I needed to be brutally honest with myself. This came as a mantra I kept etching in my journal over and over again: It doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be honest.

Travel is what I know best. I feel secure in myself, more confident, happier, and calmer when I’m somewhere that nobody knows me and I have no one to rely on but myself. It teaches me about myself. It’s a bit like living in a dream, I can’t deny, but dreaming is necessary for the future I must create. You cannot cultivate identity where the old one keeps reasserting itself.

No plan is ever perfect, and there are a few holes in this one. For one, I’m isolating myself again. An unhealthy way of living, sure, but it’s been the modus operandi of my life. When I divulged to a friend my concern that I would maybe go a bit crazy being by myself for so long, he serenely responded that some of the most enduring writers retreated into long periods of isolation to produce their best works — Dickinson, Thoreau, Proust. I appreciated the sentiment but it mostly just got me thinking that we should do a sanity check on where society derives our common wisdom from instead.

Fears of succumbing to insanity notwithstanding, I quite like my own company most of the time. And I don’t expect traveling to fundamentally change me or make me better. I’ll just be who I am in Japan, in Korea, in Singapore, in Taiwan.

So I am here to escape the world as best I can. In Japan, I’m the alien foreigner. I get to exist adjacent to society rather than within it, and there’s a definite freedom to that. Opting out of life for a while is exactly what I’m doing, and I’m very grateful that I’m able to do it at all. I can write, and explore, and briefly exist in a reality that feels safer, and full of more possibilities than home.

Tokyo

The world as my home, or my playground?

“I think I’ll stay in Kazakhstan next. Or somewhere in Central Asia. It’s one of the few places left that feels undiscovered. Colombia, Bali, Thailand, Japan, Portugal…they’re so overrun now. Everyone knows them.”

I was having drinks with my former boss at some Hogsalt establishment (don’t ask me which, they all blend together) while he was in town. Casually discussing travel and leisure is normative between us – more than that, it’s expected of us. You’d seem like a bit of a bumpkin if you didn’t jet off to some exotic place at least a couple of times a year.

And I understood what he was saying practically, but I was also struck by a strange discordance in the conversation we were having. We were still tourists regardless of whether we reached a destination before everyone else. These weren’t exotic places for us to discover – they were real places that people lived in. We were still consumers. Indulging, eating, shopping, loudly exclaiming how affordable a coffee is while locals have watched its price double in the past year. I’m not trying to posit that tourism is a bad thing, but at the foreground of constant consumption in our daily lives, it adds up to quite a lot, actually. Is travel a hobby, or is it just another form of shopping?

Japan is straining under a weak yen and a tourism boom that locals are openly exhausted by, and I’m directly contributing to that because my home has gotten too expensive to live in. My trip to Tokyo is just my story with the couple in the elevator but in reverse – now I’m the one boasting over how cheap the rent is.

I think everyone that has the means to is looking for a space where they can breathe, and a lot of us are coming to the ugly realization that you can’t escape the world anywhere. High enough up on the food chain, sure, you can insulate yourself from its worst derelictions enough – but for most of us, no dice.

That’s why I feel this sense of urgency, in that I think this could be my last opportunity to travel extensively in a while. With yawning economic gaps and increasing domestic and international political tensions, I don’t want to wait for a nebulous “someday” to see the things I want to see. I need to do this now.

Home isn’t a thing I can escape

Three years ago on a trip to Korea I wrote that the world was contracting in on itself, buckling beneath geopolitical and economic anxiety. The promise of globalism in its neoliberal incarnation was dead. Western politics were bending back towards conservatism. We were not, in fact, at the end of history. And as Americans, we have quite a lot to reckon for it.

I’m very curious to see how I’ll be received as an American now versus four years ago. We Americans love to travel abroad and say oh, we don’t support it. Baby, we are it. We’ve been built off it. This is the hypocrisy innate to my journey as well. I’m a consumer of new places and ideas, a perpetual passer-by who gets the luxury of dreaming. But does being a beneficiary of empire really grant me the privilege of dreaming, or does it stunt my imagination and wrap all of my “dreams” up in consumerism? What does roaming around with a strong passport and currency actually grant me in terms of perspective?

(This is also where I lose my patience with the Europeans who chide us when we travel abroad — you are the profiteers, same as us. We are your new incarnation, your bastard child. You are only angry that our rogue leader has breached the social contract between Western nation-states, and left you scrambling for a foothold in the global pecking order.)

To be frank, this is the one identity I don’t question at all. Every time I leave home, the feeling has made itself more and more pronounced – that I am an American before anything else. Where else could I possibly go, and who else could I possibly be? I have always felt an outsider in my home, and now I leave to find that I will be an outsider everywhere else, too. I can either claim my home or become a liar, but in any case never abandon my identity entirely.

What am I escaping, and what do I want? The answer is still money and money, honestly — I need to escape the cycle of making money by making more money. Then I’ll feel safe. Then I’ll be free. Then I can have what I want. Then I won’t have to play pretend anymore. Maybe all I really want to do is draw the blinds closed, drop the pretense, and tell the rest of the world to go fuck itself. Do I actually care about anything or anyone outside of myself at all?

The luxuries I’m about to enjoy were granted to me by the very thing I’m escaping. It’s inherently paradoxical, and leaving doesn’t absolve me of anything, but staying wouldn’t have offered clarity either. So I’m off to confront the limits of my insulation, both personal and societal. Whether that breaks a cycle or repeats it is something only time will tell.

This piece was inspired by James Baldwin’s A Question of Identity, an essay I read shortly after my own decision to leave. It resonated deeply with me, as Baldwin has a unique gift of communicating what I’ve always felt but couldn’t put words to. Sometimes things enter your life at just the right time, and Baldwin’s literary work, beginning with A Question of Identity, is one of them for me. If you, too, are a driftless American, I highly recommend giving it a read.

The restaurant sits in a converted warehouse space, with the high ceilings, exposed beams, and brick walls emblematic of the neighborhood. Its design leans minimal, but not overly so – it’s clean and open, laden with backdrops of green verdure and blush-colored booths. Tables draped in white linen dot the room like lilypads. There’s no chef’s counter here, because the bar is reserved for their a la carte menu. I got a table to myself right by a window. The restaurant sits on the first floor and only overlooks Huron street, so don’t stress if you aren’t seated with a view – there isn’t much to see.

Overall, the atmosphere and interior lie on the weaker end of the Chicago fine dining spots I’ve visited. If you’re looking for peak ambiance, I’d point you to Ever or Oriole.

Where Indienne punches above its weight class is the food itself. This spot has cemented itself as one of my favorites in Chicago, and I would gladly return to try another one of their tasting menus in a heartbeat.

Service

A chair pulled out, a colorful scarf offered for my bare shoulders after my coat was whisked away, and a complimentary chai between dinner and dessert (after I waffled on ordering it for ten minutes) – everyone at Indienne was warm and personable, in typical Michelin service fashion. The general atmosphere was very relaxed – like most Chicago fine dining, you can get away with wearing jeans here. If I had to nitpick anything, the wait time between courses seemed a bit long – but I was dining solo, and this restaurant balances four different dietary tasting menus. It wasn’t long to the point of being obtrusive, and probably would have been perfectly paced for a couple or group.

Food

What I loved most about Indienne was that it knew when to reinvent a familiar dish and when to simply perfect it. Some courses were so eccentric, they barely resembled their original form at all – the pani puri needed to be explained to me before I understood what the piece of abstract art in front of me was referencing. Meanwhile, the dal makhani is just that, and it tasted absolutely beautiful.

The opening courses were the most eclectic of the evening. The aforementioned pani puri is made with a passionfruit purée nestled in a buckwheat shell, and is almost too beautiful to put in your mouth. The dhokla is a savory white chocolate that through some type of sorcery has been transformed into a uniquely dry and spongey texture that just crumbles apart in your mouth. The yogurt chaat takes the abstract art concept and sprints off with it. You’re presented with a pyramid of frozen yogurt shards dotted with playful splashes of color that you have to break open to access the spicy chaat underneath. It’s crispy, hot from the spice and cold from the frozen yogurt, with flavors that continue to evolve as you eat.

The meat courses are less eccentric, but are just as, if not more delicious. Every fine dining restaurant does a scallop dish, but Indienne does it best. They did it so well that it stands as my favorite bite I’ve had at a Michelin restaurant, ever. It’s buttery and warm, and the caviar garnish actually serves as a beautiful complement to the main protein without being thrown on as a bougie accent. I’m in the minority of thinking the supplemental lobster ghee course that follows after can be skipped. It is good, but the scallop outshined it, making the two courses back-to-back feel repetitive.

The lamb kebab was simple, spicy, and just disintegrated in my mouth. It’s paired with two straightforward chutneys – tamarind and avocado. The chicken is done three ways (pureed, pâtéed, and ground) and pressed into a silicone mold, but it’s served alongside a bowl of warm dal.

Everything, from the eclectic to the straightforward, tasted phenomenal. The flavors evolved throughout the individual dishes and the meal itself, with each dish carrying a distinct identity. I think that was central to what made this spot so memorable to me – you couldn’t pin down a specific flavor at any one point. Every bite was complex, robust, and beautifully harmonious. It truly felt like a love letter to South Asian cuisine and what makes it beautiful.

Often in fine dining there are great courses, and ones that miss the mark. Indienne was consistently strong throughout. The food was exceptional for a 1-star meal, especially considering they balance four separate dietary menus and offer substitutions across meals. I actually want to go back and try the vegetarian and vegan menus…if I can’t resist just grabbing the omnivore menu again.

Final Thoughts

I’d strongly recommend Indienne to just about anyone, but especially those who have never experienced fine dining before and aren’t spoiled by the bells and whistles that 2- and 3- star spots provide. Another pull is its value – at $139, it’s simply one of the most affordable Michelin-rated tasting menus in the city. The final and most important reason is quality – this is simply an incredible meal. The food is exceptional, a beautiful portrait of the breadth and complexity behind Indian cuisine. Go try any of their menus, and I promise you won’t leave disappointed.

Rating: 9.6

You can also find me @ayahokay on Instagram, Tiktok, and Beli.

Visited on October 15th, 2025.

Full Meal

I did a double-take when the waiter told me this was made of white chocolate. I’ve never had a dry sponge texture like this before. It’s perfectly spiced and beautiful to look at. A wonderful bite with heat that lingers in the back of your mouth.

I loved how the flavor evolved as I chewed from sweet and tart to spicy and warm.

The only disappointing dish of the night. The texture wasn’t pleasant, and all it tasted of was avocado and tamarind.

Crispy and creamy. Cold that blooms into warmth. Absolutely beautiful to look at and even more delicious. A texture dream.

The scallop was buttery, warm, and perfectly cooked. Caviar often just feels like it’s thrown on to elevate a dish — this was not the case here. It was a beautiful complement, and probably the most harmoniously I’ve seen it incorporated into a seafood dish. The squid “noodles” underneath the scallop are clean, bouncy, and citrusy. It bears repeating that this is one of the best bites I’ve ever had in fine dining.

Buttery, robust, spicy, and warm — the lobster is very well done. But for the extra $30 and immediately following the scallop and squid, it underwhelmed me slightly. But the mango and yogurt garnishes really add a lot. I’m in the minority opinion surrounding this dish, so if it’s calling to you, by all means — give it a shot.

The kebab just disintegrates in your mouth. The tamarind and avocado chutneys are both delicious. Once again, the flavors continuously evolve as you eat. The fatty lamb rib makes this the richest dish of the night. In my opinion, the kebab was more impressive than the rib. I liked the jicama with the rib and the chutneys with the kebab. This is a very dry dish, but not necessarily in a bad way. It’s just different.

So creative and inventive, with a gorgeous presentation. It’s so much food. They do free refills on the naan, but I’m getting too full to take advantage of that, though part of me wants to mop up every bit of that sauce. The chicken is simply phenomenal, made three different ways, layered into a silicone mold and pressed together. I can’t really taste the garlic on the naan.

This is the best dessert I’ve had at a Michelin meal, full stop. I might dream about this forever. If you haven’t had bal mithai before, it’s like condensed milk on steroids, and this dish dials it up to 11. The ice cream is delicate and fluffy. The orange crisp adds such a beautiful contrast. The dish is decadent without feeling heavy. I wish I could order this a la carte.

For posterity. Look at the beautiful china :)

The bonbon was a fun final bite with actual liquid coffee inside (so be sure to eat it in one). The other two were tasty, but standard. If there’s any place to put gold leaf without risking it looking kitschy, it’s on a little bite like this.

Nestled somewhere in the purgatory between Logan and Wicker and just down the street from the iconic Margie’s Candies, KND’s entrance is gray, unassuming, and pretty easy to miss. And it’s literally next door to big sister Kyoten. So, what’s the difference?

Price Point

These are two very different calibers of splurge.

Kyoten will set you back a whopping $440 for its omakase – one of the most expensive tasting menus in the city, rivaling even Alinea. This price is inclusive of service charge, but not tax.

Kyoten Next Door asks for a comparatively modest $159. This price is pre-obligatory service charge, which is 18%, so really the total cost is closer to $200.

Here’s a full cost breakdown, accurate as of January 2026:

• Kyoten – Weekdays: $440 | Weekends: $490

• Kyoten Next Door – Weekdays: $159 | Weekends: $169

Omakase Style

Kyoten Next Door is a traditional-style omakase, whereas Kyoten is progressive style. As the name implies, traditional omakase adheres to its Japanese roots as closely as possible – the focus is on the fish and rice. Progressive omakase lets itself play with a few more bells and whistles, introducing tempura, sauces in the rolls, and dessert dishes. Kyoten Next Door offers 16 courses. Kyoten offers 20-22, depending on the menu and seasonality.

First Impressions

The entrance is easy to miss. The restaurant sits on a quiet street a few blocks off Milwaukee, and the facade is a boring, understated millennial gray. Inside, however, the space opens into something far more elegant—a minimalist, serene art gallery.

Upon entering, the chef greets you while preparing his mise en place (is there a Japanese term for this?), and the host takes your drink order. There are several chefs in residence at KND, and that night, I was served by Chef Mugi.

I loved the space and the quiet, understated start to the evening. It felt true to the meal I was about to have.

The Food

Before the meal begins, the chefs reintroduce themselves and provide context for both KND and its sister restaurant—essentially everything I’ve just outlined. They emphasize that this is a traditional omakase and encourage diners to focus on the quality of the fish and rice.

KND uses a special variety of rice selectively bred in Japan for maximum quality. Only two other restaurants in Chicago receive this caliber of rice shipped directly from Japan: Kyoten, obviously, and Oriole (something I wouldn’t learn until dining there months later).

Chef also assures that slight modifications can be requested throughout the meal – more or less rice, as needed, to get fuller or avoid getting full too quickly. In my eternal hubris, I assured myself that I wouldn’t need to make such a modification.

Each course is introduced with an explanation of the fish’s origin and the specific preparation of the rice. I love this level of detail. Most of them go over my head, but it’s cool to learn about the process and sophistication behind what you’re eating at places like this. It helps you understand the work that goes into it.

The meal was evenly paced, especially given that up to ten diners were being served simultaneously. I never felt that things were rushed or too slow. Bites ranged from okay to just plain delicious, with most landing comfortably on the stronger end of that spectrum.

The biggest distraction was the fact that some pieces had connective tissue that made for a difficult chew – I haven’t been to enough omakases to know if this is standard experience, but based on reading other reviews, I wasn’t the only one with this complaint. It’s a comparatively small issue, but definitely an annoyance for a premium omakase.

Service was polished and professional—exactly what you’d expect from a restaurant of this caliber. Nothing flashy, but no missteps either.

Final thoughts

All of the fish was expectedly top-quality, and the meal was simple, as promised. Frankly, I walked away thinking that my palate wasn’t sophisticated enough to fully appreciate this.

I think this spot is an obvious must-try for the sushi purists of Chicago, those reminiscing on a trip from years past and wanting to revisit a life-changing meal they had while there. Or maybe it’s for those who have never traveled before, and want to experience what an authentic omakase is like at home. It’s also suited for those who are looking for a simple, high-quality meal at a reasonable splurge.

Overall, I don’t believe that this spot deserves the ubiquity that Reddit grants it, but that’s because it isn’t trying to go for ubiquity — it’s very clear about what it does, and commits to that. I don’t think my lukewarm feelings are a fault to the restaurant at all – this rating boils down to personal taste. The meal was good, but I’m not rushing to return. The next time I seek out a traditional omakase, it’ll be in Japan, or at least somewhere that seafood is less expensive to source. And if I had the money to blow $500 on a meal, I definitely would’ve just gone to the envelope-pushing Kyoten instead. It sounds more my style.

Rating: 8.3

Detailed Meal Review

Ora King Salmon (New Zealand) — 8/10

The meal begins with a buttery, smooth, and simple bite. Chef explains that the bites begin lighter and will get heavier as the meal progresses. They will switch to a darker rice, enriched with aged vinegar, about halfway through to accompany the heavier fish.

Ocean Trout/Masu (Australia) — 8/10

This bite is leaner, and cold-smoked. I’m not a smoked-anything person in general, but the wasabi beneath the fish paired exceptionally well. It was an impressive bite.

Red Snapper/Madai (Japan) — 11/10

They tucked some lemon zest under the fish for this one, and wow. So simple and light! This cut was the leanest of the night, and the fish will get progressively fattier as the meal continues. All fish are sourced from Japan from here onwards.

Skipjack Mackerel/Shima Aji (Japan) — 10/10

Very buttery. Melts in your mouth. Also utterly beautiful to look at.

Yellowtail Hamachi (Japan) — 10/10

Another simple bite where the taste of the fish shines with no additions. I think it was around here that I began to realize how much I wanted bells and whistles — I liked the lemon zest and wasabi hidden inside of previous bites. They made for a more interesting taste experience. This simplicity is wonderful in its own right, of course, it just began to feel repetitive after a bit. I needed more variety, but again, I understand that isn’t a fault of the restaurant. It’s core to what differentiates it from Kyoten.

Akami Tuna (Japan) — 7/10

The leanest part of the tuna, which explains why this was one of the pieces where connective tissue was an issue. This bite was way less smooth compared to the previous courses.

Toro Tuna (Japan) — 6/10

I’ve had toro many times before and loved it. So why was this so offensive to me?? Look at that marbling! It was at this bite that the chefs switched to the darker, vinegar-enriched rice. This one had issues with the connective tissue again, and tasted heavy and oily. It wasn’t pleasant at all. It was around here that I started feeling full.

Wagyu (Kyoto, Japan) — 10/10

Dry-aged 10 days, which to my understanding isn’t very long in the world of dry aging, but I absolutely tasted a difference. It was richer, much more umami. Might have something to do with the fat content speeding up the aging process?

Scallop (Hokkaido, Japan) — 11/10

My favorite bite of the night. I wanted twenty of these. This scallop was marinated in lemon juice and dashi, and hiding beneath it is a dab of scallion oil and pepper. It was divine — the acidity of the lemon perfectly balanced out the spicy kick from the pepper.

Japanese Spanish Mackerel/Sawara (Japan) — 6/10

A slightly smoked mackerel with ginger paste tucked beneath. It tastes much more mild than what I expect out of mackerel, which isn’t necessarily a point in its favor because I like the fishy robustness of mackerel. Connective tissue being present makes this not the smoothest bite again.

Mackerel/Saba (Japan) — 7/10

This is scallion rice, topped with a ginger paste. It seems that ginger and mackerel are meant to pair well together, but I’m not feeling it. It’s eaten like a taco…I liked this one more than the last bite, I guess?

Sea Urchin/Uni (Hokkaido, Japan) — 8/10

This is the freshest, highest grade of uni possible…and I learn that I actually prefer it at a lower quality. Because when it’s this fresh, it’s just mush. There’s no texture. It’s wet goo in your mouth. The uni I’ve had in the past has more of a body. I adore uni, but I’ll stick to my B-grade shit, thanks.

Sablefish/Gindara (Japan) — 11/10

I just like Sablefish. It’s simple, it’s beautiful, it’s tender. What’s not to love?

Wagyu Kimbap/Futomaki (Japan) — 3/10

After having a very purist, almost entirely fish-focused meal this was super jarring and I did not enjoy it at all.

Salmon & Tuna Handroll/Temaki (Japan) — 8/10

It’s good and the fish is fresh, but the simplicity of the meal is really getting to me now, and I’m positive that I don’t want to do another traditional omakase unless it’s in a seafood city (not the grocery store. love them though 🫰). The seaweed is so crispy and delicious, and the way they folded it was so satisfying.

Egg/Tamago (Japan) — 9/10

A sweet treat! Yes, it’s sweet! This was the perfect cap to the meal and I simply cannot eat another bite.

You can also find me @ayahokay on Beli, TikTok, and Instagram, or Sy1vie on Twitch.

Visit date October 7th, 2025.

Good morning! I’m on the O’Hare tarmac and we’re taking off to New York. I like doing these early morning flights because it gives me the opportunity to spend the whole day exploring. Wear a nice outfit, deplane, do your makeup in the bathroom, drop the luggage off at the hotel and set out. LaGuardia’s nice, righ…

Read more

Flight to Narita

A really disquieting realization I’ve made as I’ve aged further into my twenties is that I am now afraid of things I never gave a second thought to before—swimming in the ocean, flying, getting in a cab with a stranger. I guess that’s a hallmark of growing up – with experience comes world weariness and fear. These past …

Read more

When I was younger, I would always dream about the day that I’d get to disappear somewhere far away, where I could finally be alone, which meant that I’d be free. Solitude has always been the thing I coveted most, because it meant that no one could control me. To me, loneliness meant liberation. Really, being alone is the ultimate privilege for a woman—we’d only gained the ability to be alone very recently.

The other night at a dinner party I asked a woman I admired if she ever wished she had a daughter. Having three sons like she did felt like my own personal nightmare. Whenever I entertain the idea of having children of my own, I feel like if I could look into the future and see that I’d only have sons, I’d choose to have no children at all.

That sounds like a cruel thing to say, I know. I have three younger brothers who I love very much. But I also grew up around many families that had only boys. Boys who grew up to scribble swastikas and girls getting violently penetrated on whiteboards, boys who would cast mocking glances towards each other whenever any woman dared to voice an opinion around them, boys who would turn to the mothers that had quietly kept their atheism to themselves their entire lives to ask “Mom, why won’t you wear the hijab? You’re embarrassing the family.”

So I don’t want only sons.

Her answer was immediate — “No. I don’t like girls.”

“They’re difficult to raise,” another woman agreed, pursing her lips and nodding.

“Because in our culture, girls are prized.”

“They are the jewels of the family.”

“…You need to protect them...”

“…Keep a close eye on them...”

“They’re too much to worry about!”

“Ayah’s father always says that anything can happen to the boys and he wouldn’t care. If something happened to Ayah? The world would end.”

This line of thinking has been my life’s damnation.

I offer a tight-lipped smile and look back down at my phone. These conversations used to make me very angry. At this point I am just tired of listening to them.

I liken being a girl raised in a conservative family in the west to being a pet bird with clipped wings.

You are placed in a cage by the window. The cage is warm and safe and comfortable, but it’s very small. You see such colorful and interesting things outside of it, but never get to interact with them directly. The outside seems wonderful, and you dream of what it would be like to experience it yourself. You see other birds fly by sometimes — they don’t look like you, and they don’t act like you, but they are birds nonetheless, so the abhorrently stupid thought occurs to you that maybe one day you can be like them too.

One day, the cage door is accidentally left ajar.

Excited beyond belief, you burst out, and manage to get in a few feet of backbreaking flight before ceremoniously crashing headfirst onto the floor. You’re incredibly startled. You’ve seen other birds outside the window soar, you think, confused. What just happened to me?

You try again from the floor. You use all of your energy (is it supposed to be this hard? They make it seem so effortless), getting a few feet into the air before crashing back down again.

Eventually you are found, your flailing attempts at flight chuckled at, and are placed back into the cage.

Escaping the cage becomes a slow learning process. You have to wait for opportunities, and there isn’t any room to practice your flight inside, so you conclude that the next best thing is to more carefully study the birds outside. How they take off, how they glide to expend less energy. You glance back at your own wings and now realize your own deficiency. You will have to try twice as hard to fly like them. You feel a gnawing sense of urgency in your chest.

You try the back door. You try a different window. It’s the same story every time. Crash, get discovered, get thrown back in the cage. Your life devolves into a series of obsessive attempts to leave that cage.

Slowly you are able to manage brief visits outside. They leave you scared and exhausted, but you’ve learned a lot. You encounter many strange things that you don’t recognize. A lot of it terrifies you. Some of it tries to hurt you, and some succeeds. You struggle to differentiate between newness and danger, so you decide err on the side of caution to protect yourself from things you do not recognize.

After far too many attempts to permanently leave the cage fail, you realize that your crazed and desperate attempts to escape as quickly as possible are a fool’s errand, because you cannot fly on clipped wings. First, you must mend them. Quietly, of course, slowly, and without fuss. You will have to deceive the captors who love you, pretend to love your cage. If you reveal your plans, you could be sabotaged. But you now understand that you must heal before you can fly.

You continue to sneak brief trips outside, learning bit by bit. You begin meeting other animals, who are strange, funny, stupid, cruel, and kind. You are just as alien to them as they are to you. You can begin to adapt, but it’s their world that you are molding yourself into. You frequently feel like a stranger, and no one reads your book as well as you can read theirs.

The past several years spent in silent observation have granted you great pattern recognition. Begin to recognize the little quirks in each being you pass — every flavor, every theme, every wound, repeated. A body is a finite space. There are only so many configurations it can take.

What of the mind? Pessimistically you believe that no one can ever really escape the circumstances that molded them. Your life has been proof of that. A smaller voice inside pushes you to keep trying. The version of you today is much more knowledgeable, and therefore much more tired, than the little one that crashed into the floor many years ago. For some reason the world outside seems more tired, too. Often it feels to you that the world is contracting in on itself just as you have set out to explore it.

Thankfully, not everything is foreign. You even start hearing stories of others like you. Some have succeeded, but are far away now. Some did not get happy endings—preyed on by other animals, meeting tragic ends in falls from great heights. You despair at their fates, catastrophic thoughts of the same things happening to you flooding your mind. Adapting to life outside of the cage will be dangerous. Life inside the cage is not an option, but you begin to fear that it may be the only life you were molded for.

Enough time has passed, and enough experience gained, that now your wings can passably fly. To all but a very discerning observer, they don’t seem as if they were ever clipped at all. But in that time your mind has grown heavy. You come to your final realization: that the healing never stops, only changes form. This is where your inner pessimist was correct. We must mend our own wounds the rest of our lives. And you will die with your wounds.

An even longer time has passed now, and you’ve more or less adapted to life outside of the cage. You have finally begun building an identity beyond the one from the cage, but it is a solitary journey. Your peers learned the lessons you take now very long ago.

On occasion, your previously arrested development becomes gingerly revealed through the necessity of conversation. You understand that you need to show some vulnerability in order to connect. You don’t do this often, because the conversations become awkward and misconstrued, more explanation than discussion. Most are well meaning, but all ultimately hold perspectives entirely alien to your own, as yours are to them. Often you have to start by describing to them what a cage even is. Still, then, they always ask one question that makes clear they will fundamentally never understand where you came from.

“Why didn’t you just fly out of the cage?”

Unfortunately I don’t live on a coast, so wholesale oysters cost a fortune to get here – mention the Whole Foods 12 for $12 and you’re getting blocked – so I usually get my fix at restaurants. And every time, I sit in the disappointment that I don’t get to do the shucking myself (and miss out on a potential in-oyster snack).

Any food that makes me crack open, prod at, suck out, and generally work to get at it is a winner in my book. It’s like it taps into some ancient reward mechanism hardwired into my lizard brain. I worked for it, so it tastes better. But how am I defining “playing” with ones’ food? I’m definitely using the term very generally. A lot of the examples I’m going to give aren’t considered “play” at all – they’re just how the food is eaten. But for the sake of this article, I’m going to use it as a catch-all term for any kind of meal that warrants interacting with the food to eat it. Whether that’s eating with your hands I’m talking about experiences as simple as eating or preparing with your hands, such as with West African fufu and egusi soup, to traditional or ceremonial practices like finding the baby in a New Orleans king cake or almond fishing in an Icelandic Christmas Eve rice pudding. It isn’t my intention in writing this to exotify any cultures or practices, merely to admire the various ways I’ve seen food being handled, celebrated, and most importantly, eaten.

Eating with your hands can sometimes be seen as a faux pas at the best of times, boorish and offensive at the worst. My aunt watches in horror as I pull meat from bone on a whole-fried fish. I remember a waitress at Din Tai Fung holding back laughter every time she saw me eating sticky beef ribs with my hands. What’s interesting to me is how the notion of touching your own food transitions as you move throughout cultures and socioeconomic classes – in place where communal food is more common and you’re eating things like mezze or wats, you’d look fucking stupid cutting into your pita or injera with a knife and fork. Conversely, trying to eat a crepe with your hands at a sit-down establishment would make you look like a slobbering rube.

Prudish superiority complexes of the utensil-users aside, I can appreciate some of the song and dance that comes with a proper meal – the one that asks for a salad fork, an entree fork, a soup spoon, a regular spoon, a steak knife, a butter dish, and a separate knife for that butter, until you’ve got a cacophany of instruments laid out in front of your plate with a very specific order of operations to how they should be tackled. I actually like it. Truly. I think it can be worth celebrating on its own. At the end of the day, I’m a girl who loves luxury, and I’ll pay the price of decorum to participate in it.

What I don’t like is when this prim-and-proper dining experience doesn’t realize that it has a time and place, too. It boasts no inherent superiority to any other type of dining, no matter how much ceremony they wrap it up in. When the purported “superiority” of this song and dance is weaponized by a snivelling prude to turn their noses up at “inferior” cuisines (because you know they really want to say “cultures” instead), you know you’re dealing with someone who doesn’t truly love food.

Thankfully, these opinions belong to a pretty obnoxious, out of touch, and dying minority. Attribute it to globalization, greater access to travel, viral tiktok recipes, or whatever else–but being adventurous with your food could even be considered trendy now, a cultural rite of passage. You want to look cultured to your friends. You want to tell them where you ate before anyone else in your social circle does. It may not even be about eating the food. It’s about being seen eating the food, about letting everyone know where you ate the food, and about curating the image of someone who gets it, who belongs…everywhere.

And the real dick kicker here is that the same people pearl clutching over “uncivilized” dining practices are the same ones who will gladly shell out hundreds of dollars for an interactive, eat-with-your-hands meal so long as it was ideated by a white guy who went to Cordon Bleu. Practically every fine dining experience I’ve participated in so far has introduced some element of playing with your food – a perverse attempt at tapping into the primal satisfaction of shucking your own oyster or gently demolishing a pani puri.

That isn’t anecdotal! The Alchemist’s dining experience literally begins with a pani puri, an Indian dish where you crack open a hollow semolina shell and spoon in some delicious fillings, before dunking it into a flavorful, spicy water. A few months ago I was at a cool oyster omakase experience where one of the dishes was hidden in a treasure chest, unlocked by a key we received earlier in the meal. Alinea blows up a green taffy balloon for you to suck the air out of. Ever has you pick your chocolates out of a real wooden log. Ortolan is probably the strongest example of “food-play” that I can think of. Out of respect to the deceased avians, I should actually refer to it as a ritual, because there isn’t really anything playful about it. And it begins long before dish hits table. The little songbirds are captured in nets during their migratory season in the south of France. The caged birds are then kept in total darkness for a month, blankets draped over the cages. Sounds cruel, right? Positively soft compared to what they did before the modern era – gouging the birds’ eyeballs out with needles. I hesitate to assume this change was a measure of animal welfare. Maybe chefs just decided they wanted intact eyeballs included in the experience as well.

They are kept in darkness as they only feed at night. Circadian rhythms sufficiently disrupted, the birds engorge themselves on food for weeks, growing two or three times their own size. Once the bird is sufficiently fattened, it is killed by drowning in French brandy, and then cooked in its own fat. As the roasted birds arrive at the table, diners drape handkerchiefs over their heads before indulging in the meal – so as to hide their shame from God. The bird is eaten in one go, chewed whole, with only the beak left behind – brittle bones break apart and cut into the gourmand’s mouth as they chew. Apparently, the metallic taste of your own blood complements the flavor of the whiskey.

I won’t ever commend such cruel treatment of an animal – a post-mortem syringe can achieve what I assume drowning is intended to do (distributing the armagnac through the bird’s body) just fine. But, these sadists would argue, that simply isn’t as enticing. It kills the story. And our minds are just as hungry as our stomachs – the cruelty, the bizarreness, the ritual and the story is exactly what makes it taste better.

Dining is language. Dining is culture. Dining is religious, it’s cult-like, it’s ceremony. The table is the center of home and community. When comparing life now to your childhood years, it feels so droll because you have fewer novel experiences. Discovery is youth. Granted, we have to make sure that youthful drive for newness does not pervert itself – to introduce ceremony to one’s food isn’t enough. One must respect its source, and if you’re a meat eater, you better make damn sure you understand what’s happening to your next indulgence before it hits your plate. All in all, be joyful. Enjoy your food. Respect your food. And next time you make popcorn, eat it with chopsticks.

And if anyone ever laughs at you for ordering a messy sandwich on the first date, or, god forbid, daring to eat with your hands – ignore them. They’re part of a laughably small minority. There’s no need to perform while you eat. We’re already doing it everywhere else.

• 10 years old

• In Florida

• It was half steamed, half raw, and

• It tasted absolutely fucking disgusting.

I think the rationale my parents took at the time was that because it was me and my brother’s first time trying oysters, we could have them partially cooked to ease our way into it. Thus we got the worst of both worlds.

It took me twelve years to give them another go, this time at Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo. This time raw, and to make matters worse, the size of these things offered no mercy. Shells the size of my hand with my only accoutrement being one of those yellow plastic lemon squeeze bottles. Once again, I was disgusted and deterred.

I wish I could say it was my unique sense of willpower that got me coming back, willing to brave my growing sense of disgust and try again. Unfortunately not the case. Walking around the city a few hours later, I started feeling peckish again. Newfound realization and horror dawned on me as I realized I was craving…oyster.

Since then, I’ve partaken a couple of times, whenever the craving would hit. A chef’s selection on ice at Shaw’s Crab House got me hopeful that maybe the full experience could be enjoyable, actually. $24 for half a dozen drowned in tiger’s milk at Kayao had me damn near falling in love. It was those oysters at Kayao, shared amongst friends in the summer of 2024, that really piqued my interest again.

Alas, I did not trust Midwestern restaurants when it came to oysters, and didn’t really think to ask around for spots that may have been selling the crème de la crème. The craving continued to grow into fall 2024, and when my friend Laura invited me out to Seattle to attend a concert at The Gorge, I jumped at the chance to visit the coastal city – for music and nature, yes, but most importantly, for oysters.

Tragically, I was still an oyster novice at the time. New chum. A raw rookie. A seafood student, if you will. I didn’t know that East and West Coast oysters were so different. All I knew across my tentative tastings was that I really hated some of the oysters I was trying and absolutely loved others. And that distinction became very clear to me once I arrived in Seattle.

The trip was a blast, but the oysters felt like a betrayal. It would be 8 months before I tried them again.

And tried again I did. Quite a few more, actually. Now I can credit my sheer sense of willpower when it comes to trying all food. A precursory reddit search and asking around gave me a few leads to try, and from there I had around 100 oysters from May through August of this year. Rookie numbers for the true veterans, I know – but for a girl who’d only enjoyed maybe a dozen oysters over the past three years combined, this was a huge leap.

The Publican was my first stop, and I’m so, so glad it was. Not only did the oysters they offered rank consistently high on my list, but the staff were so friendly and knowledgeable, and the rest of their happy hour deals aren’t bad either. I haven’t dined there for dinner, so I can’t speak to that, but in the derisive words of a friend, “it feels like you’re eating in a barn”. Wouldn’t know. I stick to patios in the summer. IYKYK, Chicago.

After walking back out the shuttered saloon doors of the restroom, and then the comically large glass-paned entrance with a door handle long enough to rival my height (okay, I saw what he meant now), I situated myself back on my patio chair and asked about their happy hour deal. $2 discounted from $5. Let’s start sampling.

To my horror, it was a west coast oyster that day. The hama hama. Begrudgingly, I ordered two. And they actually…weren’t bad. Dare I say it was the first ever West Coast oyster I actually enjoyed. If this was good, I had to try some of those East Coast oysters, even if they were $5 a pop. I ordered two each of the Tumblecan and the Wellfleets, and it was love at first bite.

The addiction and curiosity had set in, and I quickly made headway through my list. Bar Mar, Volo’s, Trivoli Tavern, Half Shell, Venteaux. Hugo’s Frog Bar & Fish House was top of my list to try as a friend from the East Coast had recommended it. We went together and left very impressed. I ended up returning twice. They do have a happy hour deal ($2.50 discounted from $5), but keep in mind it doesn’t extend out to their patio.

The grand finale of my oyster journey took me to Logan Square to visit Motor Shucker at their residency at Easy Does It. A mutual friend had really sold it to me at dinner a couple of nights before, touting it as “hot people sourcing exotic oysters from around the world”. After describing the types I usually gravitated towards (the oysters, not the people), he said I’d enjoy the NZ oysters in particular. I was heartbroken when I arrived, though, because there were no New Zealand Oysters or my beloved Wellfleets to be found. Only two oysters took residence on the menu — Canada Cups from PEI, which are ranked below, and Alabama oysters. With the gutting of the CDC and the meteoric rise of vibrio cases that have emerged from the South’s warmer waters in its wake, I decided for the sake of my hypochondria that it was not worth to chance it on the bama oysters just yet. Thankfully, some divine being from above took pity on my disappointment, and the menu swapped out while I was there. I got to close out my summer of oysters with a Massachusetts Moon Shoal.

Ultimately I’ve learned that I like smooth, clean-tasting oysters with mellow flavors and intensely briney liquors. I don’t like my oysters being super big or meaty. I also don’t like that west-coast famous “melon-cucumber” finish. It leaves a really weird aftertaste in my mouth – it’s almost filmy. 🤢

And while Oyster Girl Summer may be drawing to a close, my foray into this world definitely has not. Hell, I’ll probably be trying even more now that the weather’s getting cooler.

Here’s my definitive oyster ranking.

8-10: Automatic re-order.

6-7: Will order for the table.

5 & under: If you see me eating these (raw) again, it’s under duress.

9 - Tumblecan (Island Creek, MA) – Clean tasting. Delicious liquor. Gorgeous to look at. I think Kayao used these at one point. Grown adjacent to the Aunt Dotty’s farm, which is another favorite of mine. These originated from a collaboration between the owner of Chicago’s The Publican, Paul Kahan (hence the name), and the crew at Island Creek Oysters! Makes sense that an oyster that’s quintessentially Chicago ended up at the top of my list. I didn’t know the history behind it until I wrote this piece! Tragically, these oysters are very rare, only available for a few months out of the year.

9 - Wellfleet (MA) – So briney, and they taste so clean.

8 - Summer Love (PEI) – Smooth meat, decently briney.

8 - Canada Cup (PEI) — Very inoffensive. I think this would be a great starter oyster. Not too briney, not too fishy. A little boring, honestly — but I rank it so high because I think this would make the perfect template for when you’re looking to dress an oyster up (like how Kayao does).

7 - Coot Cove (MA) – Mineral taste.

7 - Matt’s Landing (MA) – Very neutral, not briney enough for my tastes

6 - Moon Shoal (MA) — noooot salty enough for me.

6 - Hama hama (OP) – most tolerable West Coast oyster. Also, the prettiest shells I’ve ever seen on an oyster.

6 - Blue Point (CT) – Not salty enough…just kind of mid. It gets a pity point because I tried these at Whole Foods and they were not shucked well. There was a ton of sand and grit in each one, to the point I asked if one of the oysters had spawned because the sand had turned its liquor murky (didn’t know BPs are farmed only at the time, or that the oyster supply chain wouldn’t in a million years be selling wild-caught oysters at Whole Foods).

6 - That one oyster I had in Japan (Japan???) – I think this ranking’s fair. It’s just been so long. It was my first in over a decade. I didn’t necessarily like it, but it got me coming back.

4 - Kumamoto (WA) – didn’t stand out to me? I don’t remember enough about it to say.

3 - Baywater Indigo (WA)

3 - Cliff Point (WA)

3 - Baywater Sweets (WA)

3 - Rudy’s (WA)

2 - Chesapeake Bay (VA) – No liquor and it’s fat. Everything I HATE in an oyster. Most west coast oysters may actually surpass this one. I’ll never have these raw again but I think they’d make for a decent grilled, deep-fried, or Rockefeller situation. Maybe even in Gulmuchim? A shame the cups are so shallow.

0 (???) - This West Coast oyster I had at Bar Mar that was soooo nasty. Only time I’ve ever spit one out. It had the strongest creamy/filmy mouthfeel I’ve ever gotten out of a West Coast oyster.

For the sake of this definitive list, here’s a ranking of the oysters I had at Shaw’s Crab House last year. I can’t numerically rank them in good faith since it’s been so long.

Aunt Dottys (MA) > Pickering Pass (WA) > Barstool Cocktail (PEI) = Chebooktook (NB) > Brisco Point (WA) > Blue Pool (WA) — same farm as hama hamas…so maybe my research method just sucks

Conclusion here is that Massachusetts oysters are the best in the country, and I desperately want to visit the Island Creek Farm. I can’t wait to continue my oyster journey and hopefully brave trying some Southern oysters in the winter months, as well as more international oysters in the future. My next trip to Japan will definitely include Hiroshima, which I hear has some of the best oysters in the country. And I’d love to hear where your favorite oyster is from. Help this girl expand her palette!

In the Mood for Love (2000) / Disco Elysium (2019) / AMERIICAN REQUIEM — Beyoncé / Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) / Outer Wilds (2019) / eternal sunshine — Ariana Grande / Revue Starlight (2021) / Culpable — Joy Sullivan / Giovanni’s Room — James Baldwin / “Lightning Suspected in Death of Horses” — Caylin Capra-Thomas / Profiles of the Future — Arthur C. Clarke / I, Carrion (Icarian) — Hozier / Paradise Lost — Raqib Shaw at the Art Institute of Chicago (July 2025)