BudgetTravel

Downstairs at the Ramen Museum is where the real action takes place. Two basement floors have been transformed into a virtual 1958 streetscape (a significant year, if only because that's when "instant noodles" hit the shelves). The neon-lit scene--with bars, street vendors, and lots of steamy ramen stalls--feels like a movie set. No matter how surreal the spectacle, however, nothing can top the truth: It's a museum dedicated to noodles.

In between working my way through the Japanese culinary classics, I enjoyed paying my respects to some of the less heralded oddball variants. Monja-yaki is a kind of food found in Tokyo that probably won't be the next hot trend anywhere else. For one thing, it's difficult to define. Imagine a liquid that becomes a solid that will probably end up in a gaseous state sometime later in the evening. (A Japanese friend described it as "like a sauce that's the meal.") Monja-yaki is as much an activity as it is a dish: The tables in a monja-yaki restaurant all have a hot griddle onto which a mishmash of batter, cabbage, and other implausible toppings are spread out and cooked until the concoction reaches a consistency somewhere between a pancake and fried cheese. There are hundreds of toppings to mix and match--squid, spicy cod roe, various meats, a blob of food called "pizza" that was hard to place. Diners at the table cook their own bits and serve themselves using tiny metal spatulas.

TOKYO SLIDE SHOW Utterly delicious photographs by Tetsuya Miura • Launch the slideshow FREE DOWNLOADABLE MAPS The superb Grand Hyatt hotel in Tokyo mapped three of the restaurants in this story for us. If you don't already have it, you will need Adobe Acrobat, a free (and easy!) plug-in, to read the maps Download the maps Download Adobe Acrobat TOKYO DINING • The Hungry Man's Tokyo • Five Ways to Make Dining in Tokyo a Little Less Frustrating • Chic, Affordable Tokyo Cafes • Snap Guide: Tokyo • Japanese Fashion Loosens Up MARCH 2006 ISSUE • Table of Contents • Dream Trips: 2006 Edition • The Hungry Man's Tokyo • 50 All-Star Family Camps • Trip Coach: The Caribbean • Road Trip: The Northern Neck, Virginia • 40 Best Vacations

You'd think maybe one or two monja-yaki joints would be enough for any city, even one as big as Tokyo. But a few blocks from the Tsukishima subway stop is a long, narrow avenue called Tsukishima-Nishinakadori, surrounded by the impossible-to-forget sight of 70 nearly identical little restaurants that all serve this strange, fun, collective treat.

And then there's chanko, the food of sumo wrestlers. Sumo wrestlers feed themselves heartily, and after their championship days are over, some of them open restaurants with enormous, anything-goes hot pots engineered to bulk us all up to fighting weight. At Chanko Dining Waka, run by the retired sumo wrestling star Wakanohana, a diminutive non-wrestler tended to a pot of boiling vegetable broth in the center of our table. He used wooden tongs to shape chicken meatballs that he plopped into the bowl, and he returned every few minutes to add more protein and vegetables to the broth. It's unpretentious late-night food, perfect for those moments when the exquisite subtlety of sashimi is not at all what's called for.

I have eaten some strange things in this town. Chicken sashimi. Raw horse. Whale steak. Even cod sperm-sac sushi. (1. Puddinglike. 2. Never again.) Come to think of it, I've also ordered in some strange ways. Te (pronounced tea) is a cool little lunch counter in Roppongi Hills where you order and pay via a retro-futuristic vending machine in the front of the store. Then you go inside and wait for your meal. A filling plate of spaghetti with mentiako (spicy cod roe) is about $7.

But for all the wild fun they have with their food, the Japanese are exceptionally serious about quality and freshness. The obvious place to see this devotion on display is Tsukiji, the biggest fish market in the world. Hauling giant, blood-red tuna carcasses, carts whiz down aisles lined with what appear to be every last one of the world's exotic sea creatures, laid out on ice. Beyond a small section of plastic cutlery stalls near the Kaikou-bashi entrance (in the general direction of Ginza), two long lines snake outside two sushi restaurants located three doors apart.

One is Sushi Dai (with a green shade in the window), the other is Sushi Daiwa. Both of the restaurants are very small and very good. I prefer Sushi Dai--for the extraordinary taste of the fish and the rice, the tight quarters of the twelve-seat bar, the steaming bowl of fishy miso soup, the little balls of pink salt lining the counter, and the fact that, a full year later, the chef remembered that I'd been in once before. I'm not really sure how to describe the fish except to say that it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the best sushi I've ever eaten. And at about $30 for a substantial omakase (chef's choice) meal, it's a terrific deal in a town where high rollers can drop as much as $800 per person at one of the more famous sushi bars.

One evening I went with friends to the Kappa-bashi district, where restaurants (and amused gaijin, as foreigners are called) come to buy those perfect plastic food specimens. As tempting as it is to pick up a suitcase worth of the stuff, any decorator will warn you that it's not easy to find a fitting place to display a plate of fake pork ribs.

We had dinner plans at a place across town and intended only to take a short walk. But before we knew it we found ourselves around the corner, ordering a snack inside a boisterous robata-yaki called Tanuki. Robata-yaki are simple bar-restaurants where all the raw ingredients are on display. You point at whatever you want to eat--such as stingray fin, octopus, soft green tofu, even ginkgo nuts--and then take a seat at a big, long bar that faces a grill. Once the food is cooked, waiters pass it over the grill to the customers by using wooden oars. The oars also deliver mugs of beer, and before we knew what happened, we'd forgotten about our other plans for the night.

Only a few blocks from the fake-food district, we'd stumbled yet again onto something delicious. For me, the night captured the very essence of Tokyo: It's at once masterfully artificial and beautifully real.

Food