penniless in tokyo or my kingdom for some gyudon!

[elliptic_curve]

If you find yourself penniless in Tokyo, you can survive on eating

1. cheap sushi from the 7-11 (still better than anything you can get in Waterloo, trust me) < 4$
2. gyudon (literally "beef bowl") in fast food chains. < 5$

Comments

[evildrgo]

Reading your LJ is like an all you can drool All Asian Buffet...

Is Cheap Sushi from 7-11 better than sushi at Loblaws?

[elliptic_curve]

hahahah! i love asian food. when i was a little kid, i had all kinds of weird food quirks, like eating rice for breakfast, eating savory breakfasts, and liking unripe fruit better than ripe fruit, and my mother used to get so mad at me and try to get me to eat more normal things. when i went to asia i was so VINDICATED!

yeah, the 7-11 sushi is at par with your average canadian sushi restaurant. i find loblaws sushi so abysmal i have a personal ban on the stuff, no matter how much i might be craving sushi. it's not as good as a GOOD sushi restaurant, however, even in Canada, but it's decent. It's way better than anything from KW. And it's cheap.

you can also buy onigiri, which are rice "triangles" with a filling inside. that was the first thing i ate in Japan! those are like 1.5$, i ate a lot of those in tokyo coz i had no money left!

[sfllaw]

I had no idea you like gay asian guys. Goes to show that you learn something new everyday.

[mutex8]

Zing!

[octal]

The other fun thing to do is dress up, go into 5-star hotels, and scarf breakfast buffet, etc. food.

[scjody]

bonus points if you sneak out lunch too.

[scjody]

Most of the gyudon restaurants I found had these machines where you insert money then choose what you want by pressing the appropriate button - labeled only in kanji apart from the price. Picture menus are definately nice when they exist but they're not consistent outside the really touristy areas. I was only there for a short time though and maybe I just had bad luck.

[elliptic_curve]

yeah, i think i had gyudon mostly in shibuya.

one general principle of finding good restaurants in foreign lands that doesn't seem to fail: just go where there's a bunch of other people and seems to be a "buzz" -- this is way more reliable than a travel guide, IMHO. also, if a place seems empty, no matter what the recommendation, it might have been good before, but now it will suck. you have to be willing to eat whatever other people are having, but if the restaurant is really popular it's probably good.

i ended up having this murky, black-like-oil-broth stew in tokyo because the restaurant was close to where i was staying and there was always a huge line at lunchtime. i had no idea what the stuff even was, and it looked gross from the picture, but i tried it, and it was AMAZING.

one time in BKK there was a huge line for a bakery, and so i stood in line, figuring it was good. it was for rotiboy. Rotiboy makes exactly one product: rotiboy coffee buns. These are fluffy buns, with a coffee taste and butter on top, and lightly

[scjody]

Yeah, I've gotten pretty good at picking out places based on "buzz" too. It's probably even more important in somewhere than Bangkok since things change so quickly (from what I've heard) and so many tourists are dependent on guidebooks. The other thing is of course to look for locals not tourists, but sounds like you've already figured that out :)