Tsukiji Fish Market & Akihabara

 Tsukiji Fish Market

When i did a search on the best sushi in tokyo, Tsukiji Fish Market's Sushi Dai often came up.
The reviews read "sushi for breakfast" and mentioned 2-3 hour waits. For me- eating sushi at 6am doesn't sound like it would agree with me and waking up at 4am sounded even worse. But since i was in Tokyo, i might as well get the best i could!!! AND it was awesome!

We "slept in" and headed off to Tsujiki around 7:30am. The JR train does not take you to the fish market, so we took the subway Oedo line which was just around the corner from my hotel (Sunroute) in Shinjuku. The Oedo line took several stops and in less than an hour, we arrived at Tsukiji. exit. (If you're unsure if you're on the right train, if you see Roppongi, you know u're heading in the right direction!)

Exiting the fish market exit of the train station

u will see this sign. i love how there's a spot missing from all the finger pointing?

When we got there, we hadn't decided yet if which place we were gonna eat at, cuz there's quite a few options. But really it comes down to two places. Sushi Dai or Daiwa Sushi. Sushi Dai had two lines- one right outside the window of the restaurant that seats roughly 10 people TOTAL. and then the PART TWO line around the corner.

Daiwa had maybe a handful of people waiting.
I did a quick search on my rental iphone on which was better. Both have great reviews, but as one reviewer put it- For almost the same price, sushi dai has a longer wait, but gives you more.
Here's a pic i took of the Sushi Dai menu

3900 Yen, you get 10 pieces of nigiri sushi chefs selection, one extra piece you can choose, egg, a roll sushi and miso soup.


Compare it to Daiwa

It's 3500 yen but you only get a total of 7 nigiri sushi, one roll and miso soup.

 So we stood in line in the scorching sun for 2.5 hours at Sushi Dai. Luckily once we got passed a certain point, the head waitress came and gave us umbrellas to shield the sun. how sweet! We chatted with her about the trip and she was such a cool lady. We also chatted up some ladies who'd come before and they telling us it's worth the wait, but how she didn't know how much longer she can keep coming here to endure the lines. With all us foreigners reading blogs about how you should eat here, the locals can't catch a break!

Do everyone a favor and while you're inside and while everyone is staring from outside (they will stick their head under the noren to look at you

), and don't take forever taking pictures of your food. Snap shoot and be over with it and EAT!. that's why i loved my rental iphone4s. I could snap a picture quickly and the pictures came out pretty decent. There were bloggers in there who waited until all their sushi was made to take a complete shot of the omakase, and had to take like 10 different angles. No wonder the wait can be 3-4 hours!!!

My AWESOME chef

Yummy Soup

Here's all the delicious sushi my mother and i got to eat after waiting almost 3 hours!
We got one of the larger Omakase set at 3900 yen, and one smaller set for 2500 yen.

This is the menu you can choose your extra piece from:

My mother choose the baby shrimp sushi which she enjoyed

Everything was amazing and our chef made it even more wonderful with some funny chatter and tasty choices!


After lunch we were gonna make the trip to Akasaka to see the new Sky Tree building, but didn't get the chance. We did see it from afar. If you get a chance, you should try to check it out or go to the Tokyo Tower. I hear the that the skytree has a lot of cool shops there as well. Akasaka is a great place to check out the old temples and souvenier gifts as well in their bazaars.

I did want to check out Akihabara-"Electronic town". It was cool to check out, but it's geared more for techies. Here's a few pictures i took.

 To satisfy my love of desserts, i did see some very pretty sweet things right outside the train station at a shopping place called Atre2.

 For Gundam lovers, there's a Gundam Cafe near the train station as well!