Of course when you are travelling with children, you can’t always eat at the high end restaurants (plus it will drain your bank account quickly). Here are some kid friendly places and some high end eateries we enjoyed on our trips to Tokyo.
Shabusen
On our most recent trip to Tokyo in 2010, we had dinner twice at Shabusen. It is a chain restaurant that serves shabu shabu. The location that we visited was about a 5 minute walk from the Roppongi main intersection. The attraction of Shabusen? It is kid friendly. You can have your own room (or maybe they put you in private tatami rooms if you have kids - can't tell). Regardless, nice to be able to stretch out and not have to worry too much about the kids' behavior. You can choose from different levels of all you can eat shabu shabu (prices differ on quality of meat). It's relatively healthy, as long as you don't gorge on too much meat. It's entertaining for the kids to cook their own food. The restaurant is clean, Japanese in style and I think a good value. The cheapest all you can eat dinner is JPY 4200 per person if I remember correctly.
Katsukura
This is an amazing tonkatsu (fried pork cutlet) restaurant chain. There are at least 4 branches in the Tokyo Area and 24 branches in all of Japan. It’s the best tonkatsu we have had (and I have tasted a lot since I grew up in Japan). I am recommending this place because of its excellent food and also because it is kid friendly.
We visited branches in Roppongi Hills (03) 5772-3321 and in Shinjuku (03) 5537-2891. The one in Shinjuku is a bit cramped but the one in the Hills feels more spacious (and obviously a 5-7 min walk away from where we were staying). Set meals can be ordered for about ¥1100. It comes with the choice of size and quality of pork or seafood, rice, soup, cabbage and pickles. I like this place because the kids actually like the food and also can participate in the ‘prep’. The restaurant provides small individual mortar and pestle to grind the sesame to put in the tonkatsu sauce (kids love it). You can have as many helpings as you can eat of cabbage, rice, soup and pickles. It also had a kid’s menu but it’s better to order off the adult menu (kids menu included fried burger…). On top of the food, we found the service and the wait staff to be very friendly and patient.
On our last visit to Tokyo in 2009, it seemed the Roppongi Hills location had closed. Too bad. Here is a link to the locations in the Tokyo area but it is in Japanese…
http://www.fukunaga-tf.com/katsukura/shop/kantou.html
Tsurutontan
Our first meal back in Tokyo this summer was at Tsurutontan, an udon shop. The location in Roppongi is one of many in a chain started in Osaka I believe by a Japanese celebrity. In terms of kid-friendly quotient, it’s high mainly based on the food (not on the service, which is just OK). Udon is a thick white wheat noodle often served in broth. Our girls love it! The restaurant offers something like 40+ varieties. The girls liked the tempura, meat udons. I really liked the fish roe udon. There is something for everyone and the price ranges from ¥680 to about ¥1800. It is very popular so you will have to wait long if you go at peak hours.
http://www.tsurutontan.co.jp/roppongi/index.html
Crayon House
What a find! and in the middle of chi chi Omotesando. Crayon House is a wonderful treasure trove of books, English and Japanese, for the kids. In the same building, the second floor houses natural wooden toys, and the third floor carries magazines and health related items geared towards moms. At the basement level there is a natural organic restaurant to boot. It offers a lunch buffet. The food is usually simple but it’s so nice to find a place that serves healthy meals and is kid friendly. I liked it a lot but our girls didn’t seem too impressed. My girls preferred Jonathan’s with the buzzer on the table. Who cares about the quality of food when you can push a big button and have a real live person come running to your table???
http://tokyoq.com/weekly_updates/tqoole/crayon.html
Tsunahachi
Tsunahachi is my favorite tempura restaurant. You cannot get tempura like Tsunahachi’s is the US. The stuff you eat here…is pretty bad. You will know what I mean after you’ve had tempura at Tsunahachi. It’s main branch is in Shinjuku, behind Mistukoshi and Marui department stores. I recommend sitting at the counter and it’s a fun plae to take the kids. You can watch your tempura being made right in front of you and the chef serves the freshly made tempura as soon as it is done cooking. The set meal usually comes with rice, pickles and miso clam soup. Our younger daughter loved the clam soup and could not get enough of it. She also ate lots of pickles, pretty much polishing off everyone’s. The girls both loved the shrimp tempura. Vegetarians need not despair. You can order an all veggie course.
http://210.143.110.172/locat/index.html
Ony Onigiri Cafe
The kids were jet lagged and hungry and they wanted their dinner at 9:30am and wanted to go to the bathroom. We stood in the middle of Aoyama and spotted Ony. It looked inviting and the man behind the counter was so nice. He let us use the bathroom and this was before we thought of eating there.
Onigiris are rice balls stuffed with various fillings – salmon, pickles, tuna etc…and the rice balls are wrapped in nori. Ony also serves noodles in hot soup. The girls didn’t much care for the rice balls – although I love them – but they really liked the noodle soup. We ended up ordering 3 bowls because after each bowl the girls wanted more. This is a cheap, clean and fairly tasty (for what it is) place for a casual meal in the middle of uber trendy Aoyama. After onigiri you can stop by Dean and DeLuca’s Aoyama Café and indulge in green tea and chocolate doughnuts.
http://www.ony.jp/shopinfo.htm
Sushi Zanmai
There are quite a few branches of this Tsukiji sushi restaurant. Two of them are minutes away from Roppongi Intersection, right on the main streets. If your kids like sushi – great! But you can also order grilled fish and a few other cooked items from the menu.
Jonathan’s
It has an English name but I think it is very much a Japanese creation. It’s a great place for a meal with the kids after hours spent at Kiddy Land. Jonathan’s is located at the intersection of Omotesando and Meiji Dori, on the same side as Kiddy Land, right above a fast food burger place.
The food is Japanese interpretation of Western food. Kids liked it and we liked it too. What the kids really liked were the bells/buzzers placed on each table. The wait staff comes running when you push the bell. Our kids made the wait staff work quite a bit! Great casual, clean and inexpensive option for lunch or dinner.
Napule
Napule is an Italian restaurant with a beautiful terrace overlooking Midtown park. A welcome bit of greenery and open space in Tokyo! The pizza tasted very much like Delfina’s pizza in San Francisco. It was really good. Our waitress was a super nice girl and an alumna from my high school in Tokyo to boot! Of course, she was so much younger than me! She was very cute. We had such a pleasant evening…nice temperature, nice view and great pizza. I didn’t know until after we ate there that the chef won the 2008 Naples best pizza award! The pizza really was good!!
http://metropolis.co.jp/dining/dining-diary/napule/
Erawan
Erawan, a Thai restaurant with a view at ROI building in Roppongi is a fabulous option for dinner. We all ate too much, but that’s always the problem with a buffet. You can order a la carte but it was too tempting not to go for the buffet. Plus, with kids, buffets are the way to go. No one has to wait for food, the kids are happy they get to get up from the table (often), they feel empowered choosing their own food and everyone is happy! We were all very pleased; decent food, nice ambiance and great view. My favorite dishes were the different salads and appetizers. I had so much mango for dessert. That alone made the meal worthwhile. I have to thank my sister’s friend for the recommendation…this was a good one!
http://www.gnavi.co.jp/gn/en/g038502h.htm
Wolfgang Puck
The girls got tired of Japanese food (can’t believe it!) and so we headed to Puck’s for pizza etc. This location is very close to Roppongi Crossing and there is another newer nicer one in Roppongi Hills.
Kaiten-sushi, Tsukiji Honten
Our destination was the ¥100 sushi restaurant in Shibuya. (It is no longer ¥100 but ¥120 or so but still very cheap. ¥2040 for the two of us and we ate a lot.) It is famous because of its fresh seafood procured daily from Tsukiji. There is always a long line. The restaurant also imposes a time limit. I think it also has a minimum number of plates per customer but that’s not a problem at all for my husband and me. It’s good sushi for a ridiculously low price! We went back 2 days in a row! We didn’t take the kids to this place…but I think it would be OK. Our girls are usually entertained by all the plates going around on the conveyor belt.
http://www.youlinchng.com/experiences/kaiten-sushi-experiences?navcat=62
Toraji
Based on a recommendation from a friend, our family, my sister’s family and our mom headed to Toraji, a yakiniku place, for dinner. Yakiniku is grilled meat. In general, I like it and could be a fun place for a family with kids. However, for our carnivorous family, especially my growing nephews, 7 and 5, this place turned out to disastrous. There was very little meat and what meat there was, was very fatty. Meat is so expensive in Japan not the kind of place to take our kids who wanted to polish off $100+ worth of meat. We will not go back. Adults with small appetites, feel free to check it out.
A related story, I wanted to try Inakaya, which is known as a robataya, a different sort of a grill restaurant. I get both families together and we walk to it. The place is full of character and looks really fun. Then we looked at the price list and my sister saw that 1 skewer of beef (all of 3 cubes) would cost 4700 yen! That’s like $53 for 3 cubes of meat!! Her boys, especially like meat, and they would not have been satisfied with skewers of cheaper veggies. Embarrassed but determined not to go bankrupt, we got up and left. The servers were so nice!! One of them actually took us to a nearby yakitori restaurant which serves grilled meat on skewers for a more reasonable price of $3 per skewer.
http://www.liveworkexplore.com/tokyo/residents/going-out/restaurants/korean/toraji
http://www.frommers.com/destinations/tokyo/D39024.html
Shunbou
My husband and I had an amazingly relaxing and delicious lunch at the Grand Hyatt’s Japanese restaurant, Shunbou. The atmosphere was serene (particularly so without our girls), in a sea of granite and wood. The service was impeccable. We had incredibly tender grilled beef over rice, miso soup and chawan mushi. We also got to eat lunch with a Japanese celebrity, Kiichi Nakai…OK, not at the same table, but…I could see him clearly 3 tables or so away…this restaurant is highly recommended, however…
Do not eat at Fiorentina Pastry Boutique. My husband decided to treat the girls to some patisserie at the Hyatt, wrong move. The pastries were OK and very overpriced. Not going back!
http://www.tokyo.grand.hyatt.com/hyatt/hotels/entertainment/restaurants/index.jsp#4336
Nobu
Dinner at Nobu Tokyo was my first Nobu experience. Although the dining room is more than half empty when we were there, we had a great time. This was Nobu’s week to be in Tokyo. I spot him across the table and he looks at us and smiles. Nice…
Our Omakase course consisted of:
• Monkfish pate with caviar in a too sweet sauce
• New style salmon sashimi with sesame oil on gelatinized seaweed bed
• Grilled scallop and bonito sashimi salad with Matsuhisa dressing
• Soft shell crab spring roll
• Fillet of Japanese beef with vegetables
• 5 pieces of sushi
• Apple compote with berries in sherbet and red wine tea sauce and Mango pudding with gelato
It was well worth JPY 12000. Umeshu, plum wine, was good too.
http://www.nobutokyo.com/e_index.php
Morimoto
We had a hard time finding the place but it was worth it. Initially we thought of having teppanyaki but opted for sushi thinking all that meat would be too heavy. It was the right choice. We sat at the sushi bar and had the best sushi ever! (The restaurant is on different levels and the lower level houses the teppanyaki dining room.)
From what I can remember:
• Tori kai (bird clam – which the chef slapped on the counter until it swelled up)
• Wild salmon and a white fish
• Toro grated in a wooden box with caviar, wasabi, sour cream, greens, crackers etc
• Chawanmushi – the best I have had with crab and lobster
• Soup
• Grilled fish – I don’t remember what – chicken burrito – that’s what it sounded like
• Plate of nigiri sushi – eel, aka kai, toro, some famous fresh shrimp from some small village
• Trio of raw tofu cream, eel with caviar, eggplant
• Dessert – I had green tea affogato and my husband had green tea mont blanc
Heavenly meal! Sadly I understand the restaurant still exists but no longer part of Morimoto’s empire.
http://www.ystable.co.jp/restaurant/omaexex/index.html
Department Stores
You can find lots of restaurants in most department stores either on the upper floors or in the basement.
Hello Min Min - Do they have a McDonalds over there? And if yes, do they serve the #2 Extra Value Meal? That one is the best! - Your Pal - Scott Pierce
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