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Downtown Tokyo -
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Chicken gizzard anyone? Or perhaps a minced chicken ball with chicken cartilage?
I've been on All Blacks assignment in Japan, in an all-chicken restaurant in downtown Tokyo, where anything that resembles a chicken or is in some way related to a chook doesn't stand a chance.
While the All Blacks have their every need pampered to in a nearby five star hotel, us mere mortals are left to fend for ourselves on the streets of one of the world's biggest cities.
I gave chicken tail a miss, but I knew from the moment I bit into it, I should have employed a John Kirwan sidestep when it came to the chicken gizzard.
The gizzard resembled the texture of a living organism. It wrapped itself around my tongue and stuck to the inside of my mouth like a tin of Taubmans oil base topcoat. (No sheep dog in sight, thank God, although the other night I did spy a restaurant with neon signage that read "The Cats and Dogs Restaurant"!)
Don't get me wrong, there are some culinary highlights here, like the chicken pizza, the fresh tomato wrapped in bacon topped with mozzarella and the shiitake mushrooms stuffed with minced chicken. The cream pudding and cookie capped things off nicely and went close to erasing the gizzard aftertaste.
By the way, this is a smoking restaurant. Smoking is still very popular in Japan, thanks to the 400,000 plus vending machines stocking cigarettes in central Tokyo. Or maybe it strikes me as popular because I am surrounded by 9 million people, many of whom smoke?
TVNZ cameraman and colleague Jason Hull was thoroughly impressed with a local man, who
after extinguishing his cigarette, placed the butt in a specially made pouch attached to his wallet. Tokyo is so clean you can eat a chicken gizzard off the pavement.
We also bumped into two sumo wrestlers in the train station the other day. They were dressed in white, full length robes and dwarfed everyone else on the platform. Their hair was tied back as people parted like the red sea to let them past. By the looks of it they were off to work.
Speaking of size, I stayed in the world's smallest hotel room. I could actually stand in the middle of the room and place my hands on the two walls either side of me. One pleasant surprise though was the electric heated toilet seat in the bathroom. Shame it's not winter.
I also went to Tokyo's world famous fish markets, the largest in the world with some interesting catches, but that's another Tokyo food story.
Next stop for the ONE News Australian Bureau is Victoria for the horse race that stops two nations, the Melbourne Cup.
Flash suits and frilly frocks on Australia's biggest Tuesday and not a chicken gizzard in sight.
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