Japan: Eat your heart out

I realise that raw fish is not everyone's glass of soy chai latte. But you can't deny that it's good for you.

So the prospect of a week in Nippon in the middle of a nippy New Zealand winter had me singing in the shower. Not only would I soon be striding through the steamy streets of Tokyo, but all that sashimi would cleanse my system of too many weeks of comfort food, I figured. Heck, with all the walking that was likely to be involved, I might even lose a kilo or two.

Happily, it wasn't to be.

For some people, travel is all about a glimpse of how the other half lives. But for me, travel is all about how the other half eats.

As it happens, Japanese food is one of my favourite cuisines. But if you don't happen to agree, then don't be put off visiting Tokyo. The city is a hedonist's heaven, with epicurean offerings to please even the most conservative palate.

I certainly didn't expect to find French-style patisseries almost everywhere. Or for the 7-Elevens to carry everything from the finest sorbets to an impressive selection of proscuitto.

It is a little-known fact that Michelin has awarded far more of its famed stars to restaurants in Tokyo than in any other city - including Paris or New York.

Even my local train station supermarket stocked creme caramels endorsed by Joel Rubuchon, breads blessed by Alain Ducasse and $700 bottles of Dom Perignon.

The food halls alone will blow any gourmand's mind. Almost a decade of deflation has made Japan much less expensive than it was, and thanks to the national obsession with total quality management, you can still eat well on a tight budget.

Whatever your price point, I can certainly recommend the Shinagawa Prince Hotel. This hotel is so huge, it caters for almost every type of traveller, with four towers each aimed at different sorts of tourists.

I stayed in the cheapest tower, which has only single rooms, but at $80 a night through Expedia, it was a bargain. You could, in fact, spend your entire holiday inside this complex. The hotel not only has its own cinema, bowling alley and aqua stadium (which includes a Kelly-Tarlton-style aquarium and a dolphin show) but also has more than a dozen restaurants, its own food court, and several souvenir and convenience stores. And yes, there's even a McDonald's. I'm not really a food court kind of gal, but the Prince food court did prove a handy place for lunch one day.

While I waited for my spaghetti marinara, the chef threw the pasta into boiling water, then grabbed a generous handful of fresh seafood which he sizzled in a pan. Another chef whipped up the sauce. I can honestly say it's among the best spaghetti marinara I've had and it cost only about $12.

The Shinagawa railway station on the opposite side of the road also proved a handy place to eat.

The station is one of the biggest in Tokyo and the starting point for the famous Shinkansen bullet train. Like many stations in Tokyo, it also houses a retail complex that includes a department store, Italian coffee chain and a wonderful food hall.

It has several other food outlets as well, including a superb bakery chain called Andersen which, although Danish-inspired, was founded by a Japanese man in the wake of the Hiroshima bombing (the full story is on its website).

My ritual for breakfast was to grab a couple of pastries from Andersen, pop into the juice bar for a fresh mango and yoghurt smoothie, then grab a takeaway coffee from Segafredo - all for much less than the hotel's version. So much for getting rid of the flab.

Getting rid of the rubbish also proved to be a bit of a problem. Japan has been quick to jump on the environmental bandwagon - it gave birth, after all, to the Kyoto Protocol - but I somehow doubt that it will give up its obsession with packaging.

Even at Andersen, each item was wrapped in greaseproof paper, then sealed in a plastic bag. These bags were then placed in a high-quality paper bag, which was itself then sealed in plastic. It was like buying pizza from Tiffany's.

This attention to detail is endemic to Japanese culture. Its butcheries make your average New Zealand supermarket look like a Moroccan souk. Japanese meat tends to be uniformly pink, with beautifully marbled fat throughout. This, after all, is the home of Wagyu beef.

At Shinagawa station, the Wing food hall is almost on par with Harrod's. It made me realise how Anglo-based the average Auckland sushi-bar really is.

The food hall had a fantastic array of sushi, sashimi and bento, and every kind of fresh fish - each one individually wrapped in plastic, of course. But there was also a stunning selection of European cheesecakes, Swiss and Belgian chocolate, and other delights.

That was another surprise about Japan - that there is so much high-calorie junkfood available. Creperies are ubiquitous in Tokyo. Young people, in particular, can't seem to get enough of these confections and you can't help wondering what it's doing to the national cholesterol level.

Like the French, however, the Japanese do seem to get the moderation message. "The problem with the Western diet," a local businessman told me, "is there is too much brown food."

He is right, of course, and for all my sampling of European delicacies, I also ate in several Japanese restaurants where the meals consist of lots of little dishes of yummy - and healthy - foods.

English is still far from universal in Tokyo, but if you're scared of ending up with something strange, you can always pop into one of the many noodle bars where you buy a ticket from a vending machine that features pictures of all the available dishes.

They're cheap meals and always good. In fact, Tokyo is a lot like Paris in that it is virtually impossible to get a bad meal.

One night I caught up with a couple of ex-pats who took me to the Japanese version of KFC, except slightly more upmarket. We drank pints of fine Belgian-style beer and ate peppery chicken wings that are apparently a speciality of Nagoya. Japanese are huge beer drinkers, although another favourite drink is the "sour", a concoction which someone told me is derived from potatoes, like vodka. It's generally mixed with soda and freshly squeezed citrus. It's certainly refreshing, although I can't say I fell in love with it and didn't notice any alcoholic effects.

Determined to see something unique, I also dropped by the Tzukiji fish market one morning. This famous market handles tens of millions of visitors and 600,000 tonnes of seafood in 480 varieties - one of every five fish caught on the planet.

Frankly, I'm astonished they still let tourists wander around - in New Zealand either OSH or ACC would have banned the public years ago. You have to keep your wits about you to prevent being maimed by the hundreds of electric wagons and bikes that constantly zip through the labyrinth of stalls.

Earlier this year, an intoxicated British tourist was ordered out when he licked a frozen tuna. I'm surprised he got off that lightly. "Some of those guys are really rough - one day someone's going to get beaten up," a local told me.

Another night, an acquaintance took me to a restaurant I would never have found myself, on the sixth or seventh floor of an apartment block. When the lift doors opened, I was astonished to see the entrance to a very cute restaurant.

It was a fairly simple but delicious meal that included a wide variety of Japanese specialties, such as finely diced octopus marinated in wasabi. I gulped when it came to pay the bill of about $180, but a meal for two including drinks in any decent New Zealand restaurant would not be too far off that.

You can, of course, pay much, much more than that in Tokyo. But you can also do a lot worse than snack on food from the convenience stores, train stations and noodle bars - and still put on weight.

Karyn Scherer flew to Tokyo courtesy of Air New Zealand.