Reid Main

One of the reasons Elsie and I love staying around Hamamatsuchō Station is that in the mornings we're never more than a 10 minute walk from some delicious Blue Bottle coffee to start the the day.

For the Tokyo leg of this vacation we didn't really have any concrete plans which worked out in our favour as we got our first rainy day of the trip. We choose to just roll with the punches and use this as an excuse to spend the day shopping at Tokyo's various underground malls. Starting at Tokyo Station we bought some Pikachu themed Tokyo bananas and explored an area colloquially called "Character Street" that was jam packed of all sorts of anime and manga shops. Following the underground pathways north we stumbled upon a bookstore named Maruzen that happened to have a quaint little cafe on its top floors so we decided to stop for lunch. As I am a weak man whenever I see a katsu sandwich on the menu I must order it and thankfully I haven't been burned yet.

With our bellies full we decided hop on the Yamanote Line and take our shopping talents to Akihabara. We promptly spent $100 on crane games to win four prizes (no ragrets) and another $100 on a single gachapon pull in a random card shop which got us a box of 30 booster packs of Pokémon cards (spoiler alert: they contained nothing of value). Serendipitously, while looking for the aforementioned crane games we stumbled upon a floor that was full of arcade cabinets from the 90s. One of them happened to be Die Hard Arcade which is one of the earliest arcade games I have memories of playing. It had absolutely nothing to do with the film but that did not matter to my twelve year old brain.

Our stomachs began to rumble so we looked around to see if we could get into any themed restaurants in the area (Monster Hunter, Dragon Quest, etc) but couldn't find any same-day tickets. We retreated back to our hotel to drop off our haul before heading back out for dinner. Across our many vacations, on the walk from Hamamatsuchō Station to our hotel we have passed a German restaurant, Franz Club, probably 30+ times. Tonight we decided to give them a shot and I am so glad that we did. Their take on German sausage and schnitzel was fantastic. It's obviously very similar to katsu but typically the Japanese rely on the juiciness of thick port cutlets combined with some sort of dipping sauce. This schnitzel had much stronger seasoning and was a lot thinner but still delicious. Oh, they also somehow had Hofbräuhaus on tap so this place is 10/10 in my books.