🍜Local food

What the rest of the world calls sushi started in Tokyo. In the Edo period the bay in front of the city — Edo-mae, "in front of Edo" — was a rich fishing ground, and vendors served vinegared rice topped with fish that had been cured, marinated or simmered rather than kept on ice. That curing is still what separates an Edomae counter from a conveyor belt: the shari is seasoned with red vinegar and salt, and the topping is worked on before it reaches you.

Eat it at the counter, one piece at a time, in the order the chef hands it over. At an omakase counter you do not order at all.

Soba became a Tokyo staple in the 18th century, when buckwheat noodle stalls fed a city of labourers, and it is counted with sushi and grilled eel as one of the "three tastes of Edo". Zaru soba comes cold on a slatted tray with a cup of dipping broth; kake soba comes hot in the same broth. Ten-zaru adds tempura.

The slurping is not rudeness — pulling air in with the noodle is how you get the buckwheat aroma. Finish by pouring the noodle-cooking water (sobayu) into what is left of the dipping sauce and drinking it.

Monjayaki is a thinner, wetter relative of okonomiyaki: flour batter, dashi, shredded cabbage and whatever else you order, poured onto the griddle in the middle of your table. You build a ring of cabbage, pour the liquid inside, let it catch, then eat it straight off the iron with a small metal spatula, scraping up the crisp parts.

Tsukishima's Nishinaka-dori is lined with dozens of monja shops and is known simply as Monja Street. Ordering is normally per plate and shared.

Kanto-style eel is prepared differently from the Kansai version: the fish is opened along the back, grilled plain, then steamed — which is what makes Tokyo eel soft — and grilled again while being brushed with a soy-and-mirin tare that the older houses have been topping up for generations. Served in a lacquer box over rice it is una-ju; in a bowl, unadon.

It is a summer dish by custom: on the doyo no ushi no hi midsummer ox day, queues form outside eel restaurants across the city.

Fukagawa, on the east bank of the Sumida, was a clam-fishing district; its boatmen's lunch was clams simmered with leeks in miso and ladled over rice. That is the original bukkake style. The other version, takikomi, cooks the clams into the rice itself and comes in a box.

It is one of very few Tokyo dishes named after a neighbourhood, and the restaurants around Kiyosumi-Shirakawa and Monzen-Nakacho still make it.

Loach — a small river fish — was cheap Edo protein, and the shops that cook it whole in a flat pan over charcoal at the table are among the oldest restaurants in the city. You pile on as much raw spring onion as you can, let it wilt into the broth, and season with sansho pepper. The yanagawa-nabe variant adds burdock and a beaten egg.

It is a dish that has barely changed in two hundred years, and it is eaten sitting on tatami at long shared boards.

Chanko is what sumo wrestlers eat: a large pot of chicken, fish, tofu and seasonal vegetables in broth, refilled through the meal and finished with noodles or rice cooked in what is left. There is no single recipe — each stable has its own.

Around Ryogoku, where the Kokugikan sumo hall is, several chanko restaurants are run by retired wrestlers, which is the reason to eat it in that particular neighbourhood.