Robbie Swinnerton has been living, eating and writing about food in Tokyo for over 30 years. His column, Tokyo Food File, has run in The Japan Times since 1998.
For Robbie Swinnerton's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Elan is the new restaurant of the young and impressive Ryoma Shida, formerly of the two-Michelin-star restaurant Esquisse. Here, Japanese ingredients meet contemporary French cuisine.
The first meal of the year is always important. When it's the first of the decade, though, it surely takes on even weightier significance. So what's it to be? Fine dining or casual? Traditional or contemporary? Homegrown Japanese, something from overseas or perhaps some ...
Before we leave 2019 behind, there's just time to look back on the past 12 months of dining out in Tokyo. And to wish all The Japan Times' readers good luck, good health and good eating in the year ahead.
Occupying the entire basement level of the sparkling, reborn Parco luxury mall in Shibuya, Chaos Kitchen is not a food court. Nor is it anything like a typical department store dining floor, all straight lines and bland, standardized decor. In fact, it's like nowhere ...
Delifucious has resurfaced inside Chaos Kitchen, the casual basement dining floor in the hulking new Shibuya Parco building. And it already feels like it could be a perfect fit. While it lacks the rough-and-ready retro charm of the old digs, the new location brings ...
Location is everything. But that's only one reason why Esterre, the beautiful new French restaurant unveiled last month in the ultraluxury Palace Hotel Tokyo, has so much going for it.
Mai Nagamatsu is more than just a fan of katsuo (skipjack tuna). She's an avowed, unapologetic evangelist for those streamlined, silvery pelagic fish that play such an important role in Japanese cuisine. So much so that she set up her own small specialist breakfast ...
Hideaki Sakai doesn't make it easy to find his diminutive premises. Hidden on the second floor of an anonymous building on a quiet backstreet on the "wrong" side of Shibuya, it is invisible from the street. You access it through an unmarked door next ...
The vertiginous open-air viewing platform atop the new Shibuya Scramble Square building may be the area's latest and tallest attraction. But the restaurant floors immediately below are also drawing long lines. What if you don't want to wait? Try your luck at La Coquina. There's ...
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