When it comes to Tokyo food trends, four years is almost a lifetime. Back in 2010, when Yoshihide Matsubara wrote "The Burger Map," the definitive guide to burgers in the capital area, hamburgers were still generating a fair amount of buzz. Then came pancakes and then, in an unlikely 180-degree twist, came "Napolitan" spaghetti.

Still, Tokyo's resident hamburger expert feels there is a lot to get excited about — enough to warrant a new edition, "The Burger Map Tokyo," published last month.

"The restaurants that had been around three or four years when I wrote the first book have now been in business seven or eight years, some of them for 10 years. The level of quality is really high now," says Matsubara.