A line of high school-aged girls wait excitedly for a "rainbow hot dog." Stands dotting the main streets and back alleys around Shin-Okubo Station offer similar variants on this food — more corn dog than hot dog — stuffed with gooey mozzarella and boasting a crispy fried potato exterior.
But on this Saturday afternoon, the biggest queues form for this relatively new culinary innovation, which transforms the mundane white cheese into an Instagram-ready ooze of red, yellow, green and blue. After their orders arrive, two uniformed teens walk off behind a vending machine to snap some photos.
The rainbow hot dog is a nascent online food trend in Tokyo, the latest to emerge from the Shin-Okubo neighborhood in recent years, and almost certainly not the last. Often described as the capital's Koreatown, it has become ground zero for culinary cool in the greater metropolitan market. Over the past two years, Korean dishes such as cheese dak-galbi — a spicy mix of chicken and vegetables — have become hits on social media, with the recent arrival of Korean hot dogs and desserts gaining traction in 2018.