Tokyo's Best Vegetarian Spots: A Foodie's Guide

Hello and welcome back to Tokyo Cheaper. I'm your host Aimee and today we are looking at vegetarian restaurants in Tokyo with a fabulous special guest Sean Astorferada. Thanks Aimee. So just a little bit about myself. I've lived in Tokyo for about five years now and I've been a vegetarian since I was about eight give or take. Living in Japan and marrying a vegetarian diet to that has been a little bit difficult. The Japanese love meat and seafood. It's so common in all of their meals. So I've relied a lot on restaurants in Shinjuku and other areas to help me out. All right well let's go to the first one. Let's go. So we are at our first location but before we get into it I'd like to ask you Sean what is it like living in Tokyo being a vegetarian? So it can be quite difficult if you're going around traveling or you're just visiting Tokyo for the first time and you go into maybe a popular restaurant or somewhere you've seen online. Often you'll find there might be a So restaurants like this are really helpful because they give you the option of getting a full meal while giving everyone else options as well. Yeah so our first location here today is Plant Base Tokyo. It's within the Food Hall Blast which is about what a three minute walk from Shinjuku station? About that. It's yeah a couple of minutes away so really easy to get to from anywhere I'd say. One of the good things about Food Hall Blast in particular is that among its three restaurants there's a good selection of vegetarian options. All three of them have something for vegetarians but Plant Base Tokyo in particular focuses on vegan and vegetarian options so it's a great place for anyone with a dietary restriction to come by. And we have got a little bit of a selection here. What's really nice is it has both Japanese and non-Japanese options so we went with a bibimbap, we went with gyoza and soy karaage. And you've been here before right Sean? Yes these are really good. Shall we dig in then? Yep definitely. I myself am a massive gyoza fan so I'm gonna try that first. Yeah I'm more of a karaage person. Oh can't forget the lemon. That's good. It honestly just tastes like a real banging gyoza. This honestly has like a very crispy texture, tastes almost like karaage does. Not that I would know. Right. But just the crisp and the crunch on it is amazing. You can see it when you're looking at it. So crispy. Really good. So yeah that was really good. Great vegetarian options. But if you're in Shinjuku this place is great for a casual dining experience if you just want to kind of grab something, have a seat with some friends, enjoy yourself. If you're looking for something maybe a little more sophisticated or maybe something a bit more quick there are other options in Shinjuku and the surrounding areas too. So one of my favorites is Ainsof. They have a few branches including one in Shinjuku. That one's a little more sophisticated. It serves Japanese fusion and focuses on using Japanese ingredients with some more foreign dishes so curries and things that are more popular in Japan. Another English friendly option is Senjo Gyoza in Ikebukuro. This is much more of a sort of quick almost hole-in-the-wall kind of restaurant. You go in it's a very small very homely style of restaurant run by a Taiwanese lady who speaks good English. It offers some of the best boiled gyoza that you can get in Tokyo and you don't even miss the meat. It's just excellent gyoza, handmade. And one thing I really enjoy that she does is if you come in and it's very obvious that you're speaking English she'll just ask you how hungry you are and base your portions off that rather than giving you a menu or anything like that which I find quite sweet and endearing. The price is really reasonable. It's a hundred or something yen for one gyoza and so it's just a lovely homely and really good value spot in a major transit hub for Tokyo. The last one I'd recommend is Nezunoya which is near Nezu. It's more of a Japanese set meal sort of restaurant so something you'd call a shokudo or teishoku restaurant in Japanese. The idea here is the set lunch meals that you can get at many Japanese fast food restaurants that will normally consist of some rice, some miso soup and then a main. Most often that main is fish or meat-based but at Nezunoya they replace them with meat substitutes or tofu to provide a good set meal for a lunch time or maybe a quick dinner if that's what you're in the mood for in a very traditional Japanese environment. So our second location is Galafo Brothers in Shibuya. So they've got four locations around Tokyo. One here, one in Roppongi, one in Otemachi and one in Harajuku. Their main offerings are these chickpea-based patties called galafo which are traditionally from the Middle East. Their menu offers different kinds of sandwiches, rice bowls and even salads that are made using this ingredient and with a variety of different vegetable-based toppings and sauces. And it's really great because while you can just select like a selection of toppings that they have, you can also customize it yourself and get toppings that you enjoy. So it's really nice like I think there's something for everyone, right? Yeah, absolutely. So you can see we've got a salad bowl here for me and for Amy a galafo sandwich with some different toppings and mashed rice. All right, let's dig in! If you're after something else while you're in the area, Shibuya also has a lot of different vegetarian-friendly options. In the basement of the Parco building, in what's called the Chaos Kitchen, there's two good options. There's Jukusai Mensho, which is a ramen place with five different vegan ramen options including miso and tantan ramen. In addition, there's the vegan izakaya that offers traditional izakaya-style snacks such as karaage and pickles, all of which are made with vegan substitutes. And a little further away, there's also a vegan sushi which offers traditionally made sushi but with vegan alternatives to the traditional fish and eggs toppings. All right, and for our third location, we are at T's Restaurant in Jiyugaoka. So these guys have a few restaurants scattered around Tokyo. They've got one in Ueno, one in Tokyo, and obviously the one we're at in Jiyugaoka. They offer a lot of vegetarian alternatives to traditional Japanese dishes. So here we have a traditional Japanese dipping noodle, sukemen, that is normally served with a pork bone broth, tonkotsu. In this case, it's completely vegan. And here we have tantanmen, which is normally served with a ground meat topping, but again, completely vegan in this case. It can be quite difficult to get vegan and vegetarian options for this, so I'm really excited to try it. Yeah, me too. This is one of my favorite foods and I've not had a vegetarian one since I made it at home. So let's try it. How is it? The noodles are really good, you don't miss the egg at all. They taste just like fresh egg noodles and the broth is so rich and creamy. Honestly, it could be a pork bone broth and I wouldn't even know. It just blows my mind that you can get this tonkotsu, but yeah, completely vegan, completely vegan, no meat in it at all. And I don't think anyone could tell the difference. You should try it. Okay, one other thing to say is they do offer gluten-free options as well. So really just like a whole range of dietary requirements they really cater to. Yeah, definitely. And yeah, again, everything is vegan, not just vegetarian, so there's plenty of options for everyone. All right. Let's keep eating. One thing you might notice here that we didn't really touch on in many of the other spots we mentioned is the desserts. Completely vegan desserts, like this lovely parfait we have in front of us. And yeah, just an excellent parfait. Looks amazing. It really is. And something that we forgot to mention before is you can also get halal options as well, like the tonkotsu, because there's no pork used, there's no alcohol used in it either. Basically have something that's indistinguishable from one with meat in it, and you keep your vegetarian friends happy. So shall we dig in? Yes. That does not taste anything like what you think a dairy-free ice cream tastes like. It's just as smooth, just as rich on the tongue. The chocolate flavor is so strong. Again, that just tastes like a regular chocolate ice cream I would have, but even better. So we've covered quite a few options today, but I heard, Cham, you have another resource up your sleeve for if you're looking for other restaurants in Tokyo. Yeah, so if you're in Tokyo and you're just not in any of these areas, or maybe for in Osaka, Kyoto, somewhere, you know, a bit away from civilization, somewhere like Happy Cow is a website I love to use. They've got you covered for not just vegan and vegetarian options, but loads of things, you know, gluten-free, halal, some of the things we saw in teas. So yeah, they're great. Yeah, check that out. And thank you so much for watching this video today. Do leave any comments that you might have down in the comment section below, and we'll see you in the next one. Yep, thank you for having me, Amy. Bye-bye!