I went back to Tokyo in late January and early February 2025, and unsurprisingly, a fairly large portion of the trip revolved around food.

Tokyo makes that very easy.

You can eat extraordinary soba in a century-old house, sit at a tiny sushi counter in Ginza, have a completely vegan Italian-Japanese tasting menu, grill wagyu, eat traditional sukiyaki, and then move into a kaiseki meal where the season is practically another ingredient.

And somehow, across all of it, the thing I kept noticing was strawberries.

Winter strawberries were everywhere.

Soba first.

One meal that stayed with me was at Soba Osame in Mejiro.

The restaurant is tucked into an old house, and the entire experience is wonderfully understated.

Chef Kenji Osame works with native buckwheat sourced from different parts of Japan, so the point is not an elaborate bowl loaded with toppings. It is the noodle itself.

Different milling methods and textures produce noticeably different results, and suddenly something as simple as soba becomes a reminder of how much attention Japanese cooking can give to one ingredient.

Sushi is partly about where you sit.

At Sushi Shiogamakou Ginza Kiwami, the counter was part of the pleasure.

The restaurant specializes in seafood from Shiogama in Miyagi Prefecture, including bluefin tuna, but what I enjoyed most was being close enough to watch the preparation and interact with the chef.

That is one reason I often prefer smaller sushi counters when the right reservation is available.

The food matters, obviously. But so does the personality behind the counter.

Tokyo does not require you to eat Japanese food every night.

Faro was a useful reminder of that.

The restaurant takes Italian technique and works with Japanese ingredients and seasonality in a way that never feels like a gimmick.

Our meal was completely vegan, including dishes such as paprika flan, pumpkin and pistachio ravioli, and a beautiful flower tart.

That kind of meal is one of the reasons I resist planning Tokyo dining around a checklist of “foods you must eat in Japan.”

Sometimes the most interesting meal is the one that does not fit neatly into a category.

Then we ate our way through several centuries.

One of the more unusual evenings was hosted at Studio BAX, where the idea was to look at Tokyo food through the past, present and future.

The first portion drew on Edo-period food traditions, including tuna and green onion hot pot, marinated tuna nigiri and wild boar with sweet miso.

The next course shifted toward the influence of Western cuisine, with dishes from a French-trained Japanese chef.

And the evening ended at Daigo with shojin ryori, the plant-based cuisine associated with Buddhist temple dining.

It could easily have felt academic.

Instead, it was simply a very good way to understand that what we call “Japanese food” has never been one fixed thing.

There was, of course, beef.

Tokyo gives you plenty of ways to eat wagyu, and I am not opposed to trying more than one of them.

At Nishiazabu Yakiniku Ten, the experience was interactive, with beautifully marbled beef cooked tableside.

Sukiyaki Asai offered a completely different version of beef: thinner slices, gentler cooking, egg for dipping, tofu, seasonal vegetables and a broth that let the ingredients do most of the talking.

Same city. Same broad ingredient. Completely different experience.

Kaiseki brings everything back to the season.

At Roppongi Rian, the meal returned to something that kept appearing throughout the trip: seasonality.

Kaiseki is built around that idea, but you also notice it in much simpler meals, in sweets, in packaging, in markets and in the ingredients that suddenly seem to appear everywhere at once.

Which brings me back to the strawberries.

Apparently January is strawberry season.

Before this trip, I did not think of strawberries as a winter food.

Japan had other ideas.

Winter strawberries showed up repeatedly in desserts and seasonal dishes, grown specifically to peak during the colder months.

And because Japan is so attentive to seasonality, once an ingredient is having its moment, you begin noticing it everywhere.

That may have been my favorite little lesson from the trip.

You can plan Tokyo dining around famous restaurants, cuisine types and Michelin stars.

But it is also worth asking a much simpler question: what is especially good right now?

That is how I would plan a food trip to Tokyo.

Not ten versions of the same extraordinary meal.

I would mix it up.

Soba and sushi. Something very traditional. Something contemporary. A serious tasting menu. A tiny counter. Beef. Vegetables. A market. Maybe something you did not expect to eat in Japan at all.

And then leave enough room to notice whatever happens to be in season.