The Worst Meal We Had in Japan Was Also the Most Photogenic

Somewhere in Tokyo there is a themed cafe built around a stage production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and I need you to know two things about it going in: it looked incredible, and it was the worst meal we had in the entire country.

We didn’t stumble into it — we walked past a whole miniature Diagon Alley of shops built up to it, which is the kind of set dressing that gets you excited before you’ve even sat down. Then we sat down. I ordered fish and chips, served on a slate, dusted with powdered sugar shaped like a dementor. It looked exactly like the picture. It tasted like a crime. One piece of fish was cooked so far past done it had crossed over into what I can only describe as charred blackness, and I want to be generous here, but there was genuinely more batter than fish under it. Matt’s dish fared no better. We both agreed, without much debate, that this was the worst meal in Japan — a country where we otherwise ate convenience-store egg sandwiches that were better than some restaurant food back home.

The real betrayal, though, was the drink. Somewhere on the menu was a cocktail with a photogenic curl of blue smoke rising off the top — the kind of thing you order specifically because of how it’s going to look. It arrived, it smoked dramatically, I took the picture, and then I tasted it: seltzer water with blue food dye in it. Bitter. Not good. Genuinely just carbonated water someone dyed the color of a Ravenclaw scarf.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, though: I’d go back. Not for the food — for the photo. Every single dish on that table was styled to within an inch of its life, and it worked, because I still have the pictures and they’re great. It’s a strange kind of honest lesson from two weeks of travel photography — sometimes the place that photographs the best is not the place you’d recommend for dinner, and that’s fine. You can hold both of those at once. We paid, we laughed about it, and twenty minutes later we were back in a convenience store buying a Kit Kat flavor that doesn’t exist in the US, which, unlike dinner, actually delivered.

If you want the parts of Japan that were genuinely, unambiguously great — the quiet version of Fushimi Inari before the crowds show up, a steak dinner in Kyoto that’s stayed one of the best meals of my life — that trip is mailed home the honest way, gates and all. This one’s just for the record: the food was bad, the photos were great, and we’d absolutely do it again.

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