Top 5: The Best Vegetarian Restaurants In Tokyo Offering Takeout

Top 5: The Best Vegetarian Restaurants In Tokyo Offering Takeout

Even though more restaurants than ever are offering takeout during Japan’s state of emergency, if you follow a vegetarian, vegan or other plant-based diet, this can still mean sifting through additional layers of digital red tape to find something good. Fortunately, there are plant-based restaurants across Tokyo that have stepped up to the challenge, often creating new menus from scratch to elevate what it means to get takeout (or delivery).

These are my top five picks for where you can find plant-based food to-go, all of which (and more!) you can find in my book, “Plant-based Tokyo.” These restaurants are all small businesses whose chefs work closely with farmers to source environmentally responsible produce and incorporate handmade seasonings and fermentation processes learned from their grandmothers’ kitchens. It’s the kind of soulful, playful and delicious food we want to eat. Especially now.

Celebrating each season: At Kureha Shokudo, diners can expect colorful meals made with seasonal produce. | Waki Hamatsu Celebrating each season: At Kureha Shokudo, diners can expect colorful meals made with seasonal produce. | WAKI HAMATSU

Kureha Shokudo
The tray of food at Kureha Shokudo is like an open page of a children’s picture book, telling the colorful story of owner-chef Yukiko Tsutsumi’s life. Each small plate and bowl reads like an important happy memory, hearkening to her many trips around the world cooking and collecting local antiques.

“Celebrating each season” is Tsutsumi’s raison d’etre. Her restaurant-cum-cooking-school focuses on sharing seasonal preparation methods, a critical element within Japanese cultural history. According to the traditional Japanese microseasonal calendar, May 5 rings in the first days of summer, so we are currently on the cusp of the new season. Expect to see a bounty of spring cabbage, bamboo shoots, new potatoes, burdock root and more.

Currently you can pick up lunch bento and some a la carte dinner items for takeout. Call at least a day ahead for special orders, or the morning of for the day’s bento options. Cash only.

Partners Omotesando 2F, Minamiaoyama 3-8-26, Minato-ku 107-0062; 03-6875-5296; bit.Ly/kurehashokudo-ig

Have an indoor picnic: Plate Tokyo’s sandwiches, sweets and curated wine selection are now available for takeout. | Waki Hamatsu Have an indoor picnic: Plate Tokyo’s sandwiches, sweets and curated wine selection are now available for takeout. | WAKI HAMATSU

Plate Tokyo
At Plate Tokyo, music, art, wine and food all come together around the dinner table. It’s central to owner Ayano Ikai’s maxim of taking in each day knowing it’s unique.

Ikai sources meats, fish and produce, as needed, to prepare one-night-only prix-fixe dinners of refined Japanese-style French cuisine. Her one rule is to source ingredients only from producers that she knows, like wine from the winery at which she studied in Victoria, Australia.

Ikai revels in her passion when she brings several bottles of wine to each table, enthusiastically describing each one for diners to taste and select.

“I want everyone who comes through the door to feel like they’ve come to my home,” she says.

Craving a spring picnic at home? A bountiful selection of Plate Tokyo’s sandwiches, salads and cakes — recent options include a Vietnamese banh mi baguette and brownies — are available for takeout. Wines are also available for purchase. Her omakase (chef’s choice) courses, which come at three price points — ¥3,800, ¥6,000 and ¥8,000 — are also available upon request. Call in the morning to inquire about the day’s menu items.