Self - Reverence

In the basement of a Tokyo department store

Last night I was walking through Shibuya Food Show, one of my favourite department store basement food spots (or depachika in Japanese) in Tokyo.

If you’ve never been to Japan - on the basement level of most department stores you will find a seemingly endless rabbit warren of food related stalls. Think high end food court meets a fancy grocery store… and then times it by twenty. It’s a dream come true.

You could easily spend hours (and a small fortune) in these places and it'd be worth it.

One of my favourite solo activities in Japan is to trawl through a new section of the depachika, taking 15 minutes in the rice cracker section, another 10 sampling new crop green teas or searching for my favourite freeze dried natto snack (in ume flavour, of course).

Last night, I was walking through Shibuya Food Show take-away section looking for something to eat for dinner and a salad very literally stopped me in my tracks. 

When I stay stopped me in my tracks, I mean it felt like the thinly sliced…