Today marks Day 1 of Japan travels! My boyfriend and I flew via Japan Airlines from LAX to SFO to HND. Normally I don’t blog about airplane food, but this time I must due to the above and beyond and excellent airplane food and service I have ever had!!! It totally exceeded my expectations!!!!! This is flight JL001 BTW.
First off, we got warm cleansing wipes right after take off, which quickly proceeded to a small appetizer snack of Japanese rice crackers. Choice of drink included the usual plus: kiwi juice, cold green tea, two types of Japanese beer and red wine, whiskey, etc (all for free)!!!
Then comes first meal: beef and mashed potatoes or teriyaki chicken rice. I chose beef and mashed potatoes. Each meal also came with a side of fruit, potato salad with smoked salmon and green soma? Or soba noodles, salad with Italian dressing, hot miso soup, and bread and butter.
Here is the teriyaki chicken and rice.
The meal tray even came with actual metal utensils!!!!!!! I’m sure they wash and reuse!! And it also included chopsticks! I love this environmentally friendly aspect.
Right after our meal, we each got a small mini Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream!!!! SAY WHAAAAT?! I cannot believe!!!! I already felt like royalty at this point!!!
After our round of ice cream, we got served hot Japanese green tea. Ahhhhhhh….
Literally 10 minutes later, the girls come by with a tray of (not hot tea this time), but hot coffee, with creamer and sugar. They tend to both the coffee and tea lovers. Greedy me and my bf got both. We said yes to everything!
They even had toothpicks for us! How nice! 🙂
4 hours in:
We decided to walk up and down the aisle to stretch. During our stretching, we decided to go to the back of the airplane to throw away a water bottle. There was a small stand of Japanese snacks and some orange juice. One of the flight attendants said they were free for us to take if we wish and also gave us a bottle of red wine!!!!! Awesome movie date with red wine and Japanese snacks! (because they had a lot of good movies)!
Here are some of the snacks we got! Their favorite is the cheese rice cracker, which is super cheesy and yummy. But surprisingly my favorite was the chocolate chip cookie (not shown).
May I also say that their restroom is more spacious and twice as big as any other plane bathroom I’ve been in. Throughout the flight, there are mini setups of Japanese snacks and drinks to take as you please with a little light over it. One of the flight attendants made a swan origami and displayed it with the snacks. During my stretches, I peeked into a doorway that a flight attendant walked through and saw that there was a flight of stairs leading to a second story!
8 hours in:
Breakfast/lunch consisted of mushroom and spinach Alfredo pasta, fruit, strawberry yogurt and cheese and crackers. More hot tea was served! More hot coffee!!!
Minato, Tokyo:
We finally landed in Tokyo! Taking the metro train from the airport was surprisingly very easy and straightforward despite the language barrier. After checking into our capsule hotel, which is sooooo cozy, we decided to roam the streets of Nishishimbashi to look for food. Our first time in Tokyo and we wanted to just explore and wander aimlessly and pick whichever random restaurant! No expectations!
We decided on Tendon Soba Udon, which turns out to be a really good udon chain with 4.5 stars on Yelp (I checked in and found out after).
My boyfriend insisted on a beer. We got octopus appetizer for 139yen. SUUUPER CHEAP! that’s only $1.39 US. And super good and super chewy and fresh. Love the salted shoyu sauce it was drenched with. Loved the seaweed. Maybe we were hungry?
Tempura cheeeeese for 204yen. Super cheesy!
A set of plain udon noodles in soup with fish cake and seafood tempura over rice for about 750yen. Tempura sea animals included shrimp, squid, vegetables. Delicious! I love japanese short grain rice and I have never eaten tempura with soy sauce and rice before. It was just so simple and so good!!!!
Tata for now! Going to try to get some sleep in despite the jet lag!
