It's only 1 PM here, and I've already had quite a "productive" day (in my mind, of course) - I've already gone food shopping, gone to the kyuu-kyuu (99 yen store) for some around-the-apartment necessities, visited Sophia's campus, was ordered by Sophia security to visit the graduate department offices to obtain permission to remain on campus without student ID, found Sophia's grad department takes a very long lunch starting at 11 AM and ending at 1:30 PM and thus just left campus to wander the beautiful gardens around the area, got very lost in Chiyoda, visited the local Inari shrine to pay my respects, and got myself a bit of lunch.
Hence we finally get to the point of this entry - my recommendation that should you find yourself in the Yotsuya area, you should stop by a small eatery called "Loving Hut", located somewhere in this vicinity.
(EDIT - Map is not working at the moment, I'll try and get a working link or embed up later. But there is actually a Google Street View spot right at the building, showing where the place is!)
Obviously, not the best map, but as I was walking through the narrow side streets, I cannot be sure which building it was on the 2nd floor of - but it was going down that first small side street on your left if you were walking from Yotsuya Sanchome towards Yotsuya.
Anyway, Loving Hut is a vegan restaurant, run by a nice family who seemed quite excited that a random gaijin had wandered in. There is a full english menu and they do their best to help you in broken english, but you should be able to get by just fine. While not a vegetarian myself, I do find myself eating more and more soy these days due to the health benefits, and when I saw their specialty is a soy vegetable burger, I had to head in.
The burger was excellent, pure and simple. While I don't think I would have missed the fact that it wasn't beef, as the consistency was just not the same, I do still state it is one of the best burgers I have ever had, meat or not, and easily the best veggy-burger I've ever had. The bun was whole grain and seemed to be baked on location, the burger was a mix of soy and vegetable, topped with lettuce, shredded daikon, tomato, and honey mustard, and it came with a small salad for 700 yen - a pretty decent price for a pretty large, filling meal. For 900 yen, you can get a soup-of-the-day with it. The rest of the menu seemed to be primarily lighter fare, small cakes, soups, and sandwiches, all in the budget price range.
Overall, I recommend it, so much that upon returning to unpack my purchases I figured I should write up a review! While I'm still trying to live cheaply until I can settle out my financial situation here in Japan, I do hope to frequent Loving Hut often - I figure a 7 dollar meal isn't quite a "splurge" considering, well, Tokyo is still up there in the top most expensive places to live ever and all.
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I had an interesting adventure with my JET friends. The one boy is a vegetarian, and has been finding it very hard to survive in Japan without cooking his own meals. His vegan friends have it worse, but indeed going to the average restaurant in Japan is very hard for a strict vegetarian. We ordered pasta, and it came with ham in it... and supposedly we were supposed to know that plain pepper pasta came with ham mixed in? Nothing on the menu indicated it. They also made their pizzas with sauce that may or may not have had meat in it... He almost threw up.
You are very lucky!
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