A review by annaptobias
Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo by Matthew Amster-Burton

4.0

Pretty Good Number One is about living the dream of staying in Tokyo for a month, eating and sampling Japanese food at its best and most ordinary. In other foodie memoir books/shows (like Anthony Bourdain's, for instance), the author would visit restaurants that are crazy expensive and not representative of the way that 'normal' people eat. Yeah, it would AMAZING to be able to eat at Jiro's for sushi, but really, I don't have US$350 to eat a dozen pieces of sushi in one seating. Matthew Amster-Burton, on the other hand, writes about what a normal Tokyoite would eat -- ramen, donburi, yakitori, Denny's, onigiri from 7-11 -- and for me, reading about that kind of food makes Tokyo far more approachable.

As a manga fan, I appreciate how he references the series Oishinbo numerous times throughout the text, almost as if Yamaoka was his spirit guide.