Vegan Healing Cafe in Shibuya

After some sight seeing at Kaminarimon and Sensoji Temple early Friday morning, we traveled to Shibuya to do some window shopping and eat at a vegan restaurant we heard about called Vegan Healing Cafe. Punk You Japan wrote about it awhile back and we didn't really know of any other vegan restaurant to check out, so we headed there. The menu was small and there was only one person working who was the waitress and cook.. but the food was decent. Dan had the falafel burger and I ate fried soy meat. Both came with a big serving of brown rice.





For desert we had soy whip cream cake, which was absolutely delicious. The staff didn't speak very much English, but I was able to get out enough Japanese to find out about a book they sold called the Japan Vegan Restaurant Pocketguide. Luckily, it was bilingual (English and Japanese) so we bought it. It turns out there are over 50 vegan restaurants in Tokyo alone. We cannot stress enough how important this book is for any vegan coming to Japan. Not only does it have locations and maps of all the restaurants, it even has info on what things are safe to buy from the convenience stores and useful phrases. All the restaurants in the book are rated and the author visited each personally. There is also another list of restaurants at the back of the book that the author has yet to visit. You can buy the book at Vegan Healing Cafe and also at Deva Deva Cafe. We only paid 1050円 for it at Vegan Healing Cafe.

After eating lunch we walked around Shibuya checking out all the stores. First we stopped at a small record shop named Guhroovy. They specialize in hardcore techno... and we picked up a flyer for a free show called Day of Hardcore. Among Japanese hardcore fans this is somewhat of a legendary party which coincides with the yearly release of the Day of Hardcore CD. Dan used to get up early to listen to a webcast of the show in America. He is very excited to see it live this year. :)

Just down the road from Guhroovy is a huge Tokyu Hands. It is almost 10 floors, and each floor is divided into 3 sections. It has pretty much everything.. from bicycles to lumber to stationary to cooking utensils and more. But not in a crappy Target style way were everything is cheap. They carry high quality products with equally high price tags. There was even a section that had fabric and sewing machines. I kind of described it as Home Depot meets Ikea.. but they have so much more than that. Definitely a must see if you are in Shibuya.

We also visited Parco, Uniqlo, Shibuya 109 and some smaller boutiques that were in the back alleyways. Shibuya 109 was having a one day only sale and it was jam packed.



We both felt really old among the swarms of high school students. Nonetheless, it was definitely worth seeing.