Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo

✍ Scribed by Amster-Burton, Matthew

• Book ID: 108868578
• Publisher: Viaduct Music
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 305 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780983162995

✦ Synopsis

Everyone knows how to live the good life in Paris, Provence, or Tuscany. Now, Matthew Amster-Burton makes you fall in love with Tokyo. Experience this exciting and misunderstood city through the eyes of three Americans vacationing in a tiny Tokyo apartment. Follow 8-year-old Iris on a solo errand to the world's greatest supermarket, picnic on the bullet train, and eat a staggering array of great, inexpensive foods, from eel to udon. A humorous travel memoir in the tradition of Peter Mayle and Bill Bryson, Pretty Good Number One is the next best thing to a ticket to Tokyo.

Includes a new afterword by the author featuring Christmas in Tokyo, fried UFOs, a robotic sushi restaurant, and more.

"The layers of the city, its extraordinary food pleasures, its quirkinesses, emerge as the author and his family spend an intense month living in Tokyo and exploring widely...Warning: this book will make you hungry. You'll yearn, as I do, to catch the next plane to Tokyo, so you can get eating."

—Naomi Duguid , writer and traveler; her most recent book is BURMA: Rivers of Flavor (Artisan 2012)

"This is the book I've been hoping Matthew would write: smart, opinionated, and wickedly funny, crammed with in-the-know tips and observations about visiting Tokyo. From the intricacies of garbage sorting to the chirpy jingle for the local supermarket, the pleasures of pan-fried soup dumplings to the pain of junsai, I laughed, cringed, and got so hungry that I had to eat three bowls of cereal to make it to the end. I love this book."

—Molly Wizenberg , author of A Homemade Life and creator of Orangette

**

Review

"Matthew Amster-Burton is one of the funniest writers I know. He comes up with the kind of one liners and clever descriptions that makes me stop and say to myself damn, I wish I'd thought of that." --Kenji Alt , SeriousEats.com

"A consistently riveting book that might make you want to slap the bed as you laugh." --Shauna James Ahern , author of Gluten-Free Girl Every Day

From the Back Cover

"Pretty Good Number One will put a smile on your face quicker than you can say 'Arigato!'... Perfectly sums up all of the reasons why I myself fell in love with the country, and why, once you have been, you will want to return again and again."

--Rachael Hutchings , LaFujiMama.com

"A must-read for anyone traveling to Tokyo or dreaming of that future trip."

--Yukari Sakamoto , author of Food Sake Tokyo