If I ever get a booking at this restaurant I’ll hop straight on a plane

2 weeks ago 3

September 3, 2025 — 5:00am

If I ever land a booking at Sushi Amamoto I’m jumping on the next plane to Tokyo.

Granted, I can say this without having to deal with any crippling financial repercussions because I’m not going to land a booking at Sushi Amamoto, and I will never have to worry about following through on this promise. But still, notionally at least, I can say that I would be there.

Sushi Amamoto, one of the best sushi restaurants in Japan and, therefore, the world.

Amamoto is one of the best sushi restaurants in Tokyo – plenty would say it is the best – which makes it one of the best in Japan, which makes it one of the best in the world. Check out Tabelog, the food-review bible for Japan, and you can see that chef Masamichi Amamoto’s beautiful restaurant boasts a rating of 4.63 out of 5, a sky-high score topped only by the equally legendary Sugita with 4.64.

You can’t just jump online and make a booking at Amamoto, though, even if you have a spare $800 to spank on dinner (airfares not included). This is one of those exclusive Japanese restaurants that works on a “who you know, not what you know” basis.

You need an introduction to Amamoto-san. You need to either know someone already who can provide that reference, or patiently spend your time working your way up through Japan’s sushi restaurant network until you find someone who will give you the nod.

So, yes, you understand why I would be rocking up at Sydney Airport, passport in hand, should a booking ever miraculously come my way. This is the pinnacle of worldwide cuisine. Almost no one gets to experience this.

There are people out there, I understand, who might find this weird. You would go all that way just for food? You would spend all that money and commit all that time just to eat raw fish on rice? Something you can also do at home?

But I see this simply as a subset of a growing trend towards event tourism. Around the world now, people are opting for specialist journeys, basing their entire holiday around an event or a single attraction, just one thing you want to see or do.

People travel for sport. They’ll go somewhere just to see a team play, to witness a match at a certain stadium. Football, cricket, rugby, Formula 1 … you name it, you will find someone who will book a trip just to see it.

There’s concert tourism. People will travel just to see Taylor Swift, or Adele, or Bruce Springsteen. People will travel just to go to a music festival or some other cultural event. They’ll hop on a plane purely to see a natural phenomenon, a migration or a waterfall or a solar eclipse.

So why wouldn’t you travel just for food? If you love to eat, if your adventures are guided by your stomach, why wouldn’t you identify a restaurant you have always wanted to visit and plan your holiday around that experience?

I’m also not alone here, either: a recent survey by the restaurant booking group OpenTable found that 29 per cent of Australian respondents had already booked a trip just for a restaurant.

So, yeah, I’m comfortable with the fact that I would travel to Japan purely to eat at Sushi Amamoto, or one of probably 20 other high-end sushi restaurants across the country. This experience just can’t be replicated anywhere else: the artistry, the dedication, the atmosphere, the purity of the dining experience is something you will never enjoy outside this handful of restaurants.

No tricks, no bells and whistles, no overt showmanship nor flattery to deceive. Just brilliance.

Of course, there are many, many other great gastronomic experiences in Japan that cost a fraction of the fee charged at Amamoto but the glory of this style of travel is that you won’t just have one meal on your trip – you can enjoy it all.

Where else? I would travel to Spain to eat at Asador Etxebarri. This, to me, is the European equivalent of a high-end sushi restaurant, a place where the chef – in this case Basque cook Bittor Arginzoniz – is so obsessive about ingredients and technique, and whose food appears simple and yet is incredibly difficult to replicate.

I’ve been to Etxebarri before but I would base an entire trip around the opportunity to go again.

I would fly from my home in NSW to Victoria purely to eat: Barragunda, Tedesca Osteria, Chauncy and Brae are all on my list (as are the pies in Tooborac). I would go to Tassie just to eat at The Agrarian Kitchen, Peppina, and Lobster Shack in Bicheno.

Hand on heart, I am considering a family holiday to Vietnam purely to go back to Pho Phu Vuong in Ho Chi Minh City – and Madam Khanh: The Banh Mi Queen in Hoi An – where a meal costs about $3, to see if they really are as good as I remember them.

And they’re much easier to get into than Amamoto.

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Ben Groundwater is a Sydney-based travel writer, columnist, broadcaster, author and occasional tour guide with more than 25 years’ experience in media, and a lifetime of experience traversing the globe. He specialises in food and wine – writing about it, as well as consuming it – and at any given moment in time Ben is probably thinking about either ramen in Tokyo, pintxos in San Sebastian, or carbonara in Rome. Follow him on Instagram @bengroundwaterConnect via email.