The World's Largest Cookware Market - Kappabashi-Dori in Tokyo

Keywords:	Kitchenware ¦ Japan ¦ Cookware Porn ¦ Reportage
Translations:	Español
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There are over 80,000 restaurants in Tokyo and they all buy most of their cookware and kitchen equipment from this alley in Asakusa, one of the capital's neighborhoods.

A short walk from Asakusa's subway, train and boat station, the market is well marked on the many neighborhood maps. It is not really a market but rather a shopping street devoted exclusively, but really exclusively, to cookware and restaurant equipment.

You can spend a day roaming through the more than 150 shops on either side of the street. Paris' many cookware shops are provincial and diminutive compared to Kappabashi-Dori, where some individual shops are twice the size of Dehillerin.

All shops sell to individuals, including passionate foreign home chefs like me. Prices are fixed although you can ask for a discount. Click to enlarge.

This shop sells restaurant stationery in Japanese.

Some shops are specialized in single-dish-restaurants equipments, like this shop above selling all you need to make soba noodles from scratch and by hand. They don't sell anything else.

Japanese china is sold in several shops on this street. Click to enlarge!

A curious combination - premium charcoal for Yakitori joints and a rather impressive wooden mortar and pestle for pounding cooked rice to make mochi cakes. Not very airplane-friendly.

A shop selling Japanese cutlery with an English-speaking owner. I bought him a huge soba noodles knife.

All sorts of signs for restaurateurs of all tastes.

I could not be certain of the sort of dishes many of the cookware I saw turned out. But the Japanese are keen on European culinary culture and I saw some of the highest-quality equipment used in European kitchens:

A very comprehensive range of high-quality professional cookware for French pastry. Check out the copper bowls for beaten egg whites and the Swiss-made chocolate tempering machine (top right)!

This particular shop even had a wall full of alsatian clay kougelhopf molds which I couldn't find anywhere in Paris.

Another shop sold hundreds of cookie cutter - those Japanese sure like European pastry. Click on the image to enlarge - quite impressive.

One of several shops offering the ubiquitous plastic model of japanese dishes usually displayed in restaurant windows. A real favorite with tourists this one. I bought a fried noodle plastic dish to use as a stand-in in food photography.