After the unfortunately fierce bout of jet lag this morning, I made my way over to the Tsukiji Central Fish Market to get a piece of the organized chaos. It’s a sight to behold: seafood of all shapes and sizes is on the block in narrow stalls as little motorized carts tear through the maze of people and stalls to get everything where it needs to go.

The bounty for emerging unscathed was sushi breakfast. It doesn’t get fresher than this, assuming that you don’t want your food moving. And I don’t. There were absolutely insane lines outside of two of the shops. I overheard guys near the front of the line saying they were waiting about an hour already.

The restaurants aren’t much more than very narrow counters seating maybe a dozen people at a time. Even if every diner ate as quickly as they could and got out, there was just no way to get good turnover.

After toughing out the lines for maybe 20 minutes and not really getting anywhere, we threw in the towel and hit up a less-trafficked restaurant, named Yamazaki, between the two insanely popular ones. You know what? It was damn fine sushi to me. I’m sure there’s a little extra something in the other two super-popular places, but I’m not enough of a sushi connoisseur to know what I was missing. Here’s the plate that I took on.