Daytime Shibuya: eating in the lanes the crowd walks past

Everyone crosses the Shibuya scramble, takes one photo, and moves on. The odd thing is that five minutes' walk in any direction the visitors run out — the lanes around the station still serve the office workers who work there, at their prices rather than main-street prices.

These three hours go into four of those lanes. The first stop is an office-worker lunch counter, entered deliberately at PEAK hour — because watching the queue, the ordering and the twenty-minute turnaround is the thing worth seeing. Then a curry shop that opened in the seventies with the recipe unchanged, the kind of place Tokyo calls a nostalgic taste. Then a katsu sandwich counter, eaten standing. Finally, behind the station, a dessert shop where the entire queue is local.

A drink is included at the last stop, and your guide points you on to what else is worth a look nearby if you have time left. The whole route sits inside a ten-minute walking radius of the station — good for an afternoon when you don't want to get on another train.