JayaHi Julie
What a lovely comprehensive review. Japan is on my list of destinations to visit. Was there lots of vegetarian food available or not? I do eat eggs but not meat.
Jaya
I went on the May tour, there were about 3 vegetarians and 1 person who couldn't eat shellfish.
There was "some" provision for vegetarians on the trip, but it was a little hit and miss.
Most of the meals that we ate were ordered in advance from a fixed menu, and were cooked before we got to the restaurant so that they would be ready within minutes of us arriving (Pretty much zero wait for food anywhere). The down side of this was that there wasn't any real opportunity to choose what you wanted to eat if you didn't like what was being served.
The meals tended to be lots of small portions of different things and were very heavy on fish. The vegetarian options were largely the regular meal without the fish\meat, but with some kind of vegetable dish added. Some people liked them, some people didn't. The portions weren't very big and it looked as though they were mostly just portions of steamed vegetables rather than an actual "vegetarian meal" as I know them in Europe. A bowl of steamed green vegetables, vegetables in Tempura, that kind of thing.
Some of the vegetarians filled up on rice\noodles if it was available, others swapped dishes with other people so that they could get more vegetables.
There were some complaints about this, including from our tour manager (Who was a vegetarian) so this may have changed by the time the next tour comes around.
We had about 5 independent meals that weren't provided with the tour, so people got to choose what they ate and where they ate. There was quite a good choice of vegetarian dishes on these days and people seemed to like them.
In short, Japan does have some excellent vegetarian food, but we mostly ate in fancy restaurants with fixed menus, who didn't really cater for vegetarians.
