Tucked into a quiet Ebisu back street, Aotea Rangi is one of the few places in town where you can experience the charms of genuine New Zealand cuisine. At first glance the small restaurant looks like an Italian trattoria with terrace seating, but once you're inside the atmosphere seem more like a casual cafe-bar. The lighting is soft and the mood is relaxed. Service is attentive, and the friendly staff are more than ready to help you negotiate the extensive New Zealand wine list.

Tokyo has scores of restaurants serving Japanese curry, but the subgroup devoted to "Oufuu" (European-style) curry have their own special charm.

These restaurants typically have French-sounding names and classic 1970s Japanese coffeeshop decor - heavy wooden tables; white stucco walls hung with paintings; artistic knickknacks everywhere; bebop-era jazz playing in the background.

The curries themselves are a mix of European and Indian influences - basically the roux incorporate Indian spices simmered in a European-style stew base, each shop with its own special recipe.

Here's a rundown of some of Tokyo's more famous Oufuu curry spots, plus a few other notable curry destinations around town - 13 restaurants in all.

Loup de Mer (Kanda) - Loup de Mer proves that good yoshoku cuisine needn't be stuck in a time warp. Our lunchtime Hokkaido beef curry (Y1100) was accompanied by a very appetizing salad of head cheese and red-cabbage slivers. The hunks of beef were tender, lean and very flavorful, beautifully complemented by the curry sauce, rich but with a bracing tanginess. Unlike most yoshokuya, the decor here won't make you sigh with nostalgia - the dining room is done up in a tasteful pastel color scheme from the current century....

Bondy (Jimbocho) - The curry sauce here is scrumptious, with a natural fruit sweetness, well-balanced spices and complex flavors. There aren't many mixed-ingredient options, but the shrimp, clam and chicken was quite good, with plump shrimps and juicy, flavorful clams. It also came with button mushrooms, almonds and a sprig of watercress on top - a nice touch...

Perusona (Jimbocho) - Perusona serves top-quality European-style curries, and two- and three-ingredient combination curries are easy to order. We opted for eggplant, chicken and beef (Y1400) on a recent visit - the sauce was richly spiced and on the sweet side, while the beef was lean and very tender. The eggplant is a nice option, adding some balance to the ubiquitous meat ingredients...

Oshiage, in the northeast corner of Tokyo, isn't exactly a food-lover's destination, but we think it deserves a spot on the gourmet map simply because it's the closest station to Spice Cafe. The chef here is a veteran of a hotel restaurant in Kerala, India, and he prepares authentic, first-class curries in this cozy little hideaway. Word is out, though, and most tables are reserved for both lunch and dinner every day.

If you're looking for a change of scene, a bird's-eye view of the city, or a Bond-worthy martini at 3pm, Tokyo's design-savvy luxury hotels are just the ticket.

Forget brass-studded Naugahyde chairs and watered-down highballs. These days, the hotel bar experience is more fun than merely funny. Internationally acclaimed designers have injected the stodgy hotel bar with real style, and skilled bartenders have revived the art of the properly mixed cocktail.

Mandarin Bar - Sumptuous is the word for the Mandarin Bar at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Nihonbashi. The scale of everything here, from the bathtub-sized chairs with gargantuan cushions to the fireplace that stretches nearly two floors to the ceiling, feels playfully large. The bar itself is rather spacious, with two main seating areas on either side of the central bar....

Peter - The Bar - The experience of walking into the bar at Peter, the Peninsula's much talked-about fusion restaurant, defies expectation. Design team Yabu Pushelberg has created a 21st-century fantasy of the '80s, a post-modern atmosphere filled with shiny surfaces and accents that seem lifted from the pages of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Patrons lounge on pod-shaped seats beneath polished chrome trees, while ambient electronic music mingles with the soft glow of lavender neon from behind the black marble bar....