One Family at a Time: Okonomiyaki, Purikura, Arcade

One booking, one family, no strangers added. That is the format, and for parents taking teenagers through Kabukicho at night it is the reason to book it.

Three and a half hours starting at Shinjuku 3-chome, at a teppanyaki restaurant where the griddle is set into your table and you cook your own. Okonomiyaki is a cabbage-heavy batter pancake you flip once and dress with sauce and bonito flakes; monjayaki is Tokyo's looser cousin, which stays on the griddle and gets scraped up with a tiny spatula. Both are activities as much as dishes, which is why they work with children.

Then Omoide Yokocho, the alley of more than sixty tiny bars and grills left over from the post-war years, for yakitori and motsuyaki and the atmosphere.

The arcade stop is where families usually stop being polite to each other. You pick one: taiko drumming, Mario Kart, the Wangan racing cabinets, or a purikura booth, which photographs you and then enlarges your eyes and smooths your face whether you asked it to or not.

Afterwards there is sake tasting for the adults, with bottles from several regions, and an all-you-can-eat Japanese snack bar for everyone else. If time allows the group walks through Golden Gai.

Your guide takes photographs throughout so nobody has to be behind the phone.

The first restaurant's food and one drink are included; the second and third stops are roughly fifteen dollars a head, paid there. Guided in English or Japanese, ending at Shinjuku station.