"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice. Adam Platt has a similar take on the wonderland of fanatical foodies that is modern-day Japan. Tucking into Tokyo with a relish befitting his day job as a New York restaurant critic, he finds evidence of the national character in immaculate sushi, limited-edition pastries—and a piece of fruit that just might warrant its $100 price tag

I'd been wandering from one endless food and restaurant queue to another in a Bill Murray–like daze for a day, maybe more, when a kindly woman named Teiko revealed to me the essential Zen truth of the situation. It was a Saturday afternoon, and we were standing outside the shop of a celebrity pastry chef named Toshi Yoroizuka. Prior to that, I'd waited half an hour at the new Krispy Kreme Doughnuts outlet in Shinjuku ("In America, does it take so long for doughnuts?" asked Aki, the girl in front of me), before giving up when that line rounded a corner to reveal an even more serpentine one by the restaurant's entrance, replete with traffic cones and attendants wearing white gloves and gesticulating wildly. I'd also lined up to taste an éclair flavored with green tea, and stood in front of two ladies dressed in kimonos waiting patiently, along with exactly 138 other people (yes, I counted), at a brasserie by the noted French chef Paul Bocuse in the brand-new National Art Center.

Toshi Yoroizuka calls his eponymous pastry boutique a salon de dessert, and although his line was not the longest, it was perhaps the most impressive. Pastry chefs are the perennial divas of the glittering, fashion-conscious Tokyo food scene, and Yoroizuka is most famous for his pistachio tart, which he prepared, to great acclaim, on national TV. Local starlets patronize the salon de dessert, where they sit at a bar of shiny black marble as the chef prepares his creations to order. To secure a lunchtime seat, the city's pastry devotees begin showing up at 9 a.m. There is also a second line, in which Teiko and I stood, for purchasing pastries to go. Yoroizuka insists on making batches of only fifteen to twenty so that they are perfectly fresh. A lady with a clipboard, a microphone, and an earpiece was letting people into the salon in twos and threes. There, they bought perfectly rendered éclairs and madeleines, and many snapped pictures of their purchases with tiny digital cameras.

As we approached the door, I asked Teiko which of the delicacies were worth the wait. "I'm sorry, I've never tried any," she said. Being a clueless and jet-lagged foreigner, I asked her why then had she been patiently standing outside the door of this little shop for the past hour? "It's a long line," replied Teiko, "so the pastries must be very good."

And so it goes these days in Tokyo—the food-crazed capital of what is arguably the most food-crazed nation in the world. Like their gourmet cousins the Chinese, the Japanese have a culinary culture stretching back centuries. But in this, the age of the Internet and Iron Chef, the country is in the grip of what one of my Japanese gastronome friends refers to as "the madness." Fourteen years after the first episode of Iron Chef, according to the Washington Post, between thirty-five and forty percent of the shows broadcast nationally on Japanese TV involve cooking. Tokyo alone has roughly two thousand Italian restaurants, twice the number of New York. Cruise the World Wide Web and you will find obsessively detailed Japanese blogs devoted to pastries, to sakes and soba noodles, to Burgundy wines, and to the obscure and variegated pleasures of kombu, the thick, flat seaweed we call kelp.