We Are The Farm in Shibuya — As Seen In Japan

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Hi there. My name is Gregg, and I have high cholesterol. Specifically, high LDL cholesterol (the bad kind). My wife has high cholesterol as well. This didn’t matter to me so much after my last blood test because it was the only thing I had that was out of range. However, I’ve been reading a book called How Not to Die, and it has informed me that the “normal” range for cholesterol isn’t good enough to keep you from dying of heart disease.

To get healthier and hopefully live long, healthy lives, we’ve drastically changed our diet - seriously, you need to check out this book, it’s changing our lives and I’ve only read like three pages. We’ve stopped eating so much meat and saturated fat and replaced it with tofu, nuts, and beans, added more vegetables and fruits, and switched our white rice to brown rice. This has the added benefit of hopefully helping me lose weight, as I gained about 197 pounds during our delicious trip to Thailand.

The difficulty in eating healthier is that I suffer from Irritable Bowel Syndrome, or IBS. You’ve probably heard of this disorder as the punchline to a joke, but despite the silly name that makes it sound like I’m just cranky, it’s actually a real thing - or more accurately, a collection of things that doctors can’t diagnose and therefore lump under the umbrella of IBS. In a cruel trick of human anatomy, healthy foods like vegetables, nuts, and legumes can cause me immense pain, while unhealthy foods like fried chicken and pastries don’t bother my digestion at all.

Since we actually enjoy life and want to continue living it, Eriko and I have taken up the task of trying to eat healthy despite my limitations. We’d been doing pretty good for about three days when we had a day off and decided to try a healthy organic restaurant that had been on our radar for a long time. Will it provide delicious sustenance and improve our heart health while also not making me sick? Let’s find out.

We Are the Farm

We Are the Farm is an organic restaurant with several locations in Tokyo, including the one in Shibuya where we went. We stopped in for lunch to try their vegetable buffet. The restaurant boasts organic produce and even has its own kale farm where they make kale for juice and such.

The restaurant was not crowded on a weekday for lunch, and I could overhear a lot of people speaking English, meaning there was a healthy contingent of foreigners. The main option for lunch was the plant-based buffet. We each got that, and I also tried one of the animal proteins you can add for about $3. As we all know, the goal of a buffet is to eat so much food you bankrupt the restaurant because they can’t possibly turn a profit after you’ve eaten all their inventory. Let’s see how we did.

The salad and veggie buffet

Though the table housing it wasn’t that big, the buffet actually had a lot of options: leafy greens, beets, beans, curry, soup, noodle dishes, sweet potatoes, zucchini, carrots, bread, rice, and various salads. Eriko got the diverse plate you see above, while I stuck to zucchini, sweet potatoes, and carrots (both orange and purple), as those are usually safe foods for my tummy. I also tried a little bit of a glass noodle dish that was pretty good.

The carrots came with a miso dipping sauce that Eriko absolutely loved. It was good, but I imagine contained added sugar that may have mitigated some of the health benefits. The cooked zucchini and sweet potatoes were great - not super seasoned, but soft and flavorful. You could tell they got good-quality stuff.

The thought of a plant-based buffet (especially one lacking in fruit) may not sound exciting, but given that it also had rice and beans, you could absolutely get a balanced meal here and end up full. Considering what a similar meal might cost you in Los Angeles, this place might be considered a steal.

Curry and protein and drinks and soup

The buffet also had two soups, one of which looked like chili but was actually something called keema curry, containing beans and I think meat, which sounds like chili and also tasted a bit like chili. Both curry and chili are usually spicy, but this was not. Eriko also tried a tomato soup that she said was delicious.

They had a lot of interesting drinks, so Eriko tried orange & kale while I tried acai & chia seed. Both drinks were okay, nothing special. I added duck as my protein, because I always fall for duck when it’s on a menu, especially a Chinese one. “Oh, duck! Delicious!” I say, only to be disappointed because despite what my brain thinks, duck is not better than chicken or beef. I digress.

The duck was nice and juicy, but it came with a sauce on top. Like the miso dressing, this probably contained added sugar. It was also unnecessary - the duck would have been good on its own. If you visit WATF, you probably don’t need to get an added protein. There’s enough stuff in the buffet that even someone like me who avoided more than half the items still found enough to eat.

The verdict: is We Are the Farm worth a trip?

All in all, it was a satisfying meal at a fairly reasonable price. We felt good about ourselves for eating healthy and didn’t feel short-changed or wanting for more food. The atmosphere was nice, the staff courteous, and generally it was a nice place to sit for an hour. Eriko and I remarked that if we worked in this neighborhood, we’d go to this place all the time. We’d highly recommend We Are the Farm not just for health nuts and veggie-focused eaters, but to anyone who wants to try fresh food that will keep you feeling light and energetic.

The one drawback for me was the next-day revenge. I don’t know if it was the purple carrots, the zucchini, the keema curry, or the açaí drink, but something I had there made me quite ill the next day. I’m guessing it was the zucchini, since I don’t normally have that, but it’s tough to tell. Now I’m not sure if I personally will want to go back to WATF, but I’d probably try it again even though it caused me problems, because at least it’s good for my heart and my brain.

This is the difficulty of having IBS. I basically have to choose between what is healthy and what will prevent me from pain. Recently, I am opting to choose health. As such, I am often hurting. My bowels are not the only thing irritable these days. I am currently a quite cranky person to be around, but if all goes well, I will be a cranky SOB for a long, long time.