Why you should experience Masala Bites in Tokyo, Japan.
Masala Bites is a heartfelt vegetarian Indian restaurant where Torigoe's close-knit character, regional Indian cooking, plant-based traditions and a family kitchen rooted in Rajasthan bring unusually broad culinary geography to a quiet corner of eastern Tokyo.
Set along the lanes near Kuramaebashi-dori and just steps from Torigoe Shrine, the restaurant occupies a bright dining room beside a Hindu temple in a neighborhood where Indian and Nepali communities have become increasingly visible. The kitchen moves across Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat and southern India, allowing lentils, vegetables, paneer, grains and spices to assume different forms without meat or fish directing the meal. Vegan selections broaden that repertoire through dishes conceived without animal products, giving groups with different dietary requirements access to the same regional spread. The result is a Torigoe restaurant where vegetarian cooking becomes a route across several Indian culinary regions through food closely connected to the family behind the stove.
What you should know about Masala Bites.
Masala Bites is best known for opening in February 2025 as the restaurant extension of owner Mehta's Shreeji Foods, a project he began in 2017 to prepare Indian food for family members and fellow adherents of his religious community in Japan. Mehta comes from Rajasthan and belongs to a strict Hindu sect whose dietary practice excludes meat, fish and eggs, with his own observance also excluding onions and garlic. Shreeji Foods began as a delivery and takeaway kitchen, giving the project eight years of food preparation before the Torigoe dining room arrived. The restaurant expanded that foundation into cooking drawn from Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat and southern India, creating a regional scope broader than a single North Indian curry tradition. Masala Bites also opened beside a Hindu temple, placing Mehta's commercial kitchen physically close to a religious community connected with the food practices that helped inspire the original business. Family remains part of the restaurant's operation, with Mehta's wife and daughter participating in the kitchen alongside professional cooks. The cooking excludes chemical seasonings, and the wider selection accommodates vegan and gluten-free diets alongside its vegetarian foundation. Mehta's progression from a 2017 food service created for a specific community to a permanent 2025 restaurant gives the Torigoe dining room a clear purpose: regional Indian vegetarian cooking built from dietary practice, family participation and years spent feeding people whose requirements were difficult to satisfy elsewhere in Tokyo.
Malai kofta leads the richer side of the kitchen through soft vegetable dumplings surrounded by a creamy curry, allowing spice to unfold against a rounded sauce before bread gathers both components into the same mouthful. Bhindi masala shifts the progression toward okra, whose vegetal character and distinctive texture carry dry spice with greater definition and less richness. Aloo pyaj moves through potato and onion, using the starch of the former to absorb the masala as the latter supplies sweetness beneath the seasoning. Masala dosa changes the physical rhythm completely as a thin fermented crepe brings crisp edges around its filling, extending the meal from curry and bread into a southern Indian preparation built around contrast between brittle surface and softer interior. Vegetable biryani closes the progression through spiced rice and vegetables, gathering aroma into the grains and showing how fully the kitchen can develop an Indian meal without relying on meat, fish or eggs.
How to fold Masala Bites into your trip.
Masala Bites works as the meal destination within a Torigoe route connecting one of eastern Tokyo's oldest shrines, the remains of an Edo shogunate astronomical observatory and a commercial waterway that once moved goods toward the Sumida River.
Begin at Torigoe Shrine, founded around 651 and dedicated to Yamato Takeru, where the annual Torigoe Festival carries the four-ton Senkan Mikoshi through surrounding streets before its lantern-lit evening return. Continue to the Ruins of the Asakusa Astronomical Observatory, where the Tokugawa government rebuilt its astronomical facility in 1782 for calendar making, surveying and foreign-book translation, later giving Katsushika Hokusai the elevated observatory depicted in Fugaku Hyakkei. Conclude along the former Shamisen Moat, widened from the Torigoe River in 1630 and used through the Edo and Meiji periods by boats carrying lumber, vegetables, gravel and other goods toward the Sumida River before changing transportation patterns led to its disappearance. Masala Bites completes the route back in Torigoe with a contemporary chapter shaped by another movement of culture across geography, carrying Mehta's Rajasthan roots and regional Indian vegetarian cooking into the neighborhood through a family food project begun in Tokyo in 2017.
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