A line of high school-aged girls wait excitedly for a ¡°rainbow hot dog.¡± Stands dotting the main streets and back alleys around Shin-Okubo Station offer similar variants on this food ¡ª more corn dog than hot dog ¡ª stuffed with gooey mozzarella and boasting a crispy fried potato exterior.
But on this Saturday afternoon, the biggest queues form for this relatively new culinary innovation, which transforms the mundane white cheese into an Instagram-ready ooze of red, yellow, green and blue. After their orders arrive, two uniformed teens walk off behind a vending machine to snap some photos.
The rainbow hot dog is a nascent online food trend in Tokyo, the latest to emerge from the Shin-Okubo neighborhood in recent years, and almost certainly not the last. Often described as the capital¡¯s Koreatown, it has become ground zero for culinary cool in the greater metropolitan market. Over the past two years, Korean dishes such as cheese dak-galbi ¡ª a spicy mix of chicken and vegetables ¡ª have become hits on social media, with the recent arrival of Korean hot dogs and desserts gaining traction in 2018.
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