Food & Flavour

Japanese food is regional to a degree that catches people out. The noodle changes at the prefecture border, the beef is named after the place that raised it, and a dish that defines one city is barely served in the next one along. Planning a food trip here is therefore mostly a routing problem: you are not choosing restaurants so much as choosing which regional cuisines you want to eat in the place they belong to. Ten to fourteen days is enough to do three or four of them properly.

Tokyo is where the range is widest rather than where the specialities are strongest. Toyosu Market is the wholesale fish market that took over the trade from Tsukiji, and it is where the tuna auction happens; the Tsukiji Outer Market remains where you actually eat, and it is the better morning of the two for most visitors. Beyond that, the city is about single-subject rooms that have done one thing for a very long time. Kyubey in Ginza is a sushi counter where the chef in front of you decides the order. Nodaiwa specialises in unagi, freshwater eel, grilled over charcoal. Ningyocho Imahan does sukiyaki and shabu-shabu in the old style. NARISAWA is the contemporary end, built on Japanese woodland and farmland rather than on French technique applied to Japanese produce.

Kyoto is the apex of the formal tradition and also the home of its opposite. Kaiseki is the long seasonal sequence that everything else in Japanese fine dining refers back to, and Kikunoi and Hyotei are two of the reference points for it. At the other end, temple cooking is the vegetarian tradition that the monasteries developed: Shigetsu sits inside the grounds of Tenryu-ji in Arashiyama and serves shojin ryori, and Okutan Nanzenji has built its reputation on yudofu, simmered tofu, which sounds austere and is not. Nishiki Market runs through the centre for grazing, and Uji, half an hour away, is the tea town.

Osaka is the one to plan around if eating is the actual point of the trip. The city's own word for its attitude to food translates roughly as eating yourself into ruin, and the register is street food rather than ceremony. Okonomiyaki Mizuno does the Osaka style, where the batter and cabbage are mixed before cooking. Kushikatsu Daruma does skewered, crumbed and deep-fried everything, where the one rule that matters is that you do not dip a skewer in the communal sauce twice. Dotonbori Imai is a quiet udon room in the middle of the loudest street in Japan. Kuromon Market handles the daytime, and Dotonbori itself handles the night.

From there the map opens up. Kobe is forty minutes away and is where certified Tajima-strain beef is served at Wakkoqu and Mouriya, both of them teppanyaki rooms where the cooking happens in front of you. Hiroshima does okonomiyaki entirely differently from Osaka, layering the batter, cabbage and noodles rather than mixing them, and Okonomimura is a building of stalls all competing at it; Kakifune Kanawa on the water is the oyster specialist. Takayama in the mountains is Hida beef country, and GYU-SUKE grills it as yakiniku. Kanazawa has Omicho Market for seafood and Tsubajin for Kaga cuisine, including jibuni, a duck dish thickened into a soy-dashi broth that is genuinely local to that city.

Further out, Fukuoka is the home of tonkotsu ramen, the pork-bone broth that most people outside Japan think of as ramen, and Ichiran began there; the city also has an open-air yatai stall culture in the evenings that is unlike anywhere else in the country. Sapporo invented soup curry, a genuinely distinct genre, and GARAKU is one of the rooms that made it. Otaru has the sushi counters, Masazushi among them, and Hakodate has a morning market where Kikuyo Shokudo serves seafood rice bowls at breakfast. Nagoya has two dishes worth routing for: hitsumabushi, eel served three ways in sequence, at Atsuta Horaiken, and miso katsu at Yabaton. Sendai is gyutan, grilled beef tongue, at Rikyu. Kumamoto has basashi, horse sashimi, at Suganoya. Nagasaki has champon, the noodle dish that came out of its Chinese community, at Shikairou. Takamatsu is Sanuki udon country and Waraya is the pilgrimage. Nikko does yuba, the skin lifted off heating soy milk, which the monasteries there made a speciality. Fujikawaguchiko does hoto, flat noodles simmered into miso with pumpkin, which is farm food for cold weather.

On dietary requirements, the honest position is that vegetarian travel in Japan is harder than its reputation, and the reason is dashi. Stock made from bonito is in a great deal of savoury cooking that contains no visible fish, including many vegetable dishes and most noodle broths, so a dish being meat-free is not the same as it being vegetarian. The reliable answers are the temple kitchens, where the tradition is entirely vegetarian by doctrine: Shigetsu in Kyoto and Hachi-no-ki in Kamakura both work on that basis. Okutan Nanzenji, Nakatanidou in Nara and Soup Curry GARAKU in Sapporo have vegetarian options rather than vegetarian menus, which is a different and weaker claim and we make it as such.

For Indian food we can be specific about three cities and only three, because those are the ones where we hold a verified restaurant. Nirvanam in Tokyo is South Indian and is halal-verified. Kerala in Kyoto serves both North and South Indian and has vegetarian and vegan options. Shama in Osaka is entirely vegetarian, has vegan options, and is the one place in our Japan inventory verified as serving Jain food. We do not extend any of those claims to other cities, and we do not treat vegetarian as evidence of Jain, or Muslim-friendly as evidence of halal; where we have not verified it, we say nothing.

Practically, the constraint is seats. The rooms worth travelling for often hold eight or twelve people, many take reservations only a month ahead, and some take them only by phone or through a hotel concierge. Lunch is consistently the better value at the top end, sometimes dramatically so, and it is far easier to get. Counters generally want you to eat at the pace the chef sets. Convenience-store food is genuinely good and is a reasonable dinner on a travel day rather than a defeat. And cash still matters at the older places in a way it no longer does elsewhere.

We can help you build the route around the meals rather than fitting the meals into a route: getting the reservations that need lead time, putting Kobe or Hiroshima in the itinerary because of what you want to eat there, and being clear about which dietary claims we can actually stand behind in which city. Talk to us about what you want to eat and we will plan the map around it.