About this guide

Long-established houses, the shops that invented a dish, and places that appear on Japanese restaurant rankings. We do not go hunting for undiscovered places. What this guide adds is the half that does not exist yet — that same consensus in five languages, with enough practical detail to walk in and order.

Addresses, phone numbers, coordinates and websites come from open datasets; photos, opening hours and typical spend come from HOT PEPPER Gourmet. Those are never retyped by hand, so they do not drift the way a hand-kept list does. Everything that is not a fact of that kind is written here.

The note on an editor’s pick, saying why that shop and not the one next door. The dish pages explaining what a thing is and how it is eaten. The area introductions, the guides, the souvenir list, and the line of Japanese you can show a waiter. The route from Nagoya Station is worked out for each shop. All five languages are translated by hand, not by machine.

Roughly a fifth of the shops here have no photo we are licensed to show. Those pages say so, and link out to where real photos are.