Areas
Where to eat
Aichi is bigger than Nagoya. These are the places worth the train ride.
Nagoya
Everything within a few minutes of the Shinkansen gates, including a famous eel shop and a platform noodle bar.
Nagoya’s centre. Department stores above ground, the oldest taverns in the city below it.
A temple market turned shopping arcade, and the best street eating in the city.
Offices by day, and the quiet counters where office workers eat well by night.
The castle, its reconstructed samurai district, and the food street beside it.
The interchange everyone passes through and few stop at. Cheap, loud, good.
Around Atsuta Shrine — the birthplace of hitsumabushi, and kishimen in a cedar grove.
A park, a university, and enough ramen shops to keep the students fed.
Live houses, standing bars, and the restaurant where Taiwan ramen was invented.
A temple approach lined with small bakeries, tea shops and quiet restaurants.
Hillside temples and Nagoya’s most serious kaiseki house.
Residential, well-off, and the eastern end of the subway where locals actually eat.
The end of the Higashiyama line and the gateway to Ghibli Park.
Next to Tokugawa Garden and the baseball dome. Old shopping streets, no tourists.
Western Nagoya. Worth the subway ride for the shop that invented Taiwan mazesoba.
The rest of the city, where the ratio of locals to visitors is highest.
Beyond Nagoya
An original castle keep and an Edo-period street built for eating as you walk.
Ghibli Park, and the restaurants people eat at before and after it.
Textile town, with the strongest claim to inventing the free breakfast.
A thousand years of pottery. The Japanese word for ceramics comes from this town.
Where your plane lands, and a pottery town ten minutes away with a chimney-lined lane.
Fishing ports, morning markets, and the giant fried prawn Nagoya took credit for.
Canal warehouses, vinegar breweries, and the town that supplied Edo’s sushi.
Where Tokugawa Ieyasu was born, and where Hatcho miso has been made since 1645.
The car city. Also the source of the beef Nagoya’s better yakiniku houses use.
Japan’s largest producer of matcha. Almost no foreign visitors know it.
Its own curry udon rule: rice under the noodles, and you must finish it.
Toyokawa Inari, and the inarizushi shops along the approach to it.
Hot springs on the sea, and the best of the Mikawa Bay catch.