Before you go

If you have a single day and want to eat what the city is known for, this is the order to do it in — with the reasons, so you can rearrange it without breaking it.

A route that works if you are staying in Nagoya and want to see the region without moving hotels.

Nagoya is compact and its subway shuts just after midnight, so where you sleep decides what you can eat. Pick the base by appetite, not by hotel brand.

The Games run from 19 September to 4 October 2026, and the venues are scattered across the prefecture. Here is what is worth eating within walking distance of each cluster.

A category invented by the local press that turned into a genuine regional cuisine — one built on a miso the rest of Japan does not use, and added to within living memory.

Aichi is a merchant province and it shows in the prices. A great deal of what the region is known for costs less than a coffee in a European capital.

Most shops in this guide have no English menu. None of that matters if you know how the door, the machine and the bill work — and about six words.

Japanese food is harder to navigate than it looks, because the difficulty is in the stock rather than the visible ingredients. This is what to ask, and what to expect.

The park has almost no food of its own by design, and it sits in a suburb rather than a town. Working out where to eat is genuinely part of planning the day.

The city is quieter after dark than Osaka or Tokyo, but the things that stay open are specific, and several of them are the reason to come.

Nagoya food travels better than most Japanese regional cooking, because so much of it is built on miso, dried noodles and things that were designed to keep.

One IC card and two train companies cover every shop on this site. Here is the whole system, including the parts nobody explains to visitors.

Chubu Centrair is on an artificial island half an hour from the city. Getting to food is easier than it looks — and there is good eating before you even leave the terminal.