Breakfast: around ¥500, and it comes free
Order a coffee in a kissaten before eleven and toast, a boiled egg and often a small salad arrive with it at no extra charge. This is not a promotion. It began as competition between coffee shops in this region in the 1950s and never stopped. It is the single best-value meal in Japan.
Lunch: ¥800 to ¥1,200
A bowl of ramen, a curry, a set meal with rice, soup and a main. Miso-nikomi udon sits at the top of that range and is a full meal. Ankake spaghetti, which is a Nagoya invention and nothing like Italian food, is at the bottom of it.
The exceptions, and why they are worth it
Hitsumabushi is the one dish here that costs real money — ¥4,000 to ¥7,000 at a famous house, and it is grilled eel prepared over years of apprenticeship. There are second-tier shops doing it for half that, and this site lists them; the difference is smaller than the price gap suggests.
Drinking
A beer in an izakaya is ¥500 to ¥700. A small plate arrives unrequested at the start and appears on the bill — a seating charge of a few hundred yen, not a mistake. Standing bars, which Nagoya has plenty of, skip that charge entirely.
A realistic day, totalled
Kissaten morning ¥500. Noodle or set lunch ¥1,000. An afternoon coffee or taiyaki ¥400. Izakaya dinner with two beers ¥3,000. Subway all day ¥760 on the pass. Call it ¥5,700 for a day that includes nothing skipped and one small extravagance.
Swap the izakaya for the famous hitsumabushi and the day lands near ¥9,000 — which, for the trip’s headline meal, is still less than a mid-range dinner for one in most capitals.
How to spend less without eating worse
Eat lunch as your main meal: the same kitchens serve the same food at lunch prices, often half of dinner. Use the shops without photographs on this site — a shop with no advertising photo is usually one that does not need to advertise. And go at 11:15, when there is no queue and the first batch of everything is fresh.