Food & Drink

Regional cooking in Japan is organised by prefecture and often by city, and the useful consequence for a traveller is that the same dish name means different food two hours down the line. Ramen is the clearest case — the broth, the noodle and the toppings all change by region — but it is equally true of hotpot, grilled skewers, sweets and sake. Eating well here is less about finding the best restaurant than about eating the thing the place you are standing in is for.

Money and time. A bowl of noodles is a few hundred to around a thousand yen; a set lunch at a proper restaurant sits roughly between a thousand and two thousand; an evening at a counter with drinks is several thousand and climbing fast if the fish is good. The most reliable trick in the country is that a kitchen's lunch set is often a third to a half cheaper than the same kitchen at dinner, which puts otherwise expensive places within reach in the middle of the day. Budget twenty to forty minutes for a noodle counter and an hour and a half for anything with a reservation.

Carry cash. Small restaurants, market stalls, standing bars and older izakaya are frequently cash-only or have a card minimum, and this is the category where a phone wallet lets you down most often.

Two habits that are not obvious. Many counters expect you to buy a ticket from a vending machine by the door before you sit down. And a short queue outside a small shop at lunchtime is information rather than a warning — it usually means eight seats and a fast turnover, not an hour's wait.

Do not start with the most famous restaurant in the city. Start with the dish the region is actually known for, and let that choose the restaurant, because the thing that makes eating here worth travelling for is specificity to place, and a nationally famous name is by definition not that.

The criteria, in order. First, is it what this place makes? A prefecture that grows the wheat, lands the fish or brews the sake is where that thing is cheapest and best, and eating it two prefectures away is paying more for less. Second, can you go at lunch? Lunch is cheaper, easier to get into without Japanese, and does not require you to have booked a week ago. Third, is it a counter? Sitting at a counter in front of the person cooking removes almost all of the language problem — you can point, you can watch what the person beside you did, and the food arrives one item at a time.

Markets and morning markets deserve a special mention as a first stop, because they solve the two hardest problems at once: you can see the food before committing to it, and portions are small enough to try three things instead of betting a whole meal on one.

Leave the tasting counters, the kaiseki dinners and the places with a month-long waiting list until you know what you like. They are extraordinary and they are also the worst possible place to discover that you do not, in fact, enjoy sea urchin.

Arriving between services. Enormous numbers of Japanese restaurants close from around two until five. The hungry gap between a late-morning sight and an early dinner is the most common way visitors end up eating badly, and the fix is to eat lunch on the local schedule rather than yours.

Assuming dinner is bookable on the day. Small counters have eight seats and regulars. If there is a place you actually care about, book it before you leave home; if you have not, go at lunch.

Turning up with only a card. Especially at markets, stalls, standing bars, and anywhere with a ticket machine at the door — those machines are usually coins and notes.

Ordering a whole meal of an unfamiliar thing. At a market or a specialist shop, buy one and share it. This is the entire reason morning markets are a good first stop.

Confusing a chain for a regional speciality. Several of the dishes people travel for have national chains that are perfectly decent and tell you nothing about the place you are in. If the shop exists in Tokyo too, it is not why you came to the prefecture.

Eating while walking. Common at festival stalls and market streets and frowned on almost everywhere else, including on trains that are not long-distance. Most stalls have somewhere to stand and eat beside them; use it.

Missing the season. Seafood in particular is a calendar rather than a menu — crab, oysters, sea urchin and the rest each have a few months when they are worth ordering and the rest of the year when you are eating something frozen at the same price.