The Japanese Dining Experience

Choosing a restaurant while walking down the street is a challenge. There are (literally) tens of thousands of restaurants in Tokyo. Department stores typically have two floors of restaurants; I found one building that, so far as I could tell, had one restaurant per floor (eight floors) and nothing else. The alley where I ate Yakitori had at least 20 restaurants, none seating more than a dozen people. So the first thing in choosing a restaurant is figuring out what they serve. Though we don't read Japanese many places have picture-menus outside. Some have plastic replicas of their food on outside tables or in the windows. That helps a lot.

Bowls of plastic noodles

Plastic Italian food

Once inside, we decide what to eat. Sometimes there's an English menu, sometimes not. Sometimes the English helps, sometimes not. The pictures help but you can't always tell what kind of meat is in the dish and the wait staff may not know the English word. So we just point to a picture and go for it. Here is okonomiyaki in the menu. What's in it? What's the difference between the two?

Okonomiyaki

Here's what it looked like when delivered:

Not bad. (Actually, it was phenomenally good.)

Next we clean our hands. At sit-down restaurants we're given a warm, damp towel to wash our hands. At cafes, we're given a moist towelette.

When we place our order, we mostly point to the food we want and the wait staff confirm it, often (but not always) with some English words. At nicer establishments they take orders on mobile phones. The food (and the check) comes in just a few minutes.


The presentation of the meal is important. Everything is carefully arranged on the plate; even small places put the food on a tray in a very precise manner.

One cafe we frequented serves french toast carefully cut into small pieces and perfectly arranged on the plate. (Remember, we're eating with chopsticks.)

The French toast really looked like this.

At one place, I was sitting at a counter and given a small dish to eat. I asked what it was and the waitress quite firmly said that I was supposed to eat this before the main dish came. (I believe that she wouldn't have served me if I hadn't followed her orders!) Many meals come with miso soup and a dish of small pieces of pickled vegetable; all meals come with rice.




We're given as much time for the meal as we need. The meal is to be savored. After the wait staff bring the food they leave us alone. They never ask how the food is when our mouths are full or if we want anything else. They are always around and it's easy to get their attention if needed, but they consider it impolite to interrupt your meal. Some places have a buzzer that you press to bring a waiter.


When we're ready to go, we take the check to the cashier, thanking everyone on the way out. They all smile, bow and say "thank you." The cashier always smiles and tells us many things that we don't understand as she totals the check, takes our money and gives us change. If the change is larger bills (paper money) she will carefully show all the bills. In one case, the cashier followed us out the door to bow and say "thank you" one more time.

We had been warned that prices in Tokyo would be very high, and that can be true. Top restaurants can charge $100-200 per person. Our hotel charges $30 for a breakfast buffet; when I ordered a la carte, the orange just cost $9.45. (It was fresh-squeezed and good, at least.)

On the other hand, most meals are $10 or less. Only a couple of times have we paid more than $20 per person, and in those cases it was worth every penny. Drinks tend to be relatively expensive ($1.50 from a vending machine to $3 in a restaurant.) Beer is more expensive than saki.

Then there are yakitori restaurants, serving meat on skewers. They seem to be as much bar as restaurant and they are definitely hole-in-the-wall places.

Yakitori: just the meat.

Various fish and vegetables that are waiting to be grilled.

Sitting at the bar. This is pretty much the whole restaurant.

The two women who serve the customers and cook the food.

And finally, I had a first-of-its-kind experience when I walked into one restaurant. I was directed to a vending machine. There, I placed my food order, paid for it and received a receipt. A few minutes later, the food was delivered to my table. And no, the food did not come out of the machine. And yes, it was quite good.

Hungry yet? Here is a link to more pictures and stories about food.