Dining in Japan

If no meals are included in your budget accommodation charge, it's time to scout around for the right place to dine out. Tokyo alone has no less than 60,300 restaurants. Menus range from haute cuisine to cafes and coffee shops that serve light snacks extremely easy on the purse strings. But there are modest dining spots where the food is hearty and the tug on the budget just as readily digestible. Even in the priciest districts such as Ginza-Hibiya, quite a few restaurants are recommendable for the foreign visitor interested in budget dining. We will list such restaurants in major cities across the country under "List of Restaurants Recommendable to Tourists" .

Affordable restaurants abound in downtown office building basements, the dining floors of department stores, urban shopping centers, and the underground malls of the busiest railway stations.

At lunchtime, office workers crowd these dining spots. Many order teishoku, a low-priced complete meal on a tray. Most restaurants in the moderate to inexpensive price range have realistic plastic models of their dishes, with prices, in a showcase outside the entrance. If you don't know what to order, point to the dish you want to try. By the way, the models of dishes are also popular as souvenir. If you want them, you can have at Kappabashi in Tokyo or at Douguyasuji in Osaka.

Some restaurants have bilingual (Japanese and English) menus, and you can use JNTO's "Tourist's Handbook " as a handy phrase book for dining out. Paperback guidebooks to inexpensive Japanese dishes are available at major bookstores.

For people in a hurry, noodle stands, coffee shops, fastfood outlets and vending machines provide a variety of food and drink at very low cost.

At most restaurants, you receive a bill and pay as you leave. A few have you buy a meal coupon in advance and hand it to the waiter or waitress. Payment is made in cash except when credit cards are accepted. Inexpensive restaurants, coffee shops and fast-food outlets accept cash only.

Novelties

  1. Box lunches, some unique to a particular area, are sold aboard trains and at railway stations.
  2. "Morning Service"served at numerous coffee shops (kissaten) typically consists of coffee, toasts and a boiled egg is perhaps the most reasonable breakfast.
  3. Streetside "yatai" stalls, some with stools, offer inexpensive taste treats and a chance to rub shoulders with the locals.
  4. Dinner-shows at deluxe hotels combine fine food and live entertainment for that one evening you may want to splurge.
  5. Convenience stores, which abound in every city, have sandwiches, box lunches and other cooked dishes you can take out.
  6. Department store basements are great places to sample many kinds of food for free.
  7. Kaiten Sushi: Customers sit at a round counter and receive low-priced sushi on a circling conveyor belt.
How to Eat

If you are not familiar with chopsticks, dining at Japanese or other Asian cuisine restaurants may present a challenge. But once mastered, eating with this simple instrument is a genuine pleasure, since you are not confronted with a variety of unfamiliar eating utensils.
An oshibori towel, in a wrapper or on a small tray, gives you a chance to wipe your hands (or even your face) before you begin the meal.

Except in Chinese restaurants that provide plastic chopsticks, you eat with wooden chopsticks that come in a paper wrapper. Take them out, split them in half, and hold the two halves in one hand with your thumb, forefinger and middle finger, as if holding two pencils. Then let the middle finger slip between the two sticks. One stick will rest between the forefinger and middle finger, the other between the middle and ring fingers. Watch how other people manipulate the sticks to figure out how to pick up pieces of food correctly.

To deal with soup, pick up the small bowl with one hand and sip from the edge of the bowl. You can dip your chopsticks into the soup to pick up small chunks of bean curd or thin slices of seaweed.

Noodles served on a wooden tray are simply picked up in bite-size portions. If served in a hot broth, alternate between picking them up and lifting the bowl to sip the broth. Slurping is a sign of a good appetite and eating with pleasure, and is in this instance, perfectly acceptable.


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