How to find & reserve (Michelin) restaurants as foreign traveler:

My last two posts about a Japan trip together with my husband – which took place before the coronavirus outbreak – were about a three-week itinerary and hotels to stay in style. The next one will go into where to dine as a gourmet in the Land of the Rising Sun. But before coming to this, you have to know how to find and reserve fine dining restaurants here. Of course, traveling to Japan is no option right now, but I think you have to keep your wanderlust dreams alive!

After a few words about the particularities of eating out in Japan, I come to ways of locating high-end restaurants and getting into them.

Characteristics of Japan’s culinary scene

One thing to start, I have never ever spent so much time evaluating the “right” restaurants for our needs as in Japan. Evidently, there is no shortage of good dining-spots here. But how do you find them – and even more difficult – how do you get a reservation once you have come upon them?

For gourmets – as my husband and I are – Japan should be a paradise as there is an abundance of Michelin starred restaurants. But Japanese do not make it easy for Westerners in search of culinary excellence. There are more and more eateries that turn away first-time customers without a recommendation from a regular. This is quite an obstacle for Westerners. Why do restaurant owners in Japan act like this? First of all, their dining-spots are often very small (ten to twelve seats). Second, they usually cater for core customers. Third, they might be hesitant to speak other languages than Japanese. And fourth, Japanese restaurant owners sometimes fear that uninformed tourists might affront regular guests.

One thing is for sure, if you want to eat in upscale Japanese dining outlets, you have to make yourself familiar with certain habits and customs in terms of dining in this country. I will not go into these. In case you are interested, there are tons of materials on the internet in this regard. And it definitely helps if you learn a few words of Japanese …

Finding gourmet restaurants in Japan

As mentioned, recommended fine dining restaurants are plentiful in Japan. A good starting point of course is checking-out the Michelin Guide. Here is the link for Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. In case you go to Takayama too, please find the link here.

A less favorable way of finding good dining-spots is using TripAdvisor as primary source. The reason for this is the fact this site is mainly filled with reviews from travelers and not from locals. And this is simply not reliable enough. However, it might be useful for cross-checking once you have found a dining spot of your choice.

Alternatively to TripAdvisor, I would rely more on Tabelog, Japan’s massive restaurant review website. While I did not do researches on the restaurant platform itself, I Googled the name of a restaurant in combination with “Tabelog”. This resulted in a page with some information and – most importantly – a score, for instance 4.08 (out of 5), which is an utterly good one (for instance Restaurant Zurriola in Tokyo scored liked this …).

All the spots that perform from 3.5 and above might be considered as very good ones.

Once you have your wish list, another problem occurs, and this is the reservation issue.

Challenges of reserving restaurants in Japan

If you have selected your favorites – maybe having also checked out whether they receive foreigners – you may want to make reservations. Doing so is very much recommended in view of their popularity and/or the fact that many have only a dozen seats or so.

Reservations directly at the restaurants are in many cases not really an option (an exception here was Restaurant Plat Home in Kanazawa where we booked per email …).

This because the places in question are often neither willing nor set up for booking requests from people outside of Japan. Yet there are several possibilities to bypass this barrier.

1. Hotel Concierge

One option to get a reservation at Japanese dining outlets is it to ask the concierge of your hotel – preferably a renowned luxury hotel – to do it for you. We did not try this out, so I cannot comment on this this. I read once that this is not the royal road in Japan anymore as it is no longer working at restaurants that prefer locals to travelers.

2. Guruvani

Another option might be using Guruvani, Japan’s gourmet navigator according to its own statements, for your restaurant reservations. I came across this service several times when looking for dining opportunities myself but did not give it a try.

3. OpenTable

And yet another way to secure restaurant tables is with the help of OpenTable, an online restaurant reservation service. It especially operates in its home market of the United States but also in Japan. My husband and I use this offer quite often when traveling, which is free for end users. In Japan we booked one or two dining outlets through it.

4. Pocket Concierge

Our way of choice for restaurant reservation in Japan was another online service, Pocket Concierge. You can reserve high-end and some other restaurants through it, including lots of Michelin-starred dining-spots (Restaurant La Cime in Osaka, two Michelin starred, was one of them …).

It is even possible to be put on a waiting list for establishments taking only reservations from regular customers. My husband and I did not give the latter a shot as we wanted to feel welcomed when paying high prices for dining experiences. Yet we made heavily use of the former service as Pocket Concierge has access to quite a few renowned dining outlets.

For this purpose, you have to open an account with them and book the restaurant in question. In this process you have to select a set menu. This is often omakase, sometimes there are are also special menus that do not appear on the restaurant’s homepage. The costs for the desired menu will immediately be charged to your credit card. This service is usually not free, normally you have to pay a fee, which differs (cross check menu prices against the restaurant’s home page, if possible). In most cases, we encountered fees of 7 SFR/US$ per person or so. The reservation process went smoothly in all the dining-spots we used it. And we always got great seats in the respective places.

Over time, we used Pocket Concierge not only as a reservation vehicle but also as search engine for upscale dining-spots. And we made some great findings (for instance the Michelin starred Tempura Shimomura Restaurant in Tokyo).

More about our restaurant choices you find in the blogpost to come.

Here one last tip when making your reservation via Pocket Concierge. When doing so, you often have to decide on either counter or table seats. My advice is to opt for sitting at the counter every time you get the chance. It was always a highlight being able to witness the action behind it.

Lookout

This is it in terms of preliminary skirmishing about how to find and reserve restaurants in Japan. And of course I do not want to keep back where my husband and I dined on our trip. I can assure you there were some truly memorable culinary highlights! Find all about it in my next blogpost plus some introductory remarks about different types of eateries in Japan.

Once again, I will include my Google Map with all the details of our Japanese journey (activities, hotels and restaurants). In case you want to know more about the former two topics, here are my posts about what to do and where to stay when traveling this fascinating country.

Date of visit: November 2019

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