What to Eat in Japan: Twelve Dishes, and the Costliest

Sushi and sashimi

Tokyo built the modern sushi counter, and its fish still comes off the coastline that made the counter possible: cold water to the north, warmer currents to the south, and a wholesale market, now at Toyosu, that moves the catch from fishing port to chef's hand within a day. Fatty tuna and yellowtail carry the counter through winter; sea bream and bonito take over as the water warms. Sashimi is the same fish without the rice, cut to the grain of each species.

Kaiseki

Kaiseki belongs to Kyoto, a sequence of small courses that describes a single month through rice, dashi and the vessel each course arrives in, and it is a study in its own right, told in full in Kaiseki: the Art of the Seasonal Meal.

Tempura

Tempura reached Japan with the Portuguese and was changed entirely in Edo. Cheaper rapeseed oil let street stalls fry fish and vegetables to order through the eighteenth century, food for a city that ate standing up; only after the Meiji era did it move indoors, to a counter of its own, the batter mixed thin and cold so that it shatters at the first bite. The menu follows the season. Shiso leaf and a small silver fish called kisu belong to summer; lotus root and mountain vegetables to autumn, and a good chef changes the order of a set as the month changes.

Soba and udon

Nagano grows the buckwheat that gives Shinshu soba its name, a cool mountain prefecture whose soba tradition reaches back centuries, and it counts a dozen distinct regional styles within its own borders. Cold water and hard winters sharpen the grain's aroma, and a bowl of shin-soba, the first noodles milled from the autumn harvest, tastes noticeably of that particular October.

Kagawa answers with udon, and calls itself the udon prefecture: a wheat noodle pulled firm and chewy, served in a light broth made from iriko, dried sardines from the Seto Inland Sea, in a prefecture that eats more udon per head than any other in Japan. A guest who finishes a bowl of soba, meanwhile, is offered sobayu, the cloudy water the noodles were boiled in, poured into what remains of the dipping sauce and drunk as a final course. The custom is Nagano's own, dated to the Edo period.

Ramen

Three cities carry the country's ramen reputation between them. Sapporo's miso bowl, made for a Hokkaidō winter, is its own subject elsewhere. Hakata, in Fukuoka, reduces pork bone for hours into a cloudy, almost creamy tonkotsu broth and serves it over thin, straight noodles in portions small enough that a second serving of noodles is ordered before the first is finished, a habit called kaedama. Kitakata, a small city in Fukushima, keeps to a lighter shoyu broth of pork bone, chicken and dried sardine, with wide, wavy, distinctly chewy noodles rarely found outside the town's own shops.

Wagyu

A5 is a grade. The Japan Meat Grading Association scores yield from A to C and marbling, colour and texture from one to five, and A5 means the best of both. Kobe, Matsusaka and Ōmi are brands, each a regional programme with its own rules, and their beef is graded on the same scale. Kobe's cattle are Tajima-gyū, raised under Hyōgo's strict rules; Matsusaka, in Mie, raises only virgin female cattle for a finer, more even marbling; Ōmi, in Shiga, claims the oldest history of the three. The way the beef is served changes it: at a teppan counter, seared thin and eaten within a minute of leaving the grill; as sukiyaki, simmered in sweetened soy and drawn through raw egg; as shabu-shabu, swished for seconds through kombu broth until the fat turns translucent. The last two belong to the colder months, when a pot at the centre of the table is most welcome.

Yakitori

A yakitori counter is judged on its coals as much as its skewers. Binchōtan, a dense white charcoal burned from ubame oak, gives a high, steady, almost smokeless heat that chars the surface of a skewer while keeping its centre juicy. Momo, thigh meat, is the standard introduction; negima alternates thigh with charred leek; tsukune is ground chicken worked into a ball or a short sausage, sometimes finished with a raw egg yolk. A serious counter goes further, into liver, skin, cartilage and heart, each cooked for its own number of seconds, and a guest chooses between shio, a plain salt finish, and tare, a sweet reduced soy glaze brushed on as the skewer leaves the coals.

Okonomiyaki and takoyaki

Ōsaka mixes everything into the batter before it touches the griddle: cabbage, egg, pork or seafood, folded together and cooked as one thick disc. Hiroshima builds the same idea in layers, batter first, then cabbage, then a portion of fried noodles, a method the city developed after the war to make a little food go further. Takoyaki, Ōsaka's other griddle dish, rounds diced octopus and batter into small spheres, turned constantly until the outside sets crisp and the inside stays nearly liquid, then finished with a sauce and dried bonito shavings that curl in the rising heat.

Tonkatsu

Tonkatsu is a Meiji-era invention, one of Japan's yōshoku dishes, made by taking a European idea, the breaded cutlet, and remaking it: pork in place of veal, coarse panko in place of a fine crumb, deep-fried in place of pan-fried, and served with shredded cabbage and a thick, fruity sauce. It reached its modern form in Tokyo in the late nineteenth century and has scarcely changed since.

Unagi

Midsummer belongs to eel. Doyō no Ushi no Hi, a day fixed by the old lunar calendar, has been kept for well over two centuries as the day to eat unagi against the heaviest heat of the season, and sales still rise sharply in the weeks around it. The fish is butterflied, skewered flat and grilled over charcoal in the kabayaki style, basted again and again with a sweetened soy tare until the skin lacquers and the flesh stays soft beneath it. Nagoya serves it its own way, hitsumabushi: the grilled eel sliced over rice in a wooden tub and eaten in three stages from the same portion, first plain, then with nori and wasabi, and finally in hot dashi.

Fugu

Fugu, the pufferfish, may be prepared only by a chef licensed after years of supervised training. The licence and the skill behind it make a plate of fugu sashimi, sliced thin enough to show the pattern of the plate through it and fanned out in the shape of a chrysanthemum, one of the most expensive orders on a winter menu. Shimonoseki, at the western tip of Honshū, handles more fugu through its market than anywhere else in the country and is the name most associated with the dish.

Otoro

Otoro, the fattiest cut of a bluefin tuna's belly, is the most expensive order at most sushi counters, priced well above the leaner chūtoro and akami from the same fish because so little of any one tuna yields it. Each January the first bluefin sold at the Toyosu auction can fetch a record sum, and the sale is reported in Japan's press as an event of its own.

Ise-ebi

Ise-ebi, the Japanese spiny lobster, takes its name from the Ise-Shima coast in Mie and is kept for New Year tables and ceremonial meals because its long antennae and curved red back are read as a wish for long life. A whole one, grilled or served raw as sashimi, is a deliberate extravagance.

Kobe beef remains the name most visitors already know for expensive Japanese food, and it earns the reputation: Hyōgo's rules on the Tajima-gyū cattle behind it keep the supply, and the expense, deliberately narrow.

The three great delicacies

Edo-period connoisseurs settled on three chinmi, rare tastes meant for a cup of sake, and the list has stood ever since. The first is uni from the old province of Echizen, now Fukui, salted and pressed into a dense amber paste far stronger than the fresh sea urchin of a sushi counter. The second is karasumi from Nagasaki, the roe of the grey mullet salted and dried in the sun until it turns the colour of old amber, sliced paper thin and warmed for a moment over a flame. The third is konowata from the Mikawa coast of Aichi, made from the sea cucumber and cured in salt, the strongest taste of the three and the one connoisseurs prize most.

Their value lies in handwork, a narrow season and a small yield, as a great cheese's does, and a plate of all three set out together is a gesture a kaiseki kitchen saves for a guest it wants to honour.

Yubari melon and the gift fruit

In Japan the best fruit is bought as a gift. The Yubari King melon, grown around a single former coal town in the hills of Hokkaidō, has orange flesh, a perfectly netted rind and a T-shaped stem, and the first pair of each season goes to auction in Sapporo in spring for a sum the newspapers report like a sale of fine art. In the fruit shops of Tokyo and Kyoto, single strawberries the size of a plum and white strawberries with red seeds sit in their own padded boxes, each piece chosen for shape and colour. Autumn's matsutake, packed in cedar to protect its scent, belongs to the same world and is its own subject at The Autumn Table, as are the crabs of Hokkaidō's cold seas at the northern table.

The Autumn Table: matsutake, chestnut and new rice →

The northern table: Hokkaido's food →

Wagashi and matcha

Kyoto's confectioners make wagashi to be eaten with tea. Namagashi, the moist, hand-shaped sweets, are served with koicha, the thick, formal tea, and are shaped to the month: cherry pink and a soft petal in spring, a single maple leaf pressed into bean paste in autumn. Higashi, the drier, harder sweets, go with usucha, the everyday thin tea, in simpler, more graphic seasonal shapes. A host at a tea gathering changes the sweets with the calendar as carefully as the scroll in the alcove.

Oysters

Winter turns the coast toward oysters. Hiroshima, working the sheltered, plankton-rich waters of the Seto Inland Sea, produces close to sixty per cent of the country's farmed crop, harvested most heavily from November through March. Miyagi answers from the opposite coast, its oysters grown in the calm water of Matsushima Bay, cold enough through winter to keep the flesh firm. Both are eaten simply: raw over ice, briefly grilled in the shell, or fried.

Some of the best eating in Japan happens between the famous meals. Breakfast at a ryokan is a meal in its own right: a fillet of salted salmon or mackerel grilled that morning, rice from a lidded wooden tub, miso soup with clams or tofu, a square of rolled omelette, pickles in three colours, and on the coast a few slices of the night's catch. It arrives on a lacquer tray in the room or a private dining room, and it takes the best part of an hour.

Kyoto's Nishiki Market runs for some four hundred metres under a roof of coloured glass panels, more than a hundred shops along a single narrow street that has fed the city's kitchens since the early Edo period: pickles from barrels, rolled omelette sliced to order, tiny octopus glazed and skewered with a quail's egg in the head, yuba lifted in sheets from soy milk. Osaka's Kuromon Market does the same for Osaka. In Tokyo the great department stores keep their food halls in the basement, the depachika, where the wagashi counters, the bento of the season and the boxed fruit are laid out like jewellery, and a picnic for a garden is assembled in twenty minutes.

The first morning in a ryokan →

Each of these twelve dishes has its months. Spring brings the first bonito of the year and the last of the oysters; midsummer brings unagi on its one appointed day; winter brings fugu, oysters and the pots of sukiyaki and shabu-shabu. Japan's kitchens keep this calendar closely, and the best meals of any journey are the ones eaten in their season.

A small number of counters, mostly in Kyoto, still keep to ichigensan okotowari, seating no guest who has not been introduced by someone the chef trusts. It is the same custom that governs an evening at a working ochaya, and it exists to protect the counter's reputation.

Read Kaiseki: the Art of the Seasonal Meal →

More of the Japan Edition on Japan's food →

A culinary journey through Japan, region by region →

The Classic Cherry Blossom Tour of Japan sets more than twenty meals across its twelve days of spring. It opens with a welcome kaiseki in Nihonbashi, served course by course beneath a Noh stage, sits down in Kyoto to kaiseki at a restaurant with two Michelin stars, lays both its hanami picnics from Michelin-starred kitchens, and ends the journey at a sushi counter in Osaka.

SpringThe Classic Cherry Blossom Tour of Japan12 days30 March to 10 April 2027$22,500per person, twin shareSee the journey