Kyoto for foodies

Best restaurants

Kyoto rewards eaters who plan the day around meals, not the other way around. The city's restaurants split into a few honest camps: kaiseki rooms that price themselves out of a weekly rotation, teppan and shabu counters where the theatre is the meal, ramen shops that open at lunch and don't stop, and a growing bench of curry and sandwich specialists that would look at home in Osaka or Tokyo. The list below leans on twelve addresses that show up in OpenStreetMap with hours, phones and websites you can act on tonight. Skip the queue-and-photograph rotation around Nishiki and the marquee tempura counters in Gion that trade on the postcode; the venues here span Nakagyo, Higashiyama and Kamigyo, and each earns its slot on something more specific than a district. Read the hours before you walk: several of these kitchens close between 14:30 and 17:30, which is exactly when a jetlagged first-day visitor tends to go looking for food. Every claim below traces to the venue's own listing.