The Best Places to Eat and Drink in Tokyo

Getting a table here requires an introduction, which is either a charming throwback or a gentle hint about the clientele, depending on your outlook. This intimate Ginza steakhouse, set across two floors above the street, is built around Tajima and Kobe beef, including cuts from champion-awarded cattle. The chef's Western-influenced approach runs from seared beef assortments through oxtail soup to precisely grilled sirloin or fillet.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

A tiny kaiseki counter in Shinjuku where the set menu reads like a seasonal dispatch from across Japan, spiny lobster to black wagyu, every ingredient traced back to its source. The chef behind it built his reputation in Kobe before relocating to Tokyo, and the room stayed small by design. Getting a seat here requires the kind of advance planning people usually reserve for international travel.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

A hushed cocktail bar tucked deep inside a hulking 1970s office complex in Shimbashi, the salaryman district that never really sleeps. Antique furnishings and a near-silent room sit in odd, pleasing contrast to the gritty corridors outside. The bar leans hard on the classics, though regulars tend to steer toward the Pantheon, the house original built on Scotch, Benedictine, and lemon. A 50 Discovery from The 50 list.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

A cocktail bar perched on top of Ginza Six, seating exactly eight people around a minimal counter while the rest of Tokyo carries on below. The house obsession is tea, and the bartender Shuzo Nagumo has made a name threading gyokuro, hojicha, and oolong through classics you thought you knew. The room is delicate, the glassware is delicate, and somehow the whole thing stays relaxed anyway.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

The Martini here has its own pilgrim trail, which tells you something about the reputation this Ginza cocktail bar carries. Takao Mori, a godfather of Japanese bartending, rarely works the room these days, but his longtime team keeps the recipes and the warmth intact. For a neighborhood defined by its stiffness, the mood runs notably loose. The 50 Discovery listed it, and regulars would tell you that undersells it.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

The chef here has been breaking down beef since childhood, son of a butcher and grandson of a cattle dealer, which goes some way to explaining why the Wagyu at this refined Ginza steakhouse hits differently. A long tasting menu works through ten-plus courses built around prime cuts, with aged Kobe beef as the centrepiece. The room is polished and the prices will remind you that you're in Ginza.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Four seats, two tables, and a waitlist measured in years: Pellegrino is an Italian dining room in miniature, tucked into Ebisu, where chef Takahashi Hayato cooks the specialities of Parma with the intimacy of a family kitchen in Emilia Romagna. Meals arrive in two halves, guided by what the chef calls "everything supreme," which turns out to be less a motto than a floor plan. A 50 Discovery from the World's 50 Best.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

There are no posted hours, no website, and no reservation link because Sugalabo doesn't want strangers walking in. The chef trained under Joël Robuchon for sixteen years, and his Japanese-French counter dining is available strictly by introduction from an existing regular, a custom called ichigensan okotowari. Find a friend who already has a seat, and then you can worry about the food.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Eight seats, a wooden counter, and a chef who decides the menu each morning based on whatever the market gave up. This is a small omakase sushi bar in Ginza, the kind of place where the room disappears and the fish is the whole conversation. Lunch draws a lengthy queue for a compact, modestly priced sushi set that Tokyo talks about; evenings shift into something more elaborate. A Discovery on The 50 list.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

A sign no bigger than a bathroom tile marks the wooden door, which makes a 13-seat omakase counter behind it feel like something you earned just by finding the place. The earthy interior is deliberately spare, a single monochrome painting on the wall so that nothing competes with the chefs working over enormous blocks of wood in front of you. Sushi Mitani holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Discovery list.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Pronounced "teh-zeh," this Tokyo backstreet cocktail bar keeps nearly 3,000 books on every available surface, and regulars treat the shelves like a lending library while the bartenders riff on classics or invent something on the spot. Dark wood panelling, retro leather couches, and dim lighting make it feel like a very well-read living room. Curry dishes appear on the menu too, which somehow feels right. Been around since the late nineties, and the neighbourhood clearly never found a reason to leave.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

A thick slice of kobe beef chateaubriand, deep-fried and folded into fluffy milk bread with tonkotsu sauce, cut into four neat quarters: that is essentially the whole menu. Wagyumafia is a standing-room katsu sandwich spot in Nakameguro, with a few high stools and no pretense of a broader vision. In a city where culinary traditions are treated like sacred texts, building a restaurant around a single sandwich takes a certain nerve.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Shadowy basement banquettes, sake in hand, and wagyu on the grill: Yoroniku is a yakiniku restaurant in Minami-aoyama that high-profile Tokyoites have made something of a private secret. DJ-turned-chef Vanne Kuwahara runs the room, and set menus work through wagyu in careful sequence, from brined tongue with lemon to rich sirloin you cook yourself at the table. A Discovery on The 50 list.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A Japanese restaurant on the third floor in Akasaka, named for the neighborhood's older, more poetic identity as Red Hill. The chef grew up eating vegetables from his parents' garden in Yamagata, and the menu is essentially an ongoing tribute to that, with deep-fried tofu lifting those same seasonal vegetables and kombu repurposed from the soup stock into a soy sauce for sashimi. Thrift and sentiment, working together quietly.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Ostrich raised in Japan, slow-simmered in soy and ginger or finished over charcoal, isn't a detail you expect from a kappo restaurant in Akasaka, but here it anchors the menu alongside reverently made soba. The set format is deliberately short, then you fill in the rest yourself from the à la carte list, which suits the chef's instinct to keep traditional Japanese cooking as a foundation while quietly doing whatever he likes on top of it.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The name is a statement of intent: French cooking as something the chef refuses to fit into a tidy box. Housed in a former neighborhood workshop in Shirokane, this intimate restaurant builds on classical French technique before folding in Japanese and Chinese culinary traditions. The room still carries a handmade, slightly unconventional feel, which suits a chef who spent time in France absorbing Gallic freedom and came home determined to use it.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The dining room sits on the 33rd floor of Aman Tokyo, which means the city unfurls below you in a way that makes a bowl of vegetables feel almost ceremonial. This is a Japanese-Italian restaurant where the chef draws on Veneto training and close ties to Japanese farmers, so the produce does most of the talking. The menu runs clean and modern, vegetables and fruit pulling more weight than the name-drops usually go to meat. A long way up for a plate of greens, but somehow that's the point.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A kaiseki-style Japanese restaurant in the old Asakusa neighborhood, where the chef trained in Kyoto and brought that restrained seasonal sensibility east. The dashi is kept deliberately light so the main ingredients can speak, and a local sweet rice puff called kaminari-okoshi turns up as batter for fried dishes, a small nod to the street outside. Appetizer platters come served in hollowed yuzu, which is a lot of effort for something most diners will eat in two bites.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A basement yakitori counter in Ginza where the skewers run from chicken oyster to liver paté, which tells you this is not the casual after-work spot one floor up. The chef has spent long enough at the grill to teach from it, and apprentices work alongside him most nights. Set menus are the move, steering through cuts most places never bother with. It draws the kind of crowd that already knows what chicken oyster is, and asks for it anyway.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A French restaurant in a residential Meguro pocket where the chef cooks from Escoffier's recipes as a kind of personal commitment rather than a gimmick. The room is quiet and serious, and so is the cooking, which folds Japanese ingredients into classic French forms without making a fuss about it. The name translates to "good road," which tells you something about how earnestly the whole thing is meant.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A matcha bowl starts the meal while a tea practitioner runs a quiet ceremony at the counter, which tells you this isn't a pastry shop in any ordinary sense. Çayca is a dessert dining experience where a patissière builds each plated confection in front of you, French in structure but unhurried in pace. The tearoom-meets-Western-parlor interior on a Shibuya side street adds to the sense that you've wandered into someone's very particular obsession.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A Chinese restaurant in Higashiazabu that has been around forever, with a menu running past 100 à la carte dishes spanning Shanghai, Cantonese, and regional styles from across China. The kitchen leans traditional, working with seasonal ingredients and preparations like whole steamed grouper and Jinhua pork fillet. It's the kind of place where ordering too much is the whole point, and the table fills up accordingly.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The name translates loosely as "Kitchen of Mount Huaqiu," a philosophical Chinese text's sacred mountain where fruits grow in abundance, and the chef takes that spirit of grateful cooking seriously. This is a quiet, refined Chinese restaurant where the kitchen stays rooted in orthodox technique while nudging toward something new. The appetiser assortment alone, pulling from sea and land, signals that the kitchen has a point of view and the discipline to back it up.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A small French restaurant in Akasaka devoted to the cooking of Landes, the southwestern corner of France that rarely gets its own flag planted in Tokyo. The chef learned the cuisine directly from a Landes native, and the menu stays loyal to that education: duck confit, foie gras terrine, pâté de campagne. The garbure, a slow-simmered ham and duck bean soup, is the dish the room clearly comes back for.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A basement fusion restaurant born from a handshake between two of Tokyo's more restless kitchens, Den and Florilège. The name stitches them together with "kushi," the Japanese word for skewer, though nothing here comes on a stick. Expect Japanese-Western cooking that shifts constantly, tempura with sherry, sweetfish in a custard tart, dishes that exist once and never again. The kind of place where the menu is less a document than a mood.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

An Italian restaurant in Akasaka where the menu quietly maps two geographies at once: ingredients from the chef's Yamanashi mountains and the service team's Nagasaki coast, folded into cooking that moves through Italy's regions alongside Japan's seasons. Dinner lets you order à la carte and share plates around the table; lunch is set menu only. The concept sounds like a pitch deck, but the sourcing gives it something to stand on.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A sushi counter in Higashiazabu where you order nigiri one piece at a time, in whatever order you please. The chef polishes the rice just before cooking, which is the kind of detail that separates the obsessives from the rest. Small dishes and sake round things out, but dropping in for a single piece is genuinely encouraged, no ceremony required. Old-school and unapologetic about it.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

An izakaya on the tenth floor of Ginza, opened by one of Kyoto's most beloved kappo restaurants, that insists on shipping its water in from the old capital. The meal starts with four set dishes, arranged with enough care to suggest kappo roots, then opens into à la carte territory: oden, baked gyoza, squid yakisoba, and curry rice or ramen to close. It runs late, which matters in a neighborhood that tends to close early.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A white sign with an ebony rim hangs outside this sushi shop a short walk from the Kabukiza Theatre, which sets up an expectation of Ginza prices that the place cheerfully ignores. The philosophy here is that sushi should be casual, and the long, thin pieces reflect a style that is confident rather than fussy. At lunch the barachirashi, rice topped and mixed with the day's fish, is the one to order.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Freshwater eel prepared kappo-style on the fourth floor of a Ginza building, which is a wilder sentence than it sounds. The chef cuts, steams, and grills to order in the Kanto tradition, then arranges the courses with the kind of care you'd expect at a kaiseki table. The dipping sauce spiked with raw egg yolk, sukiyaki-style, is a signature flourish worth knowing about before you sit down.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A modern Korean restaurant in a quiet Shibuya backstreet, where the chef runs Western technique through the flavors of his Korean upbringing. The banchan spread alone spans sixteen small dishes, and the ganjang-gejang, a sauce-marinated blue crab, is dialed back just enough for the subtleties to register. The room is the kind of place that makes you feel like you found something before everyone else did, which of course you didn't.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A mother-daughter team runs this quiet Japanese home-cooking restaurant in Minamiazabu, built around the idea that daily family meals deserve the same attention as formal dining. The chef grew up in a tea ceremony household, and that sensibility shows: the dashi is drawn carefully from seasonal ingredients, the vegetable salad is generous, and fresh-cooked rice arrives with the kind of comfort food that rarely travels beyond someone's kitchen.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The name means "shining thing," which is also what the chef calls fish with silver skin, and it's the one item that never leaves the menu. This is a casual sushi counter built around drinkers, with a structure of nigiri courses alongside bar snacks, plus à la carte if you want to wander. The mood is drop-in, not ceremonial, which in Roppongi takes a little effort to pull off.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A sukiyaki house that's been around forever, descended from the butcher shop next door, which means the wagyu selection is taken with a seriousness that borders on devotion. You sit on tatami while a single hostess does the cooking, tableside, every pot. The meal closes with ojiya, a soft egg-enriched rice gruel that absorbs whatever the pan left behind. Old Tokyo in the most literal sense of the room.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A traditional unagi house near the Kanda River, behind a red-brick wall that dates from when brick meant modernity. The specialty is unaju, broiled eel over rice in a lacquerware box, and the eel is cut and steamed only after you order, so plan on an hour's wait. The menu essentially asks you to choose between one eel and one and a half, and the gap in price is small enough that the decision makes itself.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The menu resets every month, alternating between Japanese-ingredient omakase dinners and dim sum-focused lunches, so returning regulars are never quite sure what they're walking into. That's the point. This intimate Chinese restaurant in Nishiazabu runs on the chef's deep knowledge of Chinese cooking, and the courses feel considered rather than showy. A place for people who find a rotating menu more exciting than a predictable one.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

An eel restaurant tucked into a Meiji-era house right beside the Todoroki Station level crossing, where the kitchen grills unagi directly over charcoal without steaming first, the western Japanese way. That method coaxes out a smokier, more aromatic result than Tokyo-style preparations. The unaju sets are named for the Seven Lucky Gods, which is either charmingly esoteric or just the right amount of ceremony for a bowl of perfectly lacquered eel over rice.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The mural covering the walls traces faces painted in kumadori, the bold kabuki stage makeup, a nod to the restaurant's address just behind the famous Kabukiza theatre. This is an intimate omakase spot in Ginza where the chef's background in Chinese cooking surfaces in small, surprising ways, notably in baked gyoza tucked inside a Japanese tasting menu. Leave the drink pairings to the proprietress; she has a feel for the room that no wine list can replicate.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The name comes from the owners' shared surname character and the proprietress's past life as a barista, which tells you something about how this place thinks. It sits between an izakaya and a kappo, cozy and nostalgically styled, while the kitchen turns out an extensive menu with inventive touches throughout. She manages the warm sake; he runs the stove. The meal ends, charmingly on-brand, with sweets and coffee.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The chef came up in Kyoto, and the kitchen makes that lineage plain: tofu skins, Kyoto vegetables, and broth dishes that are quiet and clean rather than showy. Kanshin is a ryotei, so the pacing is ceremonial and the room keeps itself very calm. A round of smaller dishes opens the meal, then guests choose from the menu at their own pace, which is a gentler structure than many places in this register tend to allow.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A counter tucked into a Nishi-Ogikubo back alley, this kappo restaurant builds its menu almost entirely around vegetables, which sounds ascetic until the food arrives. The chef's approach follows the seasons closely, so the takiawase changes face as the year moves, cooling in summer and warming in winter. The room is quiet and unhurried, the kind of place where a small bowl of greens dressed in sesame sauce somehow asks nothing of you and delivers everything.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Wagyu grilled over charcoal with grass, forty-nine floors above Tokyo, is the kind of thing Kei Kobayashi calls casual. The chef built his name in Paris, and this contemporary French grill brings that sensibility back east, all à la carte, in a room where the city lights do most of the decorating. It skews dressy and spendy, the sort of place you book for a night that needs to feel like an occasion.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A kaiseki restaurant in Koto-ku where the chef trained in Kyoto under his father's footsteps, then his mentor's, and brings that lineage to a daily changing appetiser built around whatever is most seasonal that morning. The cooking is rooted in the Kyoto tradition of letting the season do the heavy lifting, so in spring the plate reads like a field inventory. Quiet, unhurried, and probably not where you end up by accident.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The counter is ancient buried cedar, inherited from the chef's mentor, which tells you something about the kind of reverence this kaiseki restaurant operates on before you've touched a chopstick. The cooking builds on classical technique but pulls in ingredients rarely seen in Japanese kitchens, and the chef runs the room in a black shirt and bowtie, which is either a statement or just a good look.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A confectioner and a tea master work in tandem here, one building each pastry course while the other draws a single cup of matcha to match it. The name is a pun on Sen no Rikyu, the father of the tea ceremony, which tells you everything about how seriously this place takes its whimsy. It's a structured tasting experience in Roppongi, quiet and ceremonial, and about as far from a coffee-and-cake situation as you can get.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A kushiage counter on the seventh floor of an Azabujuban building, where deep-fried skewers arrive tasting nothing like deep-fried skewers. The kitchen skips eggs and milk in the batter, fries in plant-based oil at high heat, and somehow the result feels light. Pork shoulder and quail eggs anchor the menu; buttered potato with truffle or wagyu-wrapped egg yolk mark the wilder end. The meal closes with fried rice finished in hot broth, which is a genuinely civilized way to go.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The chef here runs on a single idea, "zanshin," a concept of lingering awareness, which in practice means a Japanese dining room in Tomigaya where Kyoto technique quietly shapes everything on the table. Kombu dashi turns up from the first appetizer to the closing rice dish. Tuna sashimi arrives as Kyoto-style sushi paired with egg-yolk soy sauce, and tempura gets an agedashi treatment nobody saw coming.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A counter kitchen where you sit close enough to watch the chef coax a slow-built broth from dried seafood and meat, vegetables piled in, oil held back. This is a Chinese medicinal cooking restaurant in Nishiwaseda, and every dish is shaped by the chef's training as a food therapist, meaning the food is dense with intention and surprisingly light on the palate. The crowd tends to come looking after themselves, which makes for a quietly purposeful room.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The name translates roughly to "the abstract alchemist," which sets the tone for an Italian restaurant that takes its sourcing as seriously as its philosophy. Seafood comes from Uwajima, vegetables from Yachimata, and the chef's time in Emilia-Romagna shows up in handmade tortelli and tagliolini. It sits in a quiet Setagaya residential pocket, about as far from the tourist trail as you can get in Tokyo.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The dough here is soft and pillowy in a way that signals someone has been paying close attention. L'Insieme is a pizzeria and grill in Kameido that leans warmly into Italian informality, with a menu that runs from classic pies to more offbeat combinations, plus a serious commitment to grilled meat and an Italian-heavy wine list broad enough to match both. It ranked 23rd on 50 Top Pizza Asia-Pacific, if that helps you calibrate the evening.

1. 50 Top Pizza #23 · 50 Top Pizza Asia-Pacific

The name comes from a French word for "aromatic," which tells you exactly what the chef is after in this basement French restaurant in Ginza. He trained in Grasse, the perfume capital of Provence, and that obsession with scent carries into every plate, where classic French technique meets Japanese ingredients in a way that feels less like fusion and more like a personal argument he's been having with himself for years. The kind of place where the chef talks you through the thinking, and you leave remembering all of it.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant