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Ordering food in Japan when you don't speak Japanese

By Cody 2 min read

Eating is one of the best reasons to go to Japan, and also where first-time visitors feel the language gap most sharply. The food is incredible and often hidden behind a system you have not used before: a ticket machine with no English, a counter where the chef talks to you directly, a tiny place with ten seats and no menu you can read. The anxiety is real, and it is also completely solvable.

Here is how to order what you actually want, and relax enough to enjoy it.

Know the formats before you walk in

Half the stress is just not knowing how a place works. A few common ones:

  • Ticket machine restaurants. Common for ramen and gyudon. You buy a ticket from a machine at the door, then hand it to the staff. Great news: this is mostly visual, and many machines have photos. The conversation is minimal.
  • Counter restaurants. Sushi, yakitori, small izakaya. You sit in front of the chef, and ordering is a back-and-forth. This is where it gets personal, and where a little conversation pays off enormously.
  • Izakaya. Casual, social, lots of small dishes. You will order in rounds throughout the night, which means several small exchanges, not one.

The phrases worth knowing

A handful of words make everything smoother: sumimasen to get attention, kore o kudasai for this one please while pointing, osusume for your recommendation, and a warm gochisousama deshita on the way out, which tells the cook the meal was a gift. These are genuinely useful and people appreciate them.

Where they stop being enough is the interesting part: the moment you want to ask what is in something, say what you do or do not eat, or take the chef up on osusome and actually discuss it.

The questions that matter

Some things are worth being precise about, and a guess is not good enough:

  • What is actually in a dish, especially if you avoid certain foods.
  • Whether something contains an allergen. If you travel with a serious allergy, handle it deliberately. We have a full guide: eating out with a food allergy abroad.
  • How something is meant to be eaten, which the chef is often delighted to explain if you can ask.

Being able to ask these clearly, out loud, and understand the answer is the difference between ordering safely and ordering hopefully.

Take the chef up on the recommendation

The single best move in Japan is to ask osusume, what do you recommend, and then actually have the conversation that follows. That is how you end up with the thing that is not on any tourist list, the chef’s pride, the dish you will still be thinking about months later.

That exchange is the whole reason to be able to simply talk, in natural Japanese, out loud, while the chef talks back to you like the regular you wish you were. For the bigger picture on connecting beyond the counter, see how to talk to locals in Japan.

Order the thing you will remember, not just the thing with a picture. See how RoamSpeak works.

Part of the series Talking to locals when you do not speak the language

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