Most English-language guides to Japan are written from other English-language guides. We work the other way around.
Biteway Japan is put together in Japan, in Japanese, and published in English. The whole point of this site is to move information across a language barrier that most travel content never crosses.
Where our information comes from
For every place we list, we go to the Japanese-language sources first:
- The restaurant or venue’s own website, which in Japan is very often Japanese-only, and very often more current than anything in English
- Their official X and Instagram accounts, where closures, seasonal hours, and sudden holidays get announced and nowhere else
- Tabelog and Retty, Japan’s domestic review platforms, where the reviews are written by people who live here and eat there regularly
- Google Maps reviews in Japanese, which describe a completely different experience from the English reviews on the same listing
- City and prefectural tourism boards, for festival dates, illumination periods, and transport changes
None of this is exotic. It is simply information that sits behind a language barrier, and that barrier is the reason a lot of English travel content about Japan is out of date, or subtly wrong, or repeating a detail that stopped being true three years ago.
What we check before we publish
For the main listings in each guide, we verify:
- Closing days, including the ones that catch people out — the third Tuesday of the month, the New Year period, the day after a public holiday
- Opening hours, and whether they change with the season
- Whether you need a reservation, and whether you can make it online or only by phone
- How you pay — cash only is still very common, and there is often no ATM nearby
- What English support exists — an English menu, a photo menu, a ticket machine with an English button, or nothing at all
- What the queue is actually like, based on what local reviewers say about the time they arrived
Each of these is dated. When you see “checked in Japanese sources, August 2026” in a guide, that is the month we last looked.
What we don’t claim
We would rather tell you this up front than have you assume it.
We have not personally eaten at every place on this site. Some, yes. Many, no. What we can tell you is that every listing has been checked against Japanese-language sources, and that we do not list anything we would not send a friend to.
We do not accept payment for placement. No restaurant, hotel, or tour operator has paid to appear here, and none of them can. If that ever changes for a specific piece of content, it will be labelled as advertising at the top of the page, in plain language, before you read a word of it.
We use affiliate links. If you book a hotel or an activity through a link on this site, we may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. This never affects which places we include or how we rank them. Every guide that contains affiliate links says so at the top.
Some photographs are stock images. Where a photo is illustrative rather than a picture of the specific business being described, we mark it as such.
Things change, and we get things wrong
Japan’s small restaurants close, move, change owners, and stop taking cards. A guide that was accurate in spring can be wrong by autumn.
If you find something out of date — a place that has closed, hours that have changed, a shop that now takes cards — tell us through our contact page and we will check it and update the guide. We would genuinely rather hear it from you than leave it wrong.
If you went somewhere because of this site and it was good, we would like to hear that too.
Who writes this
Biteway Japan is written and edited by the Biteway Japan editorial team, based in Japan. We are small. We read Japanese, we live with the transport system, and we know which “must-visit” places are worth the queue and which ones are not.
Last updated: August 2026