Six seats line a well-used counter. It looks like sugi, though most wooden counters mellow into a similar warm tone after years of wear. The room is narrow, no larger than eight tatami. It’s a full house: four customers sit facing the wall behind the counter, where the host alternates between serving and tidying. Two more, including myself, are perched at the corner, looking down the length of the room.
A faint crackle of AM radio drifts from the kitchen, mingling with the hum of fans and refrigeration. At the counter, not a word is uttered. Each diner sits silently, either waiting for their order or eating intently. There’s no regard for the next person, but no disregard either. A shared understanding seems to hang in the air: it’s been a long week, and what’s needed is a moment to mentally idle.
Stepping in from the street, conscious effort is left outside. This is a place where the mind can reorganise itself without deliberate thought—something I catch myself doing, until the host slides me a second laminated menu from across the counter. I realise I’ll need to momentarily re-engage.
This is lunchtime service at a small kappo (割烹) restaurant. The term pairs the characters for “cut” (割) and “cook” (烹). Kappo places serve varied Japanese cuisine in a setting that bridges the gap between a high-tension kaiseki meal and the neighbourhood shokudō—everyday eateries akin to a diner. They sit adjacent to the single-dish focus of old-fashioned sushi-ya, soba-ya or unagi-ya, offering a broader menu. In long-established shops that primarily serve a local, regular clientele, English menus are rare, and spoken English less likely still. It’s not a matter of xenophobia. More often, there is simply no business case for catering to non-Japanese speakers.
Still, lunchtime menus tend to feature familiar building blocks that are easy to keep note of. Start with 定食 (teishoku), set meals typically served with rice, pickles, and miso soup. Then the common preparation styles: 塩焼き (shioyaki, salted and grilled), 西京焼き (saikyōyaki, miso-marinated and grilled), and 煮付け (nitsuke, simmered in a seasoned broth). As for the fish, names are often written forgivingly in hiragana or katakana: さば (鯖, saba, mackerel), サーモン (鮭, sāmon, salmon), and ぎんだら (銀鱈, gindara, black cod), for example. 刺身 (sashimi) often appears as well, joined by 揚げ物 (agemono)—deep-fried favourites like ajifurai or karaage.
I’ve already ordered my さば塩焼き定食. The second menu, though, throws me briefly. It’s a handwritten list of side dishes, rendered in a style that resists easy reading. No translation tool or AI model to date could make reliable sense of this. It’s an unexpected twist, to be asked to specify the sides on a teishoku, but I decipher several of the options and make my choice. The host scribbles it onto a slip of paper and passes it into the kitchen. The staff don’t speak to each other either. A silent, twenty-minute wait ensues.
At lunchtime in Tokyo, plenty of counters will serve you near-instantly. I recently saw a chart in a gyūdon shop setting a target of 100 seconds to prepare eat-in orders. The pace at this old sugi counter, though, moves twelve times slower. It gives me space to settle into the room’s dry austerity and ease into a kind of psychological decompression. Without looking at my phone, the nervous system shifts from the high alertness of the morning’s events to a calmer baseline. Earlier experiences start to metabolise. Problem-solving and creative thoughts begin to surface.
Just then, the host returns, setting down three plates in succession. First, the saba—grilled to a golden finish, head and all. Then shirasu oroshi: delicate whitebait over a mound of finely grated daikon. And hōrensō no ohitashi: chilled spinach, pressed and cut into bite-sized pieces, dressed with flakes of katsuobushi. Two bowls follow—a generous serving of steaming white rice and a bowl of miso soup, home-style and heavy with vegetables. The mugicha, barley tea, refills keep coming. Eating this way surely contributes to a longer life.
Come evening, a restaurant like this might edge into mid-range or even feel slightly expensive, offering a more elaborate menu. But at lunch, the entire set is covered by a single ¥1000 note—barely five euros with today’s weakened yen. Even at the yen’s postwar peak in the early 2010s, ten euros would have been a small price to pay.
I finish my teishoku, and a gochisōsama deshita—“thank you for the meal”—at normal speaking volume is all it takes to signal that I’m ready to pay. As I hand over my ¥1000 note, the cook steps out from the kitchen briefly. She might be in her seventies or even eighties. Today’s lunch, it seems, sits within the arc of perhaps six decades in the kitchen, and a life that spans the postwar history I so often return to in this newsletter. There’s a family resemblance, and I realise she must be the host’s mother.
In two-person counter operations like this, silence often signals fluency, a tacit understanding built through years of working side-by-side. A mother–son bond explains the wordless precision even more. Not a single seat has been free throughout the Friday lunch service, yet not a word passes between them. The two set the tone by example. No clatter. No chatter.
You’ll find lunches like this across Tokyo, behind discreet noren curtains: wholesome, hot meals at fair prices, served in spaces that feel like living history. Beyond sustenance, they offer something rarer—a refuge, a chance to re-centre, and say nothing at all.
Until we meet at a well-worn counter,
AJ
Today’s newsletter is free, as Tokyothèque is every week but one each month. If you enjoy reading, and have the means, consider a paid subscription. It helps sustain this open-access model, and in return, you’ll unlock monthly long reads, members-only travelogue series, the full paywalled archive, and an expanding set of neighbourhood walking maps. I’d love to have you with us.
Pins
What makes neighbourhood counters special is their ubiquity and consistency, rendering listicles irrelevant. Still, here are three I’ve visited recently, all within a short radius:
Nishimura (as seen in today's letter)
Kappo Sanyuu
Uotora