Skip to content
Find my one

Savor Scout › Food guides › Japanese food

Food guide

How to find good Japanese food

Japanese restaurants abroad are heavily skewed toward sushi, which is one part of a large cuisine and by some distance the most expensive part. The better value and frequently the better eating is in the formats that did not travel as loudly.

What separates a good one from a bad one

  • Specialisation — Japanese restaurant culture is built around doing one thing. A shop that sells only tonkatsu, or only soba, or only yakitori is the norm in Japan and a strong signal abroad. A menu offering sushi, ramen, teriyaki and tempura is an export format.
  • Rice cooked properly — Underrated and central. Good short-grain rice, cooked and held correctly, is the foundation of most of the cuisine.
  • Dashi that tastes of something — The stock underlying an enormous share of Japanese cooking. Made with real katsuobushi and kombu it has a distinct smoky depth; made from granules it is flat and salty.
  • A counter — Most Japanese formats are counter-first — sushi, yakitori, ramen, tempura. It is the correct seat, not the overflow one.
  • A set menu at lunch — Teishoku sets are how most of Japan eats lunch and are almost always the best value on the menu.

What to order

  • Izakaya — Small plates with drinks. Grilled fish, karaage, agedashi tofu, pickles. The most sociable Japanese format and the best for a group.
  • Yakitori — Charcoal-grilled chicken, skewer by skewer, every part of the bird. A good yakitori-ya is a serious thing.
  • Tonkatsu — Panko-crusted pork cutlet, with shredded cabbage and rice. Simple and exacting.
  • Soba and udon — Buckwheat and wheat noodles. Handmade soba is a craft food and worth seeking out specifically.
  • Teishoku — A set meal — main, rice, miso soup, pickles. The everyday Japanese meal and rarely found abroad outside dedicated shops.
  • Kissaten and Japanese curry — Old-style coffee shops and thick, sweet kare raisu. Both comfort food and both excellent.

Where to find Japanese food

Open listings put 13,356 Japanese restaurants across the US. These are the cities and campuses with the most of them.

Cities with the most

New York, NY 524 Los Angeles, CA 271 San Francisco, CA 191 Honolulu, HI 189 Las Vegas, NV 146 Seattle, WA 122 Chicago, IL 119 San Diego, CA 94 Houston, TX 88 Portland, OR 84 Torrance, CA 62 Philadelphia, PA 58

Campuses with the most within a mile

NYU 173 Touro University 163 CUNY Graduate Center 163 Baruch 162 The New School 154 FIT 132 Hunter 63 Pace University 62 BMCC 60 John Jay 54

A few to start with

Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.

Japanese food near campus

How Savor Scout looks for it

Japanese searches weight specialisation strongly: a shop doing one format outranks a general Japanese restaurant with a higher rating. Naming a format — yakitori, tonkatsu, izakaya, soba — filters out the export-menu restaurants that would otherwise dominate on volume of reviews.

Find Japanese food near you →

Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

When you might want this

Where to eat when you're eating alone Where to take a client to dinner Where to eat before a flight What to eat after a workout