Masthead
Editorial policy
Every article on this site is written and checked by the SHOKU NOREN Team. This page explains what that means.
Who writes this
We are a reservation desk based in Tokyo, and we are not only writers: our team operates restaurants of its own in Japan, one of them a Michelin-starred Ginza sushi counter. We work in this trade daily, in Japanese, on the same phone lines you cannot reach from abroad. That is where these articles come from — and it is also the reason we can book the houses we write about.
We do not sell coverage. No restaurant on this site has paid to appear, and none can. We add a house because we believe a traveler should eat there.
How we verify a fact
Opening hours, seat counts, closing days and payment methods change constantly, and the English-language internet is years behind on nearly all of them. When sources disagree — and they very often do — we do not average them and we do not print both. We follow a fixed order of precedence:
- The restaurant's own site. If the house says it, the house wins, whatever anyone else has published.
- Tabelog, Japan's domestic restaurant database — for anything the house has not published itself.
- Japanese reservation platforms (Ikyu, Gurunavi, TableCheck and the like) — for anything still missing.
Tourist-board pages, aggregator listicles and blogs inform our reporting but never settle a fact. Where no source above can settle it, we say so rather than guess — an honest gap is worth more to you than a confident invention.
This matters more than it sounds. One counter in this collection lists seating times on the major platforms that its own site quietly replaced years ago; a guest trusting the aggregators would arrive ninety minutes late. Every article carries the month its facts were last checked.
About the artwork
Each house is introduced by an engraved noren — the split curtain a Japanese restaurant hangs at its door — bearing the shop's name in its own characters. These are original illustrations made by us. They are not photographs of the restaurant, and not reproductions of the noren it actually hangs. We draw rather than photograph precisely so that no house's images are used without its consent.
Corrections
If we have a fact wrong — especially if you are the house — write to concierge@shokunoren.com and we will correct it and re-date the article. If you are a restaurant and would rather not appear here at all, tell us and we will remove you, no questions asked.