How to find good restaurants in Japan?

During your stay in Japan, you would like to find good restaurants. Especially you may want to try Japanese foods like sushi, ramen, tempura, and so on. Here are several useful sites to find good restaurants in Japan.

Tabelog

Tabelog is most famous and popular in Japan. It’s like yelp.com in US. You could easily find any restaurants near the place where you are. You can search any restaurants by location and key words of foods like sushi and ramen. Of course you can find Italian, French, Chinese, Thai, Indian, Korean, …etc, many different type of restaurants.

Customers who have visited the restaurants write their reviews and put a score (0-5). You can see the average score for the restaurants in the web site. If the average score is more than 3, the restaurant is likely good enough. Most of reviews are written by Japanese, so if you wan to know the content of the reviews, you need to use any free translator by google, yahoo, …

Gurunavi

Gurunavi is suitable to find the restaurants near the specified location. You can also see a menu, some pictures of foods and the restaurants, and reviews. In Japanese page, some restaurants offer special coupons, like 10% off for your orders, or free drink or dessert service. But it looks like that it is not available in English page… then we recommend that you check the same restaurant in Hotpepper mentioned below if you cannot read Japanese.

Hotpepper

Hotpepper is famous with coupons they offer. If you find any good restaurants, it is better to check the same restaurant in Hotpepper. You may find a special coupon. The way to use the coupon depends on restaurants. You could find an instruction in the coupon page. Usually we show the mobile phone which displays the coupon to staff in restaurants when you order foods. Another good thing in this site is that you can make a reservation online.

Summary

The best way to make use of these sites would be to find your restaurant in Tabelog based on the score, and check whether or not there is any coupon for the restaurant in Hotpepper/Gurunavi.