Honke Tagoto Sanjo
GO ’26 ◎Classic soba, taken seriously; my weekly lunch while I lived in Kyoto.
A Small Guide to Kyoto
京都 · kyoh-toh · Visited and curated by André
Please find my list of recommendations for a beautiful time in Kyoto below.
Eat
Yoshimura Kitayama
GO ’26Handmade soba, pulled by hand and served without ceremony; my reliable local, near where I lived in Kyoto.
Ichiryu Manbai Kawaramachi
GO ’26Clear chicken-and-duck ramen, salt or soy; one of my weekly lunch spots.
Guriko Kyoto Karasuma Oike
GO ’26The casual second brand of Okayama’s Michelin-listed Mendokoro Guriko; an elegant sea bream ramen at the counter, with unmissable karaage alongside.
Tempura no Goen Marutamachi
GO ’26Where you settle a tempura craving without the omakase price; hot, light, and generous for the money.
Da Yuki Okazaki
GO ’26Serious Neapolitan pizza in the museum quarter; the wood-fired oven shipped from Naples, the mozzarella flown in, sixteen seats and years of Bib Gourmand behind it.
Nishiki Ramen Higashiyama
GO ’26 ◎The grilled fish laid over the ramen is out of this world; come for that alone.
Rung Arun Sanjo
GO ’26For when a craving for proper Thai food hits in the middle of Japan; the real thing, cooked like it means it.
Yakimeshi to Men Kyoto Kawaramachi
GO ’26Exactly what the name promises: fried rice and noodles, done with more care than the plain sign lets on.
Sarashina Kishimen Shinkyogoku
GO ’26Pale sarashina soba and flat kishimen noodles, served plainly and properly.
Kafuu Demachiyanagi
GO ’26Tendon, and little else to decide; tempura over rice, hot from the fryer.
d shokudo Bukkoji
GO ’26The dining hall at D&DEPARTMENT; regional Japanese set meals in a temple precinct.
Niigata Katsudon Tarekatsu Karasuma
GO ’26Niigata-style katsudon: cutlets dipped in a sweet-soy tare, no egg, straight over rice.
Yamamoto Teramachi
GO ’26A tonkatsu counter near City Hall, running since the late 1960s; thick loin cutlets fried low and slow to a thin, glassy crust. Only a handful of seats, so book ahead.
Kyo no Jidoriya Aki Nishiki
GO ’26Charcoal-grilled Kyoto jidori in a machiya a step from Nishiki Market; go for the salt-grilled thigh and the tsukune, with Kyoto sake alongside.
Coffee
Kurasu Ebisugawa
GO ’26 ◎Kurasu’s home-brew concept shop on Ebisugawa, Kyoto’s furniture street; every cup, from filter to AeroPress latte, is made only with the gear they sell, no professional machines, on beans from their Nishijin roastery.
Kitaoji Roastery Lab Kitaoji
GO ’26A roastery lab in the quiet north. Coffee treated like research.
Stumptown Coffee Roasters Karasuma Oike
GO ’26Portland’s Stumptown, pouring inside the Ace Hotel; no ceremony, just very good coffee.
common. Marutamachi
GO ’26Coffee in the front, a hair salon in the back; a former Kurasu barista pouring Kurasu beans into Mashiko-ware cups from Kawajiri Seitōjo, all in a quiet machiya.
Tasuku Coffee Kitaoji
GO ’26 ◎A one-room stand in a tiny warehouse near the Kamo, open from seven; Australian beans, Melbourne sensibility, and a rare intimacy to the room.
Style Coffee Marutamachi
GO ’26A palace-side roaster where the owner maps flavour on graphs and rebuilds it with fruit, tea, and spice; light roasts, out of the Weekenders lineage.
Goodman Roaster Shijo
GO ’26The Kyoto home of a roaster the founder first built in Taipei around Taiwan’s Alishan coffee; beans roasted in-house, and a careful pour to match.
Gelato
Yuwado Shimogamo
GO ’26Proper Italian gelato made fresh daily, low on sugar so the ingredient leads; the Ippodo roasted-tea and Sicilian pistachio especially, and seasonal fruit flavours that change with the market.
Look
Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art Okazaki
GO ’26A restored 1933 hall where modern art meets civic pride.
The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto Okazaki
GO ’26Modern Japan, calmly hung, a torii away from the crowds.
YAMAHON Kyoto Sanjo
GO ’26 ◌Pottery and craft chosen with a curator’s restraint. Marked before judgment.
Raku Museum Nishijin
GO ’26A small museum for Raku ware, the hand-shaped (non-wheel) tea bowls one Kyoto family has fired for four and a half centuries; next to the workshop still doing it.
Saihō-ji Matsuo
GO ’26The moss temple: more than a hundred mosses under the trees, a garden laid out by the Zen master Musō Sōseki. Apply ahead and copy a sutra before they let you into the green; UNESCO-listed, and quiet by design.
Rurikōin Yase
GO ’26Open only in spring and autumn; upstairs, the maples outside pour onto a black lacquered table as a mirror, green or red over the moss garden below.
Shugakuin Imperial Villa Shugakuin
GO ’26 ◎Emperor Go-Mizunoo’s 17th-century hillside retreat; three garden terraces that borrow the mountains beyond as their own scenery, walked only by reservation on a guided tour.
Kiyotaki River Kiyotaki
GO ’26 ◎Start up at Kiyotaki and walk the clear river down its gorge; make time for a swim in the cold water, then ride the Sagano scenic trolley through the Hozu ravine into Arashiyama.
Komyo-in Tofukuji
GO ’26 ◎A quiet subtemple of Tōfuku-ji; Mirei Shigemori’s moss-and-stone garden of rippling waves and rays of light, usually yours alone from the veranda.
Architecture
Machiya The old streets
GO ’26 ◎Kyoto’s wooden townhouses: narrow, deep, lattice-fronted, built around a hidden garden. Slow down and read one properly; a whole way of living, quietly being lost.
Kyoto International Conference Center Takaragaike
GO ’26 ◎Concrete, pond, ceremony. Modern Kyoto refusing to cosplay old Kyoto.
Ace Hotel Kyoto Karasuma Oike
GO ’26 ◎Kengo Kuma around a restored 1926 telephone exchange; machiya spirit in concrete and copper, with a courtyard that opens the block to the street.
Kyūkyodō Teramachi
GO ’26 ◎Hiroshi Naitō’s 2020 rebuild of the centuries-old incense house; a deep timber lattice under a tiled roof, composed around ma, the charged empty interval Kyoto builds with.
Shop
Kanetaka Hamono Kawaramachi
GO ’26 ◎A knife shop with family gravity. Buy the one you’ll cook with for decades.
D&DEPARTMENT KYOTO Bukkoji
GO ’26 ◎Long-life design, regional goods, and lovely books in their own editions; a shop that knows restraint.
Kyoto Okazaki TSUTAYA BOOKS Okazaki
GO ’26Books, magazines, and objects; the museum-district version of browsing.
Essence Kyoto Okazaki
GO ’26A gallery-quiet shop of contemporary Japanese craft; ceramics, glass, and metalwork chosen like a collection, not stock.
Nakagawa Masashichi Shijo Kawaramachi
GO ’26Three centuries of craft out of Nara, revived for daily use; hemp cloth, tools, and regional goods with a modern hand.
kitone Shimogyo
GO ’26A machiya shop of ceramics, cloth, and small good things, tucked down a lane in the old centre; the kind of quiet Kyoto address you keep to yourself.
Biblioteca Shimogyo
GO ’26Clothing and gatherings in a Shimogyo machiya, a space built on a care for old things; come for the clothes, stay for whatever’s gathering that day.
Craft
Maana Atelier Kuramaguchi
GO ’26 ◎A restored machiya from the Maana Homes team, given over to craft; hands-on shibori indigo, Kyo-yaki pottery, and tea, in a house rebuilt to hold the making.
Events
KYOTOGRAPHIE Various venues
GO ’26Every spring Kyoto becomes a gallery; international photography hung in temples, machiya, and old warehouses across the city for a month.
Gozan Okuribi the five hills
GO ’26 ◎One August night, Obon ends with okuribi, the send-off fires: giant characters lit across the five hills to guide the ancestors home, while floating lanterns (tōrō nagashi) carry the same farewell down the rivers.
Beyond
Miyama Kayabuki no Sato
GO ’26Old rural Japan you can still walk into, a couple of hours north; a nationally protected village since 1993, thirty-nine thatched kayabuki farmhouses whose roofs are guarded by sixty-two water cannons hidden among the houses that arc over the thatch twice a year. Come for the crafts still alive here: the Little Indigo Museum, where Hiroyuki Shindō dyes with natural indigo in vats sunk into the floor of a 1796 farmhouse, and hand-cut soba at Kitamura, stone-ground from Miyama buckwheat and made fresh each morning.
Sakai Traditional Crafts Museum Sakai, Osaka
GO ’26Where the blades begin. Just outside Kyoto, the forging city explains the knife.
Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum Kobe
GO ’26A whole museum for Japanese carpentry tools and the hands that used them.
Miyajima Hiroshima Bay
GO ’26 ◎The floating torii on the tide, Itsukushima Shrine, and its five-storey pagoda, Itsukushima Jinja Gojūnotō; a sacred island that returns to itself once the day boats leave.
Setouchi art islands Seto Inland Sea
GO ’26 ◎A fishing archipelago regenerated through contemporary art: Naoshima for Tadao Ando’s buried museums and Benesse’s collection, Teshima for a single concrete room of water and light, and Shima Kitchen where island women cook with visiting chefs; base yourself in Uno, the ferry port, for Hym Hostel’s harbour view and, at VOGA, superlative Neapolitan pizza a long way from Napoli.
Bizen Imbe, Okayama
GO ’26The home of Bizen ware, out east of Okayama; unglazed and wood-fired, one of Japan’s six ancient kilns, with the studios clustered around Imbe station. Start at the Bizen ware museum, take coffee at UDO by the station, then walk the potters’ street past its old brick kiln chimneys, with Ichirō Mori’s modern Bizen a highlight.
A small ritual
Fushimi Inari after dark
GO ’26 ◎I like it at night. The gates stop being a queue for photographs and become a rhythm. Go quietly, and only as far as the mountain still feels kind.
Down the Kamo by bike
GO ’26 ◎A ritual from the years I lived here: pick up the river path and follow it with no destination, the city rearranging itself bank by bank as you ride.
Into the mountains by the Eizan line
GO ’26 ◎From the Demachiyanagi crossing a little mountain train carries you straight into nature: up toward Mount Hiei by cable car and ropeway, or out to Kurama through the momiji tunnel of maples, up to Kuramadera and over the mountain on foot to Kibune; past the birthplace of reiki and through the ancient cedar forest of tangled roots.