Downtown and Nishiki Market

Four hundred metres of covered arcade, five metres wide, running east from Takakura to Teramachi, with about a hundred and twenty shops under a striped translucent roof. It has been a fish market on this site since the early fourteenth century and it is still, importantly, a trade market: a significant proportion of its customers are Kyoto restaurant kitchens buying for service.

That is what makes the first hour of the day the good one. Before about ten the chefs are there and the stock is at its best; from midday it is visitors, and a proportion of the stalls have reorganised themselves around selling one-bite snacks to them. Both markets are real, but they are not the same market and they do not happen at the same time.

What to look at rather than eat: the tsukemono stalls with forty kinds of pickle in wooden tubs, the tofu and yuba makers, dried fish, sansho pepper, knives at Aritsugu, and the pressed-sushi counters. Kyoto cooking is built out of this street, which is the honest reason to come.

Nishiki sits inside the only genuinely flat, dense, walkable part of Kyoto, and it is worth understanding as a district rather than a single arcade.

Teramachi and Shinkyogoku run north from the market’s eastern end as covered shopping streets. Pontocho, a lane barely two metres wide, runs parallel to the Kamo river and is the densest concentration of restaurants in the city – in summer the places on its east side put out kawayuka platforms over the riverbank. Kiyamachi, one street east, is the drinking street, and where you will find L’Escamoteur and Bee’s Knees.

This is also where Kyoto stays open late. The temple districts finish at five; downtown runs to midnight and beyond. Building a day that does Higashiyama in the morning and downtown in the evening is the single most useful piece of Kyoto planning there is.

Hours are per shop. There is no market-wide opening time. Most stalls run somewhere between 9:00 and 18:00, many close one day a week, and the day varies by trade – fish sellers often take Wednesday or Sunday. A Sunday afternoon in Nishiki will find a noticeable number of shutters down.

The market association’s published requests go beyond the eating rule: do not touch produce you are not buying, do not photograph inside a shop without asking, do not block the arcade, and take your rubbish to the shop that sold it to you rather than leaving it on a neighbouring stall. All of that is on their own site in English.

For what to eat properly rather than in the street, the sensible move is to buy at the market and sit down elsewhere – obanzai in the evening is the downtown dish, and Kikkoya is a few minutes away.