Izusen

The food arrives in teppatsu: a set of nested red lacquer bowls of decreasing size, stacked, each holding a different dish. You lift them off one at a time and set them out in front of you, and at the end of the meal they stack back into a single vessel. The form descends from the alms bowl a monk carries, which is the joke and the point at once.

What is in them varies with the season and the course: goma-dofu, the dense sesame ‘tofu’ that is the signature of temple cooking; simmered vegetables; fu, the wheat gluten that does the work meat does elsewhere; yuba; pickles; a clear soup; rice; and a sweet. No meat, no fish, no dashi made from fish, and in the strict tradition no onion or garlic either.

It is a gentler meal than it sounds. Shojin ryori has a reputation for austerity that overstates it – the sesame tofu alone is rich enough to disprove the idea – but it is also true that nothing here is loud. Go expecting texture and restraint rather than intensity.

Daitoku-ji is a walled complex of more than twenty sub-temples in northern Kyoto, several with gardens of the first rank, and it is one of the quietest major sites in the city because most of it is closed to the public and the open parts are spread out.

Izusen occupies rooms and a covered veranda in Daiji-in looking onto a small garden. In warm months there is seating outside under the trees. It holds up to a hundred and sixty people, which sounds industrial and does not feel it, because the space is broken up into small rooms.

Combine it with Daisen-in, whose dry garden is among the best in Japan, and Koto-in, whose maple approach is the reason to come here in late November. That is a complete northern Kyoto half-day, and it is a part of the city most itineraries skip entirely.

Daitoku-ji is about forty minutes from Kyoto Station on city bus 204, 205 or 206 to Daitokuji-mae, or seven minutes on a bus from Kitaoji subway station on the Karasuma line, which is the faster route. Walk into the complex and Daiji-in is signposted.

Small groups do not need to book. Parties of six or more are asked to reserve. The lunch-only window of 11:00 to 16:00 is generous by Kyoto standards – most formal Japanese restaurants close between lunch and dinner – and arriving at 14:30 is perfectly reasonable.

The all-year opening is genuinely unusual and worth remembering when you are building an itinerary around Kyoto’s closing days: Izuu shuts Tuesdays, Matsuba shuts Wednesdays and Thursdays, Okutan shuts Thursdays. Izusen shuts for four days a year.