Kikkoya

Obanzai is Kyoto home cooking: seasonal vegetables, tofu, dried and simmered things, cooked in quantity in the morning and served at room temperature through the day. It is what the city actually ate, as distinct from the kaiseki it is famous for, and its defining ingredients are the ones that travel – pickles, fu, yuba, dried fish, root vegetables.

It is hard to eat well as a visitor for a structural reason: done properly it involves twenty small dishes prepared for regulars who know what appears when. Restaurants aimed at tourists compress it into a set tray, which loses the whole point – the pleasure is in choosing six things from a counter of twenty, not in receiving a fixed nine.

Kikkoya does it the right way round. Dishes are laid out and ordered individually, the selection turns over with the season, and nothing arrives on a lacquered stand with a photograph of it on the menu.

Half portions on request are rare and quietly transformative. Ordering as one person normally means committing a whole plate to each choice and running out of appetite after four, so a solo obanzai dinner ends up being a worse version of the same meal for two. Halve the plates and you can order eight things and actually taste the range.

It also lowers the risk of ordering something you turn out not to like, which matters when the counter includes simmered dishes and preserved fish that are an acquired taste. Order widely, halve everything, and treat the first round as reconnaissance.

Kyoto is generally a difficult city to eat alone in – the good kaiseki houses are set up for pairs and parties and the reservation systems assume two. The counters are the exception, and this is one of the better ones. Matsuba for nishin soba at lunch and Kikkoya for obanzai at night makes a perfectly good solo food day.

Japan’s 2020 indoor smoking law exempted small, owner-operated premises below a floor-area threshold, and a great many of Kyoto’s older counters fall under that exemption and have carried on exactly as before. Kikkoya is one of them. There is no non-smoking section, and in a room this size that means the whole room.

We are flagging it rather than burying it because it is the single most common complaint from visitors about otherwise excellent small restaurants in Kyoto, and because it is genuinely disqualifying for some people. A two-hour dinner in a full, smoking counter is not a minor inconvenience.

On price: Kikkoya does not publish a price list, and because you order dish by dish there is no set figure to publish. It is an izakaya-class restaurant rather than a special-occasion one, and you will pay accordingly, but we are not quoting a number we cannot source. Ask as you order; nobody minds.