Okutan Kiyomizu

Blocks of tofu, warmed in a shallow earthenware pot of water with a sheet of kombu in it, over a flame on the table. You lift a piece out, dip it in a soy-based sauce, and eat it with chopped spring onion, grated ginger and shichimi. There is no sauce on the dish itself and nothing is browned. That is the entire preparation.

It exists here because of two things Kyoto has: exceptionally soft groundwater, which makes good tofu, and a very large Buddhist establishment, which needed protein without meat. Tofu makers clustered around the big temples – Nanzen-ji, Kiyomizu-dera, the Daitoku-ji complex – and yudofu is the simplest thing their customers did with the product.

It is also a dish that divides visitors sharply. If you arrive expecting dinner, warm plain tofu in hot water is a disappointment. If you arrive understanding that the point is the texture and the sweetness of very good tofu, unmasked by anything at all, it is one of the most distinctive things you can eat in Japan. See yudofu for the longer version of that argument.

Okutan Kiyomizu sits behind a gate off the lanes, with a garden and pond and low tables looking onto it. The contrast with the approach to Kiyomizu-dera a few minutes uphill – which at midday is a solid column of people – is the main reason to come. You go through a gate and the noise stops.

Meals are built around the yudofu pot with accompanying dishes: tempura of seasonal vegetables, sesame tofu, dengaku with sweet miso, rice and pickles. It is a set rather than an ordering exercise, and it is vegetarian, which in a city where fish dashi is in everything makes it a genuinely useful address.

Do not come hungry after not eating all day. Yudofu is light by design and the portions are not generous in volume. Come after a dawn temple visit, eat slowly, and have soba later if you need it.

The natural shape is: Kiyomizu-dera at 6:00 when it opens, an hour and a half on an almost empty hillside, then down through the lanes and into Okutan when it opens for lunch. By the time you sit down the temple above you is at full capacity and you have finished with it.

Because the restaurant does not publish its hours in a machine-readable way, the reliable approach is to ring on the morning you intend to go, or to walk past on the way up the hill and read the board at the gate. Both take two minutes and both are more trustworthy than a third-party listing.

If it is Thursday, go to the Nanzen-ji branch instead – a different, older house of the same family at the other end of Higashiyama, with its own closing day – or eat Izusen’s temple cuisine at Daitoku-ji, which is open every day of the year bar four.