Name: I Spent a Day Dining Alone in Tokyo
Uploaded: 2026-03-31T18:03:47.000Z
Duration: 19 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What do you mean you don't want to eat for lunch?

Thankfully, I've come to the right place.

In many countries, dining by yourself at a table for two usually results in a waiter staring at you with a mixture of pity and mild contempt.

But here in Tokyo, solo dining is a fiercely efficient and hyper-optimized machine designed to feed millions of solitary souls every single day.

In fact, over 40% of Tokyo's households consist of exactly one person, transforming the reality of eating alone into a multi-billion-dollar hospitality empire.

Some ramen shops have practically turned it into a sport, like Jidor Ramen, a cheap variety of ramen topped with a mountain of bean sprouts where customers are served immediately and typically have to eat rapidly in silence and be out of the door in under 20 minutes.

And ultimately, they kind of need to be, as such restaurants need a large number of customers to meet their very low, very generous prices.

As for me, though, I want a more relaxing dining experience alone, and

I'm not sure I could devour a bowl of ramen in 20 minutes or less, even if I wanted to.

It is an absolute paradise for the socially fatigued, and

some of my fondest memories involve sitting alone, quietly devouring a meal with premium calories without making awkward eye contact with anyone.

And so in this video, I want to take you to five different restaurants and show you the art, the fine art, of dining alone and making the most of it.

Now, I'll level with you: booking a decent restaurant in Japan isn't overly fun.

Many places have websites that look like they were made back when I was listening to The Spice Girls, while the rest only accept restaurant reservations over the phone.

If you don't speak Japanese, well, get ready to rediscover the definition of awkward.

But thankfully, those days are over, because we're living in the future.

Thanks to the sponsor of this episode, Tabelog, one of Japan's biggest restaurant reservation platforms, who have released their bloody amazing app in English, meaning you can discover and book restaurants all from the comfort of your phone without any effort whatsoever.

And not only are they sponsoring my lonely dinner for one, but

I actually use it to find many of the restaurants we're going to go to in this video.

With over 890,000 restaurants on the platform, with 88 million reviews, you can see where the locals are actually going to and where they recommend.

And best of all, on the app, with a simple tap, you can search based on your current location, see what's going on around you, and

But if you want something really special, tap here on the Tabelog 100 for the top 100 restaurants by category, and

we'll be hitting up one of those tonkatsu restaurants, and

it'll become clear very quickly how and why that restaurant won that award.

I think a lot of non-Japanese users are confused at first, like, why does the score always look so low?

And it's because while in the West we typically love something or hate it, we go 1 to 5, in Japan it's a bit more nuanced.

People typically go to 3 if something's good, 4 if it's amazing, and

5 if it is God himself that has prepared the meal.

And unfortunately, there are currently no restaurants that are 5 stars.

The truth is, 3 is good, 3.5 is exceptional, and

anything over 4 is probably going to be the meal of a lifetime.

So don't be too confused when you see the review system.

But make the most of your trip to Japan, download the app now, and

discover and book the best goddamn restaurants in all of Japan.

It's free to download on iOS and Android, and it's linked in the description box below.

You wouldn't normally associate barbecues with being a solo dining experience, and

yet solo yakiniku barbecue has become pretty damn popular in the last few years.

And for the first stop of our trip, we're off to Shinjuku Skyscraper District to Yakiniku Like, the restaurant that pretty much kicked off the trend.

So if you're like me and you have no friends, this place is perfect.

Yakiniku Like, I like it a lot because, look, water from the server.

Chopsticks, towels, and toothpicks in the drawer.

It's like being in a sensory deprivation tank.

And the best thing is, you don't even have to talk to humans because you just order through a screen.

The tray that you get all your food on slots perfectly into the table.

But it means idiots like me, who previously spilled the water everywhere, can't spill this.

Normally, yakiniku, I'm sort of used to going with that scheme.

And now she just eats everything, and I have to pick up the crumbs.

And then if I want more, I just get more things off the screen.

We've got rice, kimchi, wagyu, different cuts of shoulder and rib.

You can control how hot it is down here on the dial.

You choose what level of flames there are.

It recommends, it says, the best level is level 3.

We're currently at level—oh dear—at level very high.

So we're at level 5, which is like a forest fire.

Don't make the same mistake that I just made.

And incinerate your beef from the get-go.

The joys of dining alone with your burnt beef.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

I Spent a Day Dining Alone in Tokyo

awkward

sort

apparently

experience