Tummy grumbling? Want a quick snack or maybe you want to take that special someone for a romantic dinner but not sure where to go? Are you used to using Yelp or another the same kind of site or app to find the restaurant with best reviews or a restaurant on your price range, and now in Japan you are not so sure what to use? On this article, I am going to dig in to Hotpepper-gourmet, Tabelog, bento.com, Gurunavi and at the end I am going to go through a bit about other sites which have restaurant reviews.
Hot Pepper Gourmet
Let us start with Hot Pepper Gourmet, this site is in Japanese and English. Hot Pepper Gourmet site is very easy to use, you can do searches by the area, type of food or with more specific things like is there a English menu or English speaking staff. The site has also a lot of information about the restaurants, recommended dishes as well as coupons to get the food a bit cheaper and having your meal be cheaper is always awesome. The downside of Hot Pepper Gourmet is that, there are no reviews or score system, so it just mostly helps you find restaurants but it does not give you information what other customers thought of them. Another downside is that the app for the site is only in Japanese so if you are using your phone it is best to just go through the browser.
Image courtesy of Google play
Price: Free
App available for: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Android
Tabelog
Tabelog site can be found in English and Japanese, unfortunately The English version of the site does not have as much information or as many functions as the Japanese version and the app is only in Japanese. Where the Hot Pepper Gourmet focused more on the information of the restaurant, Tabelog focuses more on the reviews, it of course has the basic information about the restaurants but not much more. Most of the reviews are in Japanese, but there is a score system which tells you at least how much people like it. The searching features are much like with Hot Pepper Gourmet.
Image courtesy of Google play
Price: Free
App available for: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Android
Bento
This site is fully in English but they don’t have an app. Bento.com has a lot of information about Japanese foods and drinks, it is easy to search for where and what you want to eat. The site reviews these Japanese restaurants, but unfortunately there is not really any kind of score system, you cannot leave a reviews yourself and there is far less information about the restaurants than the other sites have.
GuruNavi
GuruNavi is one of Japans biggest restaurant guide sites and both Japanese and English versions of the site work very smoothly, are easy to use and have a lot of information in them. There are lot of different ways to search for restaurants and there is also an English App for GuruNavi (Yay for one English app). Unfortunately, GuruNavi does not really have a review option build in to the site or app, but they have a link to the TripAdvisor page of the restaurant with the reviews and the score. Though you can see already the score at GuruNavi. The app itself does not show the trip advisor score straight, you need to push to open it on your browser which shows the score and a bit more info.
Image courtesy of Google play
Price: Free
App available for: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Android
Other sites
There are other sites which have reviews for restaurants in Japan as well, like Yelp. Yelp can be used in Japan but it does not have nearly as much of restaurants as other the other sites mentioned or is there as much information about the restaurants. Almost all of the reviews are by foreigners so it depends on you if you think that affects your choice.
Then there is TripAdvisor it has as much of restaurants as the other once mentioned, the review and the score of the reviews, but again, it does not have as much info about the restaurants as the other sites and because you get the reviews also from using GuruNavi, I suggest just using GuruNavi.
Then there is of course Google maps and yahoo, which have reviews and some information about the restaurants, but there is so much less information and most of the other sites have google maps connected to the info of the restaurants so there is not much use to try and find restaurants through Google maps or yahoo.
Our site Planetyze, unfortunately doesn’t yet have the restaurant section added to it, but we have blogs about different Japanese foods and blogs about the best restaurants around different cities as well as about different foods. These should help you find quickly a good restaurant and help you learn about the foods while waiting for the restaurants section added to our site.
