How to find a good restaurant in Kyoto

One of the most frequent requests we receive from customers is for good restaurants.
Kyoto is Japan’s fifth-largest city in terms of the number of restaurants, with over 8,000. One of the city’s attractions is that you can sample not only Japanese cuisine, but also a variety of cuisines from different countries.
Many tourists refer to word-of-mouth reviews on Google. However, there is nothing less reliable than word of mouth on Google. Your taste preferences will vary depending on the country or region you come from, and will also depend to a large extent on your physical state that day.

What’s more, in Japan, good word-of-mouth reviews don’t necessarily mean that the food is good, as there are also companies that award five-star ratings by posing as customers.
There are also restaurants that receive exceptionally high ratings from foreign tourists because they offer discounts if they get good word-of-mouth reviews.

Therefore, shops that only have word-of-mouth reviews from foreign tourists, and especially those with Japanese word-of-mouth reviews but low ratings, should be avoided.
As a guide, I eat in many different restaurants on a daily basis. In particular, as there are always lots of people near tourist attractions, I have a list of at least three restaurants that I can recommend to my clients in any tourist destination.
In this English blog, I’m going to introduce you to some of these restaurants.