Four days in Kyoto in mid-November, two of us, we walk a lot and we care more about food than temples. Plan it day by day with where to eat, and be honest about which spots need booking ahead versus which we can walk into. One page I can print.
Eleven searches went out before a word of this itinerary was written. That is the detail I keep returning to, because it's the one that separates a plan from a plausible-sounding list of restaurant names remembered from somewhere.
Mid-November, two people, walkers, more interested in food than temples. The brief also carried a demand that is easy to say and annoying to honour: be honest about which places need booking ahead and which you can simply walk into.
Before the first search, this went into the run:
> Decision: I'm using four compact neighborhood loops—central market, eastern > Kyoto, Arashiyama, and Fushimi—to minimize transit while prioritizing a > different Kyoto food experience each day. I'll mark only one dinner as > essential to book, give flexible walk-in alternatives, and treat November > queues realistically.
Read the last part again. **One dinner** marked as essential to book. The tempting move — the move that reads as thorough — is to flag every restaurant as reservation-only, because then nobody can accuse you of under-warning them. It costs the planner nothing and costs you four evenings of admin. Instead the constraint was treated as a constraint: one booking, walk-in alternatives beside the rest, November queue lengths taken at face value.
The other easily-broken promise was "one page I can print". The PDF is one page. Not three pages with generous margins, not a page and a spillover line. Four days of meals, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, laid out to fit what comes out of a printer.
There is a version of this task that costs nothing and takes two seconds: it writes down famous Kyoto restaurants from memory and marks them all as "recommended to book". You'd only discover the difference standing outside a place that closed last year.
This one went and checked, eleven times, then fit the result on a sheet of paper. It cost $0.452333 on Smart and took about ninety seconds. The whole run, searches included, is here: https://elsedoes.com/share/eabf0ca97a4447629753fc22a5d9a133
kyoto-food-first-4-days.pdf 88 KB
By Heei