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.
It wrote down its trade-offs before it started
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.
One page means one page
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
