Tabelog: the key to dining and whining in Japan

Australian travel writer Ben Groundwater on the one secret to travelling in Japan travel writers don't want you to know: Tabelog.

Consider this "the thing travel writers don't want you to know". This is the big reveal, your one-word ticket to eating and drinking at all the best establishments in a country that can be famously difficult to navigate for those who don't speak the language or understand the culture. Tabelog. That's it. That's all you need to know.

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Tabelog is a restaurant review website, a crowd-sourced compendium that, in essence, is not much different to TripAdvisor or even Google reviews. Regular punters visit restaurants, then jump on Tabelog to score them out of five stars. They write small descriptions of their experiences. And these reviews are tallied up, and the results are available for all to see. However, this is true: Tabelog is unlike TripAdvisor or Google reviews. Tabelog is useful. It's reliable. It's trustworthy.

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Groundwater maintains that Japanese people, the average diners, really know food, and they know how to review restaurants. The best ramen shop in the country, Ramen-ya Shima in Shinjuku, scores 3.99 out of five. It gets 4.3 stars on Google. The highest-rated izakaya in the country, Shokudo Todaka, scores 3.88 on Tabelog (on Google it's 4.5). It is rare for an eatery to score over 3.5 on Tabelog.

This is because when Japanese diners post online reviews, they don't go too crazy. They don't hand out five-star reviews to places they just really liked. That's a wildly high score that leaves you no room to move on to your next restaurant – like, what if it's better, and you've already given somewhere else five stars? The following five stars mean nothing.

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I'll just take a can of sardines and bread and it taste so good for such little money.