A Kodoku no Gurume pilgrimage where the location is a working restaurant

Most screen pilgrimages ask you to stand somewhere and look at it. This one asks you to sit down, order, and pay. The locations in Kodoku no Gurume (孤独のグルメ, roughly "the solitary gourmet") are not sets. They are working restaurants, most of them still open, most still run by the same people who were behind the counter when the crew turned up.

The title is the address

The series has run on TV Tokyo since 2012, drawn from a manga by Masayuki Kusumi and Jirō Taniguchi. Each episode follows Gorō Inogashira, an importer of small goods, who finishes a meeting somewhere in the city, notices he is hungry, and walks into a restaurant he has never entered before. The episode titles do the navigation for you: ward, then neighborhood, then dish — Kōtō ward, Monzen-Nakachō, yakitori and fried rice. It is a filing system disguised as a story.

What the frame leaves out

Television flattens rooms. A shop that reads as roomy on screen turns out to hold six counter seats and two tables, and the noon rush belongs to people who have exactly one hour. Arrive at two in the afternoon and the same room is quiet, the owner has time to talk if talking is wanted, and the chair he sat in is just a chair. Some of the shops have closed in the years since broadcast, so check that the shutter is up before you plan a train around it.

一番の常連さんは、たぶんドラマを観ていない。

The one rule

You are not visiting a location. You are having lunch.

Order properly, keep the camera pointed at your own tray, and let the room be a room rather than a scene. Many of these places are cash only and none of them hold reservations for one person. The pilgrimage, if it works at all, stops being a pilgrimage somewhere around the second bite.