Food and drink

Soba aficionados rate Toshio and Mayumi Kanei’s small restaurant, near Daitoku-ji Temple, as one of Kyoto’s best. The noodles use only Japanese-grown buckwheat flour and no binding ingredients (such as Chinese yam); they’re also cut thinner than at most other shops. Customers sit at low tables on tatami-mat floors that extend to a small garden at the back of this renovated wooden machiya (townhouse). Meals begin with a small plate of freshly fried homemade soba chips; try the soba-zenzai (dumplings with sweet red-bean soup and seaweed) to finish.

Opened in 1907, this is Kyoto’s oldest western-style cake shop. Founder Seitaro Murakami made sweets for Emperor Hirohito’s 1928 enthronement ceremony; today his great-grandson Shoichi heads the family business. From the ovens come Russian cakes – soft cookies topped with jam, chocolate or apricot – florentines and kozubukuro (orange jelly). Behind the shop a machiya has been converted into a café fitted out with Scandinavian furniture.

Rokuyosha was founded by Minoru Otono and his wife in 1950 and today it’s run by their sons, Takashi and Osamu, themselves in their sixties. The ground-floor room opens at 08.30 to serve buttered toast, boiled eggs and dark-roasted coffee, with Osamu’s son Kunpei watching on. From noon you can take the stairs down to the wood-panelled basement – Osamu’s domain – which becomes a bar at 18.00. Osamu’s wife, Mihoko, makes the cakes and doughnuts that are served on both floors.

This snug nine-seat counter restaurant serves modern, pared-back Japanese cuisine. The local owner and chef Atsushi Nakahigashi honed his skills from the age of 12 under his father, who runs celebrated Kyoto restaurant Soujiki Nakahigashi. Later, he worked at a shojin Buddhist restaurant in New York. The menu here is seasonal and everything that goes into it – from the cooking ingredients to the wine – is from Japan.