Said to have to been introduced to Japan in the sixteenth century by Portuguese traders, tempura are lightly battered pieces of seafood and vegetables. Best eaten piping hot from the fryer, tempura are dipped in a bowl of light sauce ( ten-tsuyu ) mixed with grated daikon radish and sometimes ginger. At specialist tempura restaurants, you'll generally order the teishoku set meal, which includes whole prawns, squid, aubergines, mushrooms and the aromatic leaf shiso .

Japan's equivalent of the pizza is okonomiyaki , a fun, cheap meal which you can often assemble yourself. A pancake batter is used to bind shredded cabbage and other vegetables, with either seafood or meat. If it's a DIY restaurant, you'll mix the individual ingredients and cook them on a griddle in the middle of the table. Otherwise, you can sit at the kitchen counter watching the chefs at work. Once cooked, okonomiyaki is coated in a sweet brown sauce and/or mayonnaise and dusted off with dried seaweed and flakes of bonito fish, which twist and curl in the rising heat. At most okonomiyaki restaurants you can also get fried noodles ( yaki-soba ). In addition, okonomiyaki , along with its near-cousin takoyaki (battered balls of octopus), are often served from yatai carts at street festivals.

Authentic Western restaurants are now commonplace across Japan, but there is also a hybrid style of cooking known as yoshoku (Western food) that developed during the Meiji era at the turn of the century. Often served in shokudo, yoshoku dishes include omelettes with rice ( omu-ryisu ), deep-fried potato croquettes ( korokke ) and hamburger steaks doused in a thick sauce ( hanbygu ). The contemporary version of yoshoku is mukokuseki or "no-nationality" cuisine, a mishmash of world cooking styles usually found in trendy izakaya .