The Line I Didn't Make

I'd written the name down weeks before the trip. Someone online had described the place in a way that stuck with me, small, family-run, the kind of spot that shows up on lists of restaurants locals actually love rather than the ones built for tourists. I'd circled it on a map app and told myself, almost as a promise, that this was the one meal of the trip I wasn't going to miss.

We got there at 6:40 for what I assumed would be an early enough start to beat the dinner rush. The line was already eleven people deep, wrapped around the corner of the building. I remember doing the math in my head, maybe fifteen minutes a table, four tables ahead of us, this could work. I was wrong about almost all of it.

Forty minutes in, the line hadn't moved much. A couple in front of us had been there since 6:15 and hadn't gotten any closer to the door. Someone mentioned, in the kind of overheard English you pick up on instinctively when you're anxious about a wait, that the kitchen was running behind because they'd lost a cook that week. Someone else said the restaurant had been featured on a Japanese TV show a few months back and the line had basically never gone back to normal since.

An hour in, it started raining. Not hard, just enough to be unpleasant in the particular way a light, cold drizzle is unpleasant when you've already committed an hour to standing somewhere. We didn't have umbrellas. We hadn't planned for this to take an hour, let alone two.

At ninety minutes, a staff member came out and said something to the front of the line in Japanese, gestured at a clipboard, and the energy of everyone waiting visibly dropped. I asked the person next to us, who spoke a little more Japanese than I did, what had happened. They'd run out of a key ingredient for the night. The restaurant wasn't closing, but the dish I'd specifically come for was done for the day.

We left. Not immediately, there's a strange sunk-cost stubbornness that kicks in after ninety minutes of standing in the rain, but eventually. We ended up at a chain restaurant near the station, ate something fine but forgettable, and spent the train ride back debating whether we should have left earlier or stuck it out even longer.

Here's what bothers me, looking back. Someone behind that counter knew, probably by 6pm, that the ingredient was running low. They might have known by 5pm that the wait was already pushing two hours because of the short-staffed kitchen. That information existed. It just existed in a language I didn't speak, behind a door I couldn't ask through, with no way for me to access it before committing two hours of a five-day trip to finding it out the hard way.

I think about that a lot now, the asymmetry of it. Not that the restaurant did anything wrong, they were just running their kitchen with the staff they had. The problem was entirely on my end. I had no way to ask a simple question before I'd already paid the cost of not knowing the answer.

That's the part I didn't understand about Japan until after I'd already made the mistake a few times. Plenty of the best food in the country is sitting behind a phone number, and most of what you'd want to know before showing up, is it busy, did they run out, is tonight even a good night, is one short phone call away. A phone call I couldn't make, because I don't speak Japanese, and because it never occurred to me that this was even an option.

It's the kind of thing you only learn by losing two hours in the rain to it once.

Rapym can call ahead to check restaurant availability or wait times in Japan, in Japanese, so you don't have to find out the hard way. Try it here

Also in this series: The Tokyo Ramen Lines Nobody Warns You About What to Do When Your Japan Plans Fall Apart Mid-Trip