How to Read a Japanese Menu: Key Kanji, Dishes & Prices

A Japanese menu can look like a wall of characters, but most of the useful information sits in a surprisingly small set of them. Learn to spot the kanji for how a dish is cooked, the ones for meat and fish, and the way prices are written, and you can make sense of most menus long before you can read a sentence of Japanese. This guide is the reading half of eating in Japan. For ticket machines, set meals and the phrases for ordering, see our guide to ordering food in Japan.

Three scripts on one page

Japanese uses three writing systems at once, and a menu usually mixes all of them:

• Kanji (漢字): characters borrowed from Chinese, each carrying a meaning. Ingredients and cooking methods are usually written in kanji, which is good news: one character such as 牛 (beef) appears again and again.
• Hiragana (ひらがな): rounded, phonetic characters for grammar and for words a restaurant wants to look soft or traditional. そば and うどん are often written this way.
• Katakana (カタカナ): angular, phonetic characters used mostly for foreign loanwords. If a word on the menu looks sharp and blocky, it is very often an English, French or Portuguese word in disguise.

Traditional restaurants, sushi counters and izakaya sometimes write the menu vertically (tategaki). Read each column from top to bottom, and the columns from right to left. Chain restaurants and cafés almost always run horizontally, left to right, often with photos.

How it is cooked: the most useful kanji

Most dish names are built from an ingredient plus a cooking method, so learning the methods first gives you the shape of the whole menu.

Meat, fish and everything else

These are the characters to look for if you avoid a particular meat, want seafood, or simply want to know whether that line is chicken or eel.

Menu sections and labels

Before the dishes themselves, a menu is divided into sections and decorated with labels. These tell you where the good-value lunch is, what is seasonal and what has already run out.

Sizes, set meals, rice bowls and the all-you-can-drink deals are covered in the kanji table of our ordering guide.

Katakana: the words you already know

Sound out a katakana word slowly and there is a good chance you will recognise it. Japanese adds vowels between consonants, so "beer" becomes bīru and "salad" becomes sarada. A few are worth knowing because they do not mean quite what you expect.

• ハンバーグ (hanbāgu): a hamburger steak, a seasoned beef or beef-and-pork patty served on a plate with sauce and rice. It is not a burger; a burger in a bun is ハンバーガー (hanbāgā).
• オムライス (omuraisu): fried rice wrapped in a thin omelette, usually with ketchup or demi-glace sauce.
• カレーライス (karē raisu): Japanese curry, thick, mild and slightly sweet, served over rice.
• コロッケ (korokke): a breaded croquette, usually potato or creamy white sauce.
• ハイボール (haibōru): whisky and soda, a fixture of every izakaya.
• サワー (sawā): a "sour", shōchū with soda and fruit juice (レモンサワー is lemon).

Drinks

A few drinks words come up on nearly every menu. 生ビール (nama bīru) is draught beer and 瓶ビール (bin bīru) is bottled. 日本酒 (nihonshu) is what English speakers call sake, served hot (熱燗 atsukan) or chilled (冷酒 reishu); on its own, 酒 can mean alcohol in general. 焼酎 (shōchū) is a distilled spirit, and 梅酒 (umeshu) is a sweet plum liqueur. ウーロン茶 is oolong tea, the standard non-alcoholic choice at an izakaya. Water, お冷 (ohiya), and green tea are almost always free.

Reading the prices

Most prices are written in Arabic numerals followed by 円 (en, yen) or preceded by ¥: 1,200円 or ¥1,200. A wavy line or the character 〜 after a number means "from". Traditional menus, especially vertical ones, sometimes write the price in kanji numerals instead. You only need a handful:

They combine by multiplying and adding, so 千二百円 is one thousand plus two hundred, ¥1,200, and 八百円 is ¥800.

Three more things to watch for:

• 税込 and 税抜. Tax included or tax excluded. Japan's consumption tax is 10% for eating in, so a ¥1,000 dish marked 税抜 costs ¥1,100 at the till. Our guide to tax and service charges on menus covers this and the cover charges you will meet.
• 時価 (jika): market price. Common for premium sushi, crab and seasonal seafood. There is no number because it changes with the catch, so ask before you order.
• お通し (otōshi): the small dish and seat charge at an izakaya. It will not be on the menu but will be on the bill; the ordering guide explains it.

For a quick conversion, the yen has, at the time of writing, been trading at roughly ¥100 to ¥110 per Australian dollar, so dropping two zeros gives you a rough price in dollars. Check a live rate before you rely on it; our guide to paying in local currency has more shortcuts.

Vegetarian and allergy reading

Packaged food in Japan must label eight major allergens: えび (prawn), かに (crab), くるみ (walnut), 小麦 (wheat), そば (buckwheat), 卵 (egg), 乳 (milk) and 落花生 (peanut). Restaurants are not held to the same rule, so a menu may show allergen icons or may show nothing at all. If you have a serious allergy, carry a written allergy card in Japanese and read our guide to eating abroad with food allergies.

Phrases for when the menu is not enough

これは何ですか？ Kore wa nan desu ka?: "What is this?" (pointing at a line on the menu)

肉は入っていますか？ Niku wa haitte imasu ka?: "Is there meat in it?"

〜抜きでお願いします ... nuki de onegaishimasu: "Without ..., please" (わさび抜き, wasabi-nuki, is without wasabi)

辛いですか？ Karai desu ka?: "Is it spicy?" (辛い can also mean salty, so you may get either answer)

これは一人前ですか？ Kore wa ichinin-mae desu ka?: "Is this one serving?"

同じものをください Onaji mono o kudasai: "The same again, please"

How swap.menu reads a Japanese menu for you

Learning these characters will make every meal in Japan more fun, but nobody memorises a whole menu. Photograph the page with swap.menu and every dish comes back in your language, with the original Japanese beside it and a short explanation of what it actually is, so you know that 親子丼 is chicken and egg on rice before you order it. Prices are converted to your home currency, and when a menu says the tax is extra, we tell you and add it to your total.

Tap the dishes you want, add a note such as "no wasabi" or "no pork", typed or spoken, and it is translated into Japanese. Show the waiter your order in Japanese, or let them scan its QR code and read it on their own device.

Then try the thing on the menu you would never have dared to point at. That is usually the best meal of the trip.