Kannawa Onsen — photo: 松岡明芳 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Ryokan meals: what "two meals included" really means
You get off the train at 17:20, walk up to the inn, and are handed a slip of paper with a time on it: 18:00. You had imagined dropping your bag, having a long bath, and going out to find somewhere to eat around eight. Neither of those is happening. The two meals in 一泊二食 (ippaku nishoku) are not a perk attached to the room. They are the shape of the evening, and the sooner you plan around them the better the night goes.
The meal is a time before it is a menu
At check-in someone will ask you to choose a dinner seating, usually from two or three slots between 17:30 and 19:00, and at a small inn there may be only one. Whatever you pick is a real appointment. A kaiseki dinner is cooked to land in sequence, some of it finished at the last minute, and a table that is empty at the agreed hour throws the kitchen out. Arriving twenty minutes late is noticed in a way it would not be at a restaurant.
Two consequences follow, and both catch people out. The first is that your bath has to happen before dinner or well after it — and the pre-dinner hour, roughly 16:00 to 17:30, is the busiest the baths will be all day. The quiet water is at 21:00 and at 06:00. The second is that check-in time is not a suggestion. If the inn says arrival by 18:00 and your train gets in at 18:40, you have not merely arrived late; you have missed a meal you already paid for, and there is no refund and usually no substitute.
Tell the inn your arrival time when you book, and tell them again if it changes. The phrase on the booking form is 到着予定時刻 (tōchaku yotei jikoku), expected arrival time. An inn that knows you land at 18:30 will often move your seating to the late one. An inn that finds out when you walk through the door usually cannot.
What actually arrives
Dinner is 会席料理 (kaiseki ryōri), a sequence of small dishes built around what is in season and what is local. Seven to twelve courses is normal; the plainer the inn, the fewer and larger. It tends to run: an appetiser or two, something raw, something grilled, something simmered, a hot pot lit at your table, then rice, miso soup and pickles together at the end, and a small dessert. Rice arriving last is the signal that the meal is closing, not a mistake in the order.
Several things on the table will be unfamiliar even to people who eat Japanese food often, because this is regional cooking rather than restaurant cooking: mountain vegetables in spring, river fish salted and grilled whole on a skewer, a local mushroom nobody exports. If a small covered pot sits on a lit block in front of you, someone will come and turn it off at the right moment.
Portions are larger than they look at the start, and it is normal not to finish the rice. What is worth doing is eating while things are hot: staff serve to a rhythm, and the next dish comes when the last one is mostly gone.
In your room, or in a hall
Older and smaller inns serve dinner in your room, on a low table, with the futon laid out afterwards while you are in the bath. Larger ones use a dining hall, and many now use a private partitioned room off the hall — 個室食 (koshitsu shoku) — which is the version most people actually want and which some inns charge a little extra for. Room service of this kind is disappearing, because it needs staff to carry a dozen courses up a staircase, so if it matters to you, check the plan says 部屋食 (heyashoku) rather than assuming.
Wear the yukata. Nearly everyone does, and no one dresses up for dinner at an onsen. Drinks are the one thing not included: beer and local sake are added to the bill, and at a room-service dinner they arrive fast enough that it is easy to lose track.
If there is something you cannot eat
This is the part the brochures skate over. A kaiseki menu is planned days ahead, bought in for the number of guests, and cooked by two or three people. It is not a kitchen that can improvise a second menu at 18:00. So the rule is simple and unforgiving: say it when you book, in writing, and be specific — not "vegetarian" but which things you do not eat.
Be ready for a straight no. A small inn will often tell you honestly that it cannot do a meal without fish, and that includes stock: 出汁 (dashi), the base of almost everything simmered or souped, is usually made from dried bonito and kelp. A dish with no visible fish in it is frequently still built on fish. Inns that can cook fully without it exist, particularly the temple-lodging kind, but they are a minority and they need notice measured in days, not hours.
Where the inn cannot adapt, the clean answer is to drop the meals rather than fight them. Book 素泊まり (sudomari), room only, or 朝食付き (chōshoku tsuki), breakfast only, and eat elsewhere. That turns a bad dinner into a cheaper night. It only works, though, if there is an elsewhere.
The inns where opting out is not on the table
Our records cover 1,538 onsen areas in Japan, and 741 of them record how many places there are to stay. Of those 741, 404 record exactly one, and 502 have two or fewer. Well over half of Japan's hot springs are not a town with a street of inns and restaurants. They are one building at the end of a road, standing over its own source — the word is 一軒宿 (ikken-yado), "one-inn".
At a place like that, the inn's dinner is not one option among several. It is the only food within an hour's drive, the nearest shop is back down the valley, and there is no convenience store at the bottom. Kuronagi Onsen in Toyama, one inn, water surfacing at 98.3 °C, is reached by a gorge railway and then a walk. Tamagawa Hot Spring in Akita is also one inn, also 98 °C. Room-only at either leaves you with a vending machine.
So the question to settle before you book is not what the dinner is like. It is whether the place you are going has anywhere else to eat. If it has one inn, take the meals and sort the dietary question out with the inn directly, well in advance. If it is a resort town with dozens, room-only plus a restaurant in the street is a genuine choice — and often a cheaper and later one.
Breakfast, and the clock behind it
Breakfast is also a fixed seating, usually 07:00 to 08:30, and also Japanese: grilled fish, rice, miso soup, pickles, a small egg dish, dried seaweed, and at many inns a single-serve hot pot of tofu. It is a full meal, and some inns offer a Western tray if you ask the night before.
What matters more than the food is what comes after it. Ryokan check-out is commonly 10:00, earlier than a hotel, and the baths often close for cleaning around then. If you want a last soak, it goes between breakfast and check-out, and that window is about an hour. Plan to be in the water by 08:30.
The food the spring itself cooks
In the hottest towns the water is too hot to bathe in straight and gets used as a cooker instead. An egg held below boiling comes out with a set white and a soft yolk — 温泉卵 (onsen tamago) — and you will find them sold by the bag near the sources.
The geography of this follows the temperatures, and ours are measured. Only 51 of the areas we hold record a source above 90 °C, and 22 record 98 °C or more, so this is a thing you go to rather than stumble on. Kannawa Onsen in Ōita, where the steam comes up through the streets, records 100 °C and has a public steaming kitchen where you buy raw ingredients, drop the basket into the vent and collect it ten minutes later — 地獄蒸し (jigoku-mushi), "hell steaming". Obama Onsen in Nagasaki records 105 °C, the highest figure anywhere in our data.
One thing not to do. At Nozawa Onsen in Nagano, source temperature 90 °C, the stone basins in the middle of the village are the residents' working kitchen, used daily, and they are fenced and not for visitors. Photograph them from the path and buy your eggs in a shop.
Six words that carry the evening
Useful at the counter and on a booking form: 一泊二食 two meals, 素泊まり room only, 部屋食 served in the room, アレルギー (arerugī) allergy, 苦手 (nigate) — the polite way to say you would rather not eat something, without claiming it is an allergy — and 食べられません (taberaremasen), "I can't eat it". Written into the booking notes a week ahead, those last three do more than any amount of explaining at the table.
The price side of the meal plans is in what a night actually costs, the bathing rules are in how an onsen stay works, and if you are eating alone, going to an onsen alone covers the inns that will and will not take you.