A Night in Tsukiji
The thing most people come to Tsukiji for is already over by the time the evening starts. The outer market publishes its own clock: 6:00 to 9:00 is trade buying, 9:00 to 14:00 is ordinary retail, and from 14:00 it is what the association calls free trading hours. The stalls are shuttered long before dinner. What is open at night is a different set of businesses standing in the same lanes.
That gives the evening a shape worth planning around. Everything opens at once, most of it closes together, and then the area narrows very fast to a handful of doors. This page is written in that order.
Two rules apply before you pick anywhere. Tsukiji is in Chuo ward, and under the ward's passive-smoking ordinance, in force since 1 July 2020, you may not smoke in a public place — any road, park or plaza in the ward — except at a designated smoking place. Heated tobacco is covered; the ward says so plainly. A separate ordinance from 2004 bans smoking while walking and dropping butts anywhere in the ward. Neither carries a fine, but the ward may publish the name of anyone who ignores a formal instruction. The same applies in Ginza, which is the next ward block over. On top of that the market association asks visitors to smoke only at the designated places and not to eat while walking — eat inside a shop or in front of it.
Before anything else — which night you come
Sunday is the day that changes Tsukiji most, and it changes it in the direction you would not guess: the restaurants that belong to the market keep market hours, and the market does not trade on Sundays.
- Sunday — Choseian, Takeno, Oyster Bar Chika no Iki and Shubo Kosaten are closed, and Kakigoya Tsukiji Shokudo serves lunch but no dinner. That is five of the sixteen places on this list with no evening service at all. Four of them — all but Kakigoya — list public holidays as a closing day too.
- Monday — Sushi Miyashita is closed. And if the Monday is a public holiday, Kakigoya moves its dinner service to the Sunday and drops it on the Monday.
- Wednesday — Tsukiji Sushisay is closed.
- Saturday — Choseian shuts at 14:00 with no dinner, Takeno runs straight through to 20:00 instead of breaking, and Shubo Kosaten lists Saturday as an irregular closing day, so it may or may not open.
Open every day of the week, with no weekly closing day published: the three Sushizanmai restaurants, Tsukiji Tamasushi, which closes only over the New Year period, Toritake, Yakiniku Kokokara and Bar Akatsuki. Aozora Sandaime and Kaki to Kai both say their closing days are irregular rather than fixed, which is not the same thing as being open.
17:00 — eight doors at the same minute
On a weekday, eight of the sixteen open at exactly 17:00: Tamasushi, Tsukiji Sushisay, Takeno, Oyster Bar Chika no Iki, Kakigoya, Shubo Kosaten, Toritake and Yakiniku Kokokara. Choseian, Sushi Miyashita and Aozora Sandaime follow at 17:30. Bar Akatsuki opens last, at 18:00.
Four places are already open and never shut for the afternoon, so they are where you go if you arrive at an awkward hour: Sushizanmai Honten, which never closes at all; Sushizanmai Okunoin and Sushizanmai Tsukiji Ekimae, both serving from 11:00 straight through; and Kaki to Kai, which runs from 06:00 to 05:00 the following morning.
At weekends the clock shifts. Toritake opens at 15:00 instead of 17:00, Yakiniku Kokokara at 16:00, and Aozora Sandaime and Tsukiji Sushisay both serve straight through from the morning rather than breaking in the afternoon.
Dinner, and the two clocks that run early
Two places will end your evening sooner than you expect, and both say so on their own pages.
Tsukiji Sushisay takes its last guests at 19:30, every day it opens, and closes at 20:30 with last orders at 20:00. Booking is possible from 17:00, but the restaurant says only a limited number of seats can be reserved. If you want to eat there, it is the first thing in the evening, not the thing after a drink.
Tsukiji Tamasushi adds a 5 percent service charge to anything ordered from 17:00. It is the only service charge published by anywhere on this list, and it is stated plainly on the restaurant's own page. Its set menus run from ¥3,080 to ¥5,500 including tax, so the charge sits on top of that.
Two more things worth knowing before you choose. Nine of the sixteen do not publish how you pay — among them Sushi Miyashita, Aozora Sandaime, Choseian, Takeno, the two oyster places, Toritake, Yakiniku Kokokara and Kaki to Kai — so carry cash. And nine do not publish prices either; the ones that do are the three Sushizanmai, Tamasushi, Tsukiji Sushisay, Toritake and Bar Akatsuki.
If you want to book, note that two places take no reservations at all: Sushizanmai Honten, where you queue, and Kaki to Kai, which says so in as many words. Sushizanmai Tsukiji Ekimae takes bookings on weekdays only, and at Sushizanmai Okunoin the counter seats are kept for walk-ins.
21:00 to 22:00 — nine of the sixteen finish
The hour between 21:00 and 22:00 is when most of Tsukiji stops. Tsukiji Sushisay has already gone at 20:30. Choseian and Takeno close at 21:00. Kakigoya takes its last order at 21:00 and Shubo Kosaten its last food order at the same minute, drinks half an hour later. Then at 22:00, six doors close together: Sushizanmai Okunoin, Tamasushi, Aozora Sandaime, Oyster Bar Chika no Iki, Kakigoya and Shubo Kosaten.
Counted up, nine of the sixteen are finished by 22:00. At weekends Toritake joins them, closing at 22:00 with last orders at 21:30 instead of running to 22:30.
After 22:00 — seven, then three
Seven places are still serving when the 22:00 group shuts, and they go out in order.
- 22:30 — Sushizanmai Tsukiji Ekimae, beside Tsukiji Hongwanji, closes with last orders at 22:00. Toritake closes at the same time on weekdays.
- 23:00 — Sushi Miyashita closes, last orders 22:30. Apart from the 24-hour Sushizanmai, no other sushi restaurant here takes an order that late.
- 23:30 — Yakiniku Kokokara closes, last orders 23:00.
After that there are three: Bar Akatsuki, Kaki to Kai and Sushizanmai Honten. One bar, one ramen counter and one sushi restaurant, and that is the whole of this list after half past eleven.
The small hours — two, then one
Bar Akatsuki runs to 02:00 from Monday to Friday, with drink orders closing at 01:30, and to 01:00 at weekends and on public holidays, with drinks closing at 00:30. After it shuts, Tsukiji is down to two.
Kaki to Kai serves until 05:00, taking its last order at 04:45. It is fourteen counter seats, no reservations, and you queue. The soup is reduced from Hiroshima oysters; the other one is a six-hour chicken and seafood clear soup blended with two kinds of clam.
Sushizanmai Honten simply never closes. It opened in April 2001 as what the company calls Japan's first sushi restaurant open 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and it has 144 seats over three floors. No bookings — you join the queue, at any hour. Between 05:00 and 06:00, when Kaki to Kai is shut, it is the only place on this list still open.
If you want a drink rather than a meal
Tsukiji is not a drinking district, and the list reflects that: there is one bar on it. Bar Akatsuki is on a back street about three minutes from Tsukiji Station, opened in January 2022, fifteen seats, red and black, counter only. The house drink is the Akatsuki highball at ¥1,300 including tax, finished with a pinch of pepper.
Three things it publishes that will decide whether it suits you. Smoking is allowed at every seat, and there is no separate smoking room — it is the only place on this list that says so, while six others state that they are entirely non-smoking. There is no English menu, although the bar's own page can be read in English, Korean and Chinese. And children cannot be brought in.
If none of that works, the alternative after a meal is not really a bar at all. Shubo Kosaten keeps fifty to sixty sake on its list and serves drinks until 21:30, in fully enclosed private rooms, on weekdays. For anything later than that you are choosing between a highball in a smoking room, a bowl of ramen, and sushi at four in the morning — which, for an area built on fish, is a reasonable set of endings.
Every area in this guide
Ueno · Asakusa · Shibuya · Shinjuku · Roppongi · Ginza · Tsukiji · Tsukishima