Every night in the darkest, most depressing depths of the pandemic, one TV show, which I watched over and over, helped get me through. Midnight Diner, a series on Netflix set in a Tokyo restaurant, became a healing balm and a reminder of the warmth of being around people.

The chef at this izakaya, referred to only as “Master,” cooks surrounded by a service counter on three sides, at which loyal regulars sit bathing in each others’ company. Perhaps thought of as a quirky cousin to the 1980s NBC sitcom Cheers, every episode tells a sweet, sad, or occasionally heartbreaking story. Master, a man of few words with a mysterious scar on his face, is like their conscience and a confidant, helping make sense of the world. Characters are kind, quirky, and loyal.

As a taxi glides dreamily through the Shinjuku neighborhood in the opening credits, Master gives a little voice-over: “When people finish their day and hurry home, my day starts … My diner is open from midnight to seven in the morning. They call it ‘Midnight Diner.’ Do I even have customers? More than you would expect.”

A little research confirmed that the izakaya in the show is wholly fictitious, yet I wanted to believe a place with that kind of food and that kind of feeling was real. On a recent trip to Tokyo, I set out to find one just like it.

“An Ideal in Your Heart”

I start seeing elements of what I hoped to find surprisingly quickly. I immediately find a postage-stamp-sized bar in my neighborhood where people are friendly and curious. At my first dinner out at an izakaya in the Nakano neighborhood, the food is surprisingly good for a casual spot: generous and unfussy sashimi, fish collar, smashed cucumbers with sesame, seared mushrooms, and an Asahi Super Dry or two. The busy, cheery waitstaff still takes the time to help me navigate the menu.

Barely 24 hours into my trip, I meet restaurant reviewer Mackey Makimoto at Toranomon Yokocho, a multi-restaurant project he has helped put together that’s like a food court in heaven. He’s sporting a short-brimmed fedora and is talking with a chef when I arrive with my fixer and translator, Mai Nomura. Over fried chicken, grilled sardines, fried oysters, and fried tofu, we bond over a love of Midnight Diner, but my first real question for him is whether a place like that exists.

“Izakaya is very Japanese. They started from sake shops, where customers wanted something to eat to go with their drink,” he says, “Communities would have a liquor shop, and people would buy sake to go, but then in the Edo period, they wanted to stay. At first it was only standing, but over time they wanted to sit. Eventually, they got hungry.”

This, Makimoto explains, is where the word izakaya comes from, its three characters roughly translating into “a liquor store you stay at.”

Over time, in this densely populated but sometimes lonely city, something else blossomed.

“I go to over 700 restaurants a year, but I don’t always feel happy or cheerful in them. Here, I feel happy when I speak to the chef,” he says, gesturing into the central kitchen. “The food is good, but most important is that this is where you can meet people you want to meet. Customers become friends, and friends become community.”

“On the show, almost everyone comes in by themselves. They are lonely inside,” he says. “People who are single and lonely inside can be cheered by places like this. They can show us how to be warmhearted.”

So is it real? Is there one place like it? Can I go to Midnight Diner?

“There is none. It’s utopia. It’s an ideal in your heart.”

Yet he also knows what he would order there.

“Yakisoba with Worcestershire sauce,” he says in a nod to his neighborhood. “They always serve this at the summer festival in Nakano.”

This simultaneously raises and lowers my hopes, but he also pulls up an address on his phone for a place that might fit the bill and sends me off into the night.

Found in Translation

The next evening, following his instructions, I take a train out to the Keisei Hikifune station, walk through a residential neighborhood, then up to the restaurant’s frosted glass sliders. Opening them reveals a bar with four women working behind it wreathed by customers and a handful of tiny tables along the opposite wall.

Everyone looks up as I poke my head in and, to my amazement, I am meeting people before I sit on a green stool at the corner of the bar. The guy two seats to the left is five cigarettes in. I meet my neighbors to the right: a rental car agent who works in the Tokyo Station and her chef friend who works at an izakaya. As we talk, a fish broker sits in the empty seat to my left.

Almost immediately, we’ve opened the translation apps on our phones and are chattering away.

“Do you like to drink?” the fish broker asks while sharing some sake. “I love alcohol.”

The apps and everyone’s willingness to use them allow us to have surprisingly intimate and detailed conversations. In all my years of travel writing, I’ve never used a translation app this way, and I’m stunned at how quickly it allows you to create a conversation with some depth to it.

First, I get them to tell me what to eat. I start with an herby meatball on a stick, ham tonkatsu, and an only-in-Tokyo casserole-like dish called monja. These are followed by slabs of wasabi-dabbed cheese wrapped in nori, horse mackerel sashimi, and grilled dried anchovies with mayonnaise. It’s all good to very good, and there’s a fair amount of sharing among strangers.

I ask about the clientele and how they all seem to know each other, and the rental car agent tells me that even if you’re by yourself, “there are many people who often come, so everyone gets along well.”

The vibe of the evening is a slow crescendo, our chatter building to the point where three or four of us are simultaneously talking into our phones and thrusting them in front of one another, all with a remarkable sense of good cheer.

The fish broker is jokey and friendly, and it turns out he comes in about once a week. People sit close, lean in, and touch each other on the shoulder while they speak. Someone says, “The toilet here is interesting. You should go.” I comply, and it turns out to have a surprisingly large and vibrant fish tank. At one point, an elderly couple comes in, and along with ordering dinner and drinks they’ve brought in a bag full of homemade fried chicken for the owner. She distributes pieces of it to her patrons at the bar, a move received with great excitement. As this happens, I just look around, appreciating the happy bubble surrounding the restaurant and marvel at my luck. I’ve found something more magic than I dared to hope for. In all my years of writing about food and restaurants, this memory will be among the most indelible.

“You may have discovered the best shop in Tokyo,” says the fish broker.

While this was the most magical night of my trip, the bonhomie was not at all uncommon. In fact, it’s closer to the norm. So many nights end up with me walking out of a restaurant and snapping a selfie with a gaggle of new friends. To find these places, I’d wander smaller neighborhoods, take my time, look for little places with the right vibe, and keep my heart open. For semi-outgoing travelers who like to eat and meet locals, it’s wonderful.

Local Flavors

A few days later, my intrepid interpreter Mai and I meet Takanori Nakamura, a food writer and television personality and the Japan chair for Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants. He’s wearing a blue blazer with a puffy pocket square over a yellow argyle sweater and low-top cowboy boots, a dandy in a diner. The spot, an izakaya called Tohachi, is a few steps from the Nakameguro station, and one stop from where he lived as a university student in the 1980s. There’s a mix of Eastern and Western seating styles, and the walls are festooned with paper tags called tanzaku that list menu items. Customers’ personal shochu bottles line the half wall in front of our sunken bar seats.

Over little macaroni-salad otōshi—amuse-bouche–style appetizers—along with fish cakes, croquettes, sashimi, and delicious thin slices of fatty cured sausage, all washed down by fantastic regional sakes, he explains the importance of izakaya in personal terms.

“There are so many kinds of food at a place like this. It’s very cozy and very inexpensive. If this restaurant is famous, it’s because everything is homemade,” he says, noting how many restaurants now outsource work to centralized industrial kitchens. Here, it’s homemade and familiar. “It’s always maintained the same taste. The same! And the same family runs it. Yet when I came here 40 years ago, the competition between mom-and-pop and industrial was already happening. That’s when I knew that I wanted to be a food writer.”

“This was a vital moment for me, and coming back here helps me remember that time,” he says, drawing a line in the air from the present to the past. As he talks, my eyes settle on the half wall in front of me where a laminated article with his photo on it sings the praises of the very fish cakes we are eating. “In Japan, each region has a different cuisine. It’s kind of a wonderland. The sake here comes from all over the country. Izakaya is an assembly of all of the different parts.”

I’m about to ask what he’d order at his dream izakaya, then realize it’s right in front of us.

Mai adds a little aside to her translating: “He’s brought us to his Midnight Diner.”

I keep this in my head throughout the rest of the trip and keep finding that with that bit of openness on my part, I’d receive even more in return, having conversations with curious locals at almost every place I visit. On my last night, I go to the little neighborhood bar where for one week I’ve been a local, take a selfie with my new friends as I walk out and make my way back to my guest house, thinking up my own little variation on Master’s opening-credit monologue:

Do places like Midnight Diner even exist? More than I dared to hope.