Tokyo's Best Sukiyaki and Shabu-Shabu Restaurants

This is a twelve seat shabu-shabu room in Ōkubo built around Tajima beef, the lineage the kitchen lists alongside its gold meat platter as a speciality. The beef itself is what is being sold here, and at twelve seats the room is small enough that the beef is most of what you notice. Find it in Ōkubo in Shinjuku City. It opens for dinner from 5pm every day except Sunday and serves lunch on Saturdays only.

Sukiyaki here comes with egg whipped until it is meringue-like, a description the restaurant uses of its own dish. The beef is Omi, bought from the Sakaeya butcher and aged before it reaches the pot, and that pairing is the reason to pick this one if you have eaten sukiyaki before. TikTok creator @tamo__tyan features it. The restaurant is in Toranomon in Minato City and holds thirteen seats, eight at the counter and five in a private room, so booking is wise.

Azabu Kumasan runs wagyu through several formats at once. Its listed specialities are a wagyu katsu sando, which is a breaded beef cutlet sandwich, a matsutake mushroom shabu-shabu and a chateaubriand steak. Matsutake is an autumn mushroom, so that particular dish belongs to this stretch of the year rather than the whole of it. You will find the restaurant in Azabujūban in Minato City. It serves lunch and dinner and closes on Wednesdays.

Shabu-shabu cooks thin slices of beef by swishing them through hot broth for a few seconds rather than simmering them, and tan-shabu does that with beef tongue. It is the dish this restaurant is known for, listed alongside a curry nanban udon and a meat-wrapped pepper and cheese dish the menu calls peachy. Yoyogi Imahan sits in Yoyogi in Shibuya City and seats thirty-two.

This is the Ginza branch of a house founded in 1895, which began as a beef hot pot restaurant and now serves both sukiyaki and shabu-shabu. A sukiyaki pot is built on warishita, a base of sweet soy and mirin, which is sweet rice wine, and a kitchen with this much history behind it has had a long time to settle its version. For a first sukiyaki in Tokyo this is the most straightforward choice on the list. The restaurant occupies the fifth floor of the Kojun Building in Ginza, seats thirty-eight, opens 11:30am to 10pm and closes on Mondays.

Ishibashi opened in 1879 as a butcher shop and is now run by the fifth generation of the business, serving sirloin and marbled beef sukiyaki. It appears in the MICHELIN Guide. Nearly 150 years in a single trade is the argument for coming here, and it is an evening to plan around rather than drop into. You will find it in Sotokanda in Chiyoda City, seating thirty, serving dinner only from 5pm and closed on Saturdays and Sundays.

Chinya opened in Asakusa in 1880 and became a sukiyaki specialist in 1903. It serves sukiyaki and shabu-shabu, and at seventy-four seats it has the largest capacity on this list. The history does come with an honest asterisk, because the original Asakusa shop closed in August 2021 and the name reopened at a new Asakusa address in March 2022, which is worth knowing before you go. The restaurant stands in Hanakawado in Taito City near Asakusa, serving lunch from 11am and dinner from 4:30pm, with dinner service ending at 8pm.