4 Best Restaurants in The Japan Alps and the North Chubu Coast, Japan

This stately building just outside the gates of Zenko-ji combines a bar, lounge, café, and fantastic Italian restaurant. The rather formal modern dining room offers prix-fixe or à la carte options featuring high-quality local ingredients, while the bar and lounge serve up light meals in stately surroundings and the café is a little more relaxed. There is no formal dress code, but the restaurant is something you'll feel like dressing smartly for.

This shop specializes in fu, or wheat gluten. Its adjacent restaurant offers kaiseki-like lunch sets that change monthly but are centered on the wheat gluten and in-season vegetables like shiitake mushrooms. Lunch is served from 11:30 to 2; after that, coffee, tea and sweets are served until 6.

At this place in the renowned Kenroku Garden, excellent fish and vegetable dishes have been carefully prepared for nearly one hundred years. The prices are still reasonable, and the garden views from the tatami are an added bonus.

Slip into this little shop, in business since 1859, for a scoop of delicious sofuto kurimu (soft-serve ice cream) or a cup of tea. You can relax in the small garden in the rear or on benches out front. At the far end of the Tate-machi shopping street, the heavenly scent of roasting green tea leaves wafts out the door. The café is open daily 9:30 to 6:30.