Nishiki Market has been here since the 1600s. It's a single covered arcade, narrow enough that two people walking side by side leave very little room for anyone else, and it runs for about four hundred metres through the middle of central Kyoto. Both sides are stalls, shops, and small restaurants, all of them selling food or things related to food. There is nothing else to do here except eat and look at things you want to eat.
The ceiling is the first thing you notice — coloured panels filtering the light, lanterns hanging down the length of the arcade. It doesn't feel like a tourist market, exactly. Locals actually shop here. You can buy fresh tofu, pickled vegetables, dried fish, things on sticks, things in jars. The stalls that sell single bites of things — a skewer, a small cup of something — are always slightly busier than they look like they should be. You stop at them without really deciding to.
Near one end there's a wall of traditional sake barrels — cedar drums with black brushwork, stacked floor to ceiling. It's the sort of thing you see reproduced on postcards and still feels completely real standing in front of it. We stood there for a while longer than was probably necessary.
We ate gyoza. Not from a restaurant — from a stall that had a handwritten menu, about eight items, all variations on the same theme, and a short queue of people eating standing up outside. The gyoza were negi-style, Welsh onion and pork, pan-fried until the wrappers were properly charred on the bottom. They gave you a small dish of rice vinegar and chilli oil. We had five each. We went back the next day and had them again.
The market gets busy by mid-morning. If you want to move freely and actually see the stalls rather than the backs of other tourists' heads, go early. That said, the busier it gets, the more alive it feels — the stalls doing brisk trade, the sounds of food cooking, the general organised chaos of a covered market that's been functioning for four centuries and has no particular interest in slowing down for anyone.
It's about a ten-minute walk from Gion, which makes the combination easy: temple district in the morning, market at lunch, look slightly too full for the rest of the afternoon. We've done this more than once. No complaints.