Arai Shoten荒井商店

Arai Shoten sits an 8-minute walk from Yugawara Station, on the road that runs in front of the town hall - not in the onsen district, not on a tourist street. The exterior is small and almost shop-like (the name trading store literally means "trading store"), with potted plants and a hand-lettered sign. Inside there are roughly eighteen seats across about eight two-tops, with Peruvian textiles, ceramics, and bottles arranged on the walls. It's a husband-and-wife operation: chef Takahiro Arai cooks, his wife runs the floor and explains every dish.

The backstory is the part that makes this restaurant unusual for a town this size. Arai trained in French cuisine, encountered Peruvian food by accident, went to Peru to apprentice, and opened the original Shinbashi Arai Shoten roughly twenty years ago - one of the first dedicated Peruvian restaurants in Tokyo. It earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand. In 2023, redevelopment forced the Tokyo location to close; rather than relocate inside Tokyo, the family moved the entire operation to Yugawara. In its first full year here it was selected for Tabelog's Hyakumeiten 2024 list (Asian/Ethnic East - top 100 in eastern Japan), with a current score of 3.65 across 122 reviews. Several reviewers describe traveling specifically from Tokyo because they couldn't get into the new location any other way.

Lunch and dinner are completely different experiences. Lunch is the accessible entry point: two daily-changing single-plate dishes (typically one chicken, one pork or fish) served over long-grain rice with a small green salad, a side of house chili sauce, and an optional ¥100 drink - chicha morada (purple corn juice), passion fruit, or coffee after 13:00. The lunch plates run ¥1,400-1,600 and are walk-in only. Reviewers consistently arrive 15-30 minutes before the noon open because the eighteen seats fill on the first turn and the line in front of the building is real. Signature lunch dishes include aji de gallina (a creamy yellow chicken stew built on aji amarillo), a pork-and-potato stew, lemon-braised chicken thigh, and a fried mackerel plate over green-pea stew.

Dinner is the real reason to plan around this restaurant. It's reservation-only, by phone, and runs as a course meal starting at ¥5,000 and climbing to roughly ¥9,000 - built around what Arai found at the local market that morning and what the diner has told him in advance about preferences and budget. Reviewers describe ceviche made with kinme (golden-eye snapper) and Yugawara lemon, causa rellena, lomo saltado built on Yugawara venison, a goat-meat pasta, picarones for dessert, Peruvian wine, and pisco sours. People who knew the Tokyo restaurant repeatedly say the Yugawara version is better - looser, more confident, more grounded in the local catch and game. This is the guide page to use when a guest wants the trip's best meal to be the destination, not a side note.

A few practical things: the restaurant is closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays (consistent across all sources). There is one parking spot at the building; the public lot four to five minutes' walk away costs ¥100/hour. The Yugawara plum forest bus stop is steps from the door, which makes this a natural anchor for a plum-season + Makuyama hike day. Lunch reservations are not accepted unless you specifically book a lunch course (also possible, starting at ¥5,500). For dinner, call ahead - there is no online reservation system and no English website.

Address: 〒259-0314 Shirohori, Yugawara, Ashigarashimo District, Kanagawa 18-2 1F

Phone: 0465-20-8360

Hours: Lunch 12:00-15:00 (LO 14:30) · Dinner 18:00-22:00 (LO 21:00)

A vivid Peruvian wind, encountered in Yugawara.

I never expected to encounter world-class Peruvian cooking in Yugawara.

Back in the Shinbashi days lunch was already a line-out-the-door restaurant. I thought, it's Yugawara, it's a weekday, surely I'll be fine - I was wrong. There was already a line. Of course, it's a Hyakumeiten restaurant.

Arai's Peruvian cooking has become even more powerful here in Yugawara - gentler, more beautiful, more delicious. I was deeply moved.

Authentic, but with a softness somewhere in it - it feels like this cooking has settled into the town.

These are points where the platforms we scraped (Tabelog, Google, Hot Pepper) gave us conflicting information. Where a visitor could waste a trip on a wrong assumption, we have defaulted to the most conservative interpretation rather than picking a winner. Each note explains the contradiction and the choice we made.

• Phone number: Tabelog and the official wix site both list 0465-20-8360. The Google Maps short link in our guide data was added before the phone was confirmed; we are using 0465-20-8360 as the canonical number.
• Lunch reservations: Tabelog's metadata implies the restaurant takes phone reservations; reviewers consistently say lunch is walk-in only unless you specifically book a lunch course (from ¥5,500). We have defaulted the listing to walk-in lunch / reserved dinner so visitors do not arrive expecting to skip the line.
• Hot Pepper: Arai Shoten has no Hot Pepper Gourmet listing (confirmed via search). Hot Pepper is structurally biased toward chains and izakaya - independent course-led restaurants like this one are often missing entirely. Tabelog and the official site are the canonical sources here.
• Score: Tabelog rating drifted from 3.61 (web search snapshot) to 3.65 (live scrape, 122 reviews) over the same week, consistent with active recent reviewing. We are quoting the live scrape figure on the guide page.

• Google Maps
• Tabelog
• Official site