One street north of Shijo, on Nishikikoji street. An arcade about four hundred meters long with more than a hundred specialist shops in it, and it has been supplying Kyoto with food for over four centuries. Hence the name it goes by: the kitchen of Kyoto.

What is on sale runs from fresh fish, pickles, and tofu through to knives. The stock turns over with the seasons: bamboo shoots and sakura mochi in spring, hamo in summer, matsutake and roasted chestnuts in autumn, Kyoto vegetables in winter.

Plenty of it can be eaten immediately. Raw oysters, grilled skewers, dashimaki tamago. The convention is that you eat what you have bought standing in front of the shop that sold it to you, which sounds like a small rule and turns out to govern everything about how the street feels.

This is not a place for walking and eating. The street is narrow, the shops are close together, and the etiquette is to stop, stand, finish, and then move on. With the crowd it takes a moment to find somewhere to stand at all. What it produces, walked end to end with a series of small halts, is less the feeling of visiting a market than of moving very slowly through a kitchen that happens to be four hundred meters long.