The Tokyo Yoshoku Bar Where One Woman Works Until 4 a.m.

Choto-tei is a 12-seat restaurant of about 390 square feet, fifteen seconds on foot from a small station in southern Tokyo. It opened in December 2025. One person runs it: Iwasaki-san, 31, from Nagasaki.

She arrives around 10 a.m., opens at 11:30, works lunch and dinner, and starts prep and paperwork after closing at about 10 p.m. She finishes at three or four in the morning. The video opens by putting the figure at 17 hours a day.

In that time she also makes the potato salad, the corn soup, the demi-glace and the chocolate cake from scratch. Almost nothing in this kitchen comes ready-made.

What yoshoku is

Yoshoku is Japan's domesticated version of Western food — dishes borrowed from Europe in the late 1800s, then reworked for Japanese kitchens and Japanese rice until they stopped being foreign.

It is not "Western food in Japan." It is its own cuisine: hamburg steak under demi-glace; omurice, a thin omelette wrapped around ketchup fried rice; cream croquettes; tonteki, a thick pork steak in a sweet-salty sauce. It arrives with rice, soup and a small salad. Every neighbourhood used to have a place like this. Fewer do now.

Choto-tei serves all four of those, and pours wine and draft beer at lunch.

Watch the video

She meant to be a pastry chef

Her parents were not in the business — a salaryman and a homemaker. But her mother liked baking, and the house was full of baking equipment. Iwasaki-san decided she wanted to be a pastry chef at around kindergarten age.

She came to Tokyo at 18, studied for two years, then worked. She went out on her own at 29 — but not straight into a lease. For about a year she rented time in other people's kitchens while she looked for a place of her own.

I could try out the dishes I wanted to do. And with a borrowed kitchen, if you want to stop, you can stop right away. Trying things there set me up for having my own place.

She paid for the opening out of her own savings. Asked whether she had been confident it would work:

Not at all. I just went for it.

The location was an accident

She had been looking in central Tokyo.

It was expensive. Expensive, and there was nothing, and you lose to the competition. So I thought I would widen the search — and I happened to find this place.

She had never been to the neighbourhood before. The lease came through in September; she opened in December. The station is fifteen seconds away on foot. Five, she says, if you run.

The menu was decided by a customer review

She had not settled on what kind of restaurant to open. She planned a teishoku place — set meals — and built the menu out of things she personally likes to eat: tonteki, omurice, hamburg steak.

I put out the tonteki and omurice and hamburg that I like, and a customer wrote on Tabelog that it was a yoshoku place. So it became a yoshoku place.

The category came from the reviews, not from her.

The name is not a family name or a place. Choto is her cat. "Choto-kun. He's incredibly cute. I'm just a doting parent about it."

The day starts with rice

She wipes down the tables, sets out the glasses, and starts prep. Rice first: Tsuyahime from Yamagata, cooked in a hagama — a heavy cast-iron pot on an open flame, not a rice cooker.

A hagama is unusual, right. It is quite hard work. You have to cook it in a hurry, so when I'm rushing around I sometimes forget to start it.

One pot feeds nine or ten people. There are twelve seats, so it works out. During service she cooks a pot, runs out, cooks another — the point being that the rice reaching the table is as fresh as she can make it.

Prep is almost all done by hand

Tonteki is the best seller — particularly with men. She cuts it thick off the whole piece and scores the sinew on each one by hand. Asked how much a piece weighs: "About 170, I think."

The potato salad starts with peeling May Queens one at a time. Boiled, mashed, mayonnaise, cucumber and onion salted and squeezed out, ham fried in a pan. Every recipe in the shop is hers.

The omurice egg mix is 40 to 50 eggs cracked individually, milk added, blended smooth. The chicken inside is domestic, diced small and fried off; the onion goes through a food processor and is cooked down slowly before the ketchup goes in.

The hamburg is a beef-and-pork mix weighted towards pork — "because I prefer it." Twenty to thirty a day, each one weighed, shaped, seared, and moved to a tray.

Asked why she does all of it from raw ingredients, the answer is one line.

I don't really use ready-made things. It just tastes better that way.

One person, until three or four in the morning

There is no one else. Whether to hire is still an open question.

Right now I'm going back and forth on whether to hire someone. Honestly, I don't know what to do.

Asked whether working alone is a deliberate choice:

It's such a small place. And I've only just started, so hiring someone wasn't really something I'd thought about.

Mornings, she says, are the slow part. She is a night person.

I take the mornings easy, and then at night I'm doing prep and cleaning up and paperwork until three or four.

Told that this is an enormous amount of work, she agrees, in the same flat tone she uses for everything else. She says people tell her her face does not show much. Asked early in the day whether she was nervous, she looked entirely composed and said: "My stomach is killing me right now."

The marketing is one Instagram reel

A 12-seat restaurant on a side street does not have an obvious way to find customers. Hers is social media, and nothing else. The shop is listed on Tabelog but she does no promotion there.

I was worried about it at first. But three days after we opened, the president of a shared-restaurant company came in, and he put up an Instagram reel, and it went really viral. Loads of people came.

Lunch is the busier service. In the evening people eat and drink and stay a long time, so the tables do not turn.

Regulars are only just starting to appear, I think.

11:30, doors open

She carries the sign out to the street and opens. Lunch reservations are taken for the 11:30 sitting only.

The first customer of the day orders a cheese hamburg and a draft beer. Beer at noon is normal here.

By 12:15 every seat is taken and a "full" notice goes on the door. At 12:47 it is still full.

Through all of it she is frying croquettes, starting another pot of rice, saucing hamburgs, pouring corn soup, taking orders and clearing plates. Alone, in order, without stopping.

The omurice: butter, tomato sauce and rice into the pan, fried fast; eggs into a second pan, shaken and stirred until they just set; the rice tipped in and folded over. Ketchup on top, parsley, done.

Cut into the demi-glace version and the egg is still loose inside. The sauce is heavy and dark and the whole thing disappears quickly.

One first-time customer explains how she heard about the place:

YouTube or Instagram, I think — I saw it somewhere. I never got round to coming, but I happened to have something to do in the area today.

What she wants next

After the lunch service ends and the last customer leaves, she is asked about her goals.

I'd like to open two or three shops.

There is no deadline attached to it.

It's only been six months since this one opened, so I want to work on this place for another year or so first. After that, eventually.

Asked for a word to her regulars:

So many people come in every day, and that's what keeps me going. Thank you, and please keep coming.

If you're going

Hours, closing days and prices are as filmed and may have changed. Worth confirming before you go.

A note on etiquette: twelve seats, one person cooking and serving. Order, eat, pay, leave — that is the deal, and it is why the place works.

The part text can't carry

Everything above is the reporting. What it leaves out is the speed of her hands.

She shakes an omelette pan while taking the next order, starts rice while croquettes are in the fryer, clears plates in the gaps. None of it looks rushed. She simply does not stop.

That is the 23:38 mark onward, when the room fills. And at 24:22, an omelette gets folded over the rice in one motion.