Live to eat.

L2E stands for Live 2 Eat. It’s where we keep the restaurants.

We eat out often, in Tokyo and wherever we travel. For close to thirty years, the two of us have planned trips around a single dinner. Find a place that looks right, drive there, eat, drive home. Usually in a car that wasn’t built for comfort, because one of us loves driving more than the other loves comfort. At some point we stopped calling those trips “trips.” We call them grand touring.

L2E is a quiet archive on Instagram. A photo, the name of the place, and not much else. No ratings. No hashtags. No comments. We don’t follow anyone, and it isn’t trying to be found. If you found it, you found it.

We don’t sort restaurants by stars. We sort them by how far we went to get there. Walk, at one end. Airplane, further out. And one more beyond that: Grand Touring, for the places where the road is part of the meal, and we want to taste the whole journey again. A small dining room in Kanazawa we’ve driven to five times. A restaurant in a mountain village in Toyama.

Distance is a category, not a rank. A neighbourhood diner sits in Walk. During the pandemic, their bento boxes fed us more weeks than we can count. Years later we walked back in, and our bottle of whisky was still on the shelf, with our name on it. “We couldn’t throw it away,” they said. “We knew you’d come back.” That place is not a lesser entry than the mountain village. Good is good.

There’s even a joke tier called EMS, for when the place travels to you instead. A coffee roaster in Da Nang, for example. We’ve been there, so for us it’s Airplane. If you read the post and fly to Da Nang yourself, it’s Airplane for you too. If you only drink their beans in Tokyo, it’s EMS.

What we care about most is honesty at a fair price. Some of our places have stars. Many don’t. A few are the kind a guidebook marks as good food that doesn’t cost a fortune, and those are often the ones we go back to.

We try not to write “delicious.” It doesn’t explain anything. We try to tell the instant “that hit the spot” apart from the slower “that was genuinely good,” and to leave nostalgia out of it. A place doesn’t get in because we liked it twenty years ago. It gets in because it’s good now.

The places we keep going back to have a habit of remembering us. We’re not sure why. We try to sit quietly.

We live to eat. Not the other way round.