If you haven’t heard of the “Oreno Italian”, “Oreno French”, aka “Oreno” series, you might be missing out on one of the most popular casual restaurant dinning sensations in Japan right now.
The concept of this restaurant is to serve top notch food with high quality ingredients for an incredible price. The lead chef and owner, Toshihiro Yamaura, used to work for a 3-star Michelin rated restaurant and then decided to open his own idea of serving beautiful and tasty food for an affordable price so he hired fellow talented chefs and got it started. What’s the catch? There’s a two hour time limit and you have to stand through your dinner. The restaurant is barely making money on the cost of the food itself, but by enforcing the time limits they can get through 4 rounds of service and serve 160 people in the restaurant per day. When standing and eating, people will naturally leave before their 2-hour time limit and the service keeps on schedule. There is a limited number of sit down tables but it’s incredibly difficult to make a reservation. I think the best way to make reservation is to just go to the restaurant and ask for one at the location itself but keep in mind that you can only make a reservation up to a month in advance.