Ryuji (リュウジ), a popular Japanese recipe developer and social media personality, set off a heated online debate after declaring that Nagoya has “seriously no good restaurants, even less than Tokyo,” prompting hundreds of users to flood his replies with recommendations for the city’s best-kept culinary secrets.
The comment came in response to a fan who asked Ryuji, after he had already sparked controversy by saying Tokyo’s food culture felt underdeveloped compared to the Kansai region (Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe), what he thought of Nagoya specifically. Ryuji replied bluntly that he genuinely wanted someone to point him toward good food in the city, adding that when he asks locals for recommendations, they tend to suggest chain restaurants, which led him to suspect that “a lot of people in Nagoya aren’t that interested in food.”
The remark quickly went viral, drawing both agreement and pushback. In the days that followed, Nagoya food fans flooded his replies with recommendations, ranging from long-established miso katsu shops to local miso-simmered udon spots, insisting that plenty of excellent independent restaurants exist in the city if you know where to look. One user offered to personally take Ryuji around to non-chain restaurants, to which he responded that he genuinely wanted to go.
Who is Ryuji?
Ryuji is a Japanese recipe developer and CEO of Buzz Recipe Co., known for his easy, no-fuss cooking videos and recipe books. He has built a massive online following, with roughly 5.6 million YouTube subscribers, 2.32 million Instagram followers, and 760,000 on TikTok, for a combined audience of about 11.6 million across platforms. He has won a Recipe Book Award, appeared on Nippon TV’s long-running educational variety show “Sekai Ichi Uketai Jugyou” (The Most Useful School in the World) and the talk show “Hirunandesu,” and has sold a cumulative 1.5 million copies of his cookbooks.
Ryuji has not announced specific plans yet, but he indicated he intends to try out some of the recommended spots the next time he is in Nagoya.
