How burgers work in Japan

Menus usually separate a 単品 (tanpin), the burger on its own, from a セット (setto), which adds fries and a drink. The two prices can differ by several hundred yen, so a price comparison is only meaningful once you know which one you are looking at.

This site stores them as two separate fields — price_single and price_set. Some shops publish only one of them; where a value does not exist, we leave the row out rather than showing a blank.

If a shop grills a thick patty, the staff may ask how you want it cooked. Many shops instead serve every burger at one doneness they have decided on, and will not take a request. Neither approach is a shortcoming — they are different designs.

Where a patty is thin, as in a smash build, there is little room to cook it differently in the first place, so the question usually does not come up.

If you want to ask, 「焼き加減は選べますか？」(yaki-kagen wa erabemasu ka?) — “can I choose the doneness?” — is the phrase. This site stores doneness_options in three states: you can choose, you cannot, and not yet collected. We keep the third separate so that a gap in our data never reads as a “no”.

A tall build usually arrives on a plate with a knife pushed down through it. That is not decoration — it is the shop telling you to cut it rather than compress it. Other shops wrap the burger in paper and expect you to eat it through the wrapper, twisting it down as you go. A lower build may simply arrive as-is.

Two fields cover this: serving_style (knife / wrapper / handheld) and volume_level, a 1–5 measure of height and how readily the build collapses. Between them they answer the practical question — can I eat this with one hand, or do I need both and a plan?

Style is assigned by extracting it from review text. We do not guess it from a shop name.

• Classic

  Few components. The patty and the bun carry it.

  Patty, cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion — and a sauce that stays within familiar territory. Because the stack stays low, these are usually eaten by hand rather than cut with a knife. With fewer components, the sear on the patty and the condition of the bun decide the whole impression.

• Gourmet

  A patty and bun specified by the shop. Tall builds.

  The blend, the weight, the target doneness, the bun — all decided by the shop rather than a supplier. These builds get tall enough that they often arrive with a knife pushed through them. If a shop lets you choose your doneness, it is usually this style. Single-item prices run higher.

• Diner

  Served as a full plate. Judge it with the sides.

  Built as a meal — fries and a drink included — rather than as a single item. Set pricing dominates, and a single-item price is not always posted. Almost always eaten in, either on a plate with a knife or in a basket lined with paper.

• Smash

  Thin patties pressed onto the griddle. Maximum crust.

  The ball of beef is pressed flat on the griddle, so each patty is thin and the browned surface covers most of it. One patty is rarely enough, so these are usually stacked two or more — which makes patty count a meaningful axis. Because they are thin, doneness is generally not something you can specify.

• Local

  Regional ingredients or a locally established build.

  Builds that fold in an ingredient or a combination specific to where the shop is. They do not reduce to the same measurements as the other styles, so what makes each one local has to be recorded individually rather than scored.

You will not find claims here about Japanese burgers being the best anywhere, or rankings of national cuisines. We have not verified anything of that kind against a primary source, so we do not write it. Everything shop-specific on this site is either a value from the database or a statement about how we collected it.

The database holds 1,382 shops, of which 919 are published — we show only shops that have a summary, and we drop closed shops plus 78 whose reviews describe a steak or Salisbury-steak restaurant. Burger specs have been extracted for 587 so far. Data exists for 12 prefectures only.