• 15 Dec, 2025 *

Midnight Diner was such a great show. It’s an odd show, and not in the usual Japanese sense. Well, there’s some of that kind of weirdness of course. But the general premise of the show is so foreign to me, it’s exactly the kind of thing that could never be made here in America.

It stars a nameless owner a diner that’s only open late and night and early in the morning. He has a steady stream of customers, new and regular. He has a limited menu, but will cook almost anything you ask for if he has the ingredients. And if he doesn’t, you can bring some and he’ll use that. His regulars are such great characters, often in the periphery but always making their presence known in the small diner. These customers range from businessmen, prostitutes, cross dressers, members of the yakuza, nurses, doctors, and so many more. They all know each other, always having conversations as they eat.

Instead, the show focuses on his customers. Each episode is about one or two customers. They come in, ask for a specific dish, and Master starts making it, talking about what it’s made of and why that person wants that specific dish. And from there, the focus turns to the customer, and we follow them through their lives for a certain of amount of time as they run into problems and have to overcome them. Or fail to overcome them. Some of the best episodes are the ones where the customer that’s the focus of that episode fails. There’s a painful one about a girl who contemplates committing suicide, one were a woman has cancer and has a limited amount of time to live, and one involving a stripper trying to be taken serious as a dancer.

Master himself is a minor character, a recurring presence in the diner who speaks little. Of course, as the stereotype goes, he’s always there to offer advice and guide people to the right path. Only one episode focuses on him and a friend, and this is the only time we ever see him leave the diner.

Despite the sometimes heavy stories, or comedic ones, it always feels so comfy. The small space in the diner itself, the communal feel between the diners, Master’s gentle hand at the controls. Each episode ends with the actor talking about whatever dish they ordered and telling the viewer how to make it.

Midnight Diner is based on a manga that started in 2006 and is still ongoing. It’s called Shinya Shokudou, created by Abe Yarou. It’s never been officially translated into English, unfortunately, otherwise I’d have to buy a new bookcase because I’d buy all 74 volumes. Some mad lad translated every volume to Vietnamese and put them online for free.

The show paired very well with Samurai Gourmet, which was also made in Japan and eventually found its way to Netflix. That show was about a retired office worker with too much free time on his hands. He wanders the countryside like a… well, more like a rōnin than a samurai but I’m not going to argue, and ordering new dishes at restaurants he’s never been to before. Whenever he runs into problems, he imagines what a samurai would do in that situation, transporting back in time to seeing this drunk samurai be a total bad ass. The show only got one season though.

I’ve watched both series through three times now, finishing my last binge of Midnight Diner a couple of weeks ago. The last two seasons are subtitled “Tokyo Stories,” apparently Netflix Japan bought the rights to the show after the third season and renamed for… some reason. I think these are the only two TV shows I watched since That 70s Show ended in 2006.

I know I didn’t do a great job talking about either show, the downside of these daily blogs. Maybe I’ll give them both proper reviews in the future on my fourth viewings. Go give them a watch though, either on Netflix or other means.