tabelog-cli

A Tabelog CLI and MCP server. Tabelog has no public API and the Japanese site sits behind a Cloudflare challenge that rejects anything but a real browser, but the inbound locales (tabelog.com/en, /kr, /tw, /th) are served as plain server-rendered HTML with schema.org JSON-LD. This reads those. No browser, no headless Chrome, no runtime dependencies.

What it reads: restaurant search with Tabelog's own filters (area, genre, keyword, budget band, online-bookable at a date/time/party size) plus two filters the site does not offer (distance from coordinates, open at a given time); a restaurant page with structured weekly hours; reviews; the posted menu; the rating breakdown; photos; and the online-booking calendar with time slots. Reservation itself stays in the browser.

Install

Requires Bun.

bun install
bun link   # registers the global `tabelog` command

Related MCP server: grubhub-mcp

Usage

# top ramen around Sannomiya station, Tabelog score order
tabelog search --area Sannomiya --genre ramen

# Japanese works for both filters and free text; --page walks 20 at a time
tabelog search --area 三宮 --keyword 焼鳥 --page 2

# other orderings the inbound site offers
tabelog search --area Namba --genre okonomiyaki --sort access     # most viewed by overseas visitors
tabelog search --area Namba --genre okonomiyaki --sort reserved   # most reserved

# budget per person (dinner by default), snapped to Tabelog's bands
tabelog search --area Sannomiya --genre ramen --budget-max 999
tabelog search --area Ginza --genre sushi --budget-meal lunch --budget-min 5000 --budget-max 9999

# only places with an online-bookable table then
tabelog search --area Sapporo --genre sushi --vacancy-date 2026-09-11 --vacancy-time 19:00 --vacancy-people 1

# nearest first from coordinates, within 400 m, and open at that time in Japan.
# both read every result's page (about 2 s for a page of 20)
tabelog search --area Sannomiya --genre ramen --near 34.6946,135.1955 --radius-m 400 --open-at "2026-09-11 14:30"
tabelog search --area Susukino --open-at now

# a restaurant page, by URL or by the id shown in search results
tabelog detail https://tabelog.com/hyogo/A2801/A280101/28043837/
tabelog detail 28043837

# reviews, newest visit first, lunch only
tabelog review 28043837 --by-visit --use-type lunch

# posted menu (food by default; lunch, drink), rating breakdown, photos
tabelog menu 28002413
tabelog menu 28002413 --kind drink
tabelog rating 27000401
tabelog photo 27000401 --mode owner

# online-booking calendar and time slots for a date and party size
tabelog vacancy 27000401 --date 2026-09-11 --people 1 --time 19:00

# what does a word resolve to?
tabelog suggest Sannomiya

# Korean page text (names, categories, transport); filters resolve the same way
tabelog search --area Namba --genre okonomiyaki --locale kr
TABELOG_LOCALE=kr tabelog detail 28043837

# machine-readable output for any command
tabelog search --area Sannomiya --genre ramen --json

Area and genre names are matched against the suggest index, which knows English and Japanese names only. A Korean area name returns nothing; use the English or Japanese one and switch --locale kr for Korean output. Genres are pickier than areas: the index has Tabelog's own labels, so 串カツ resolves where kushikatsu does not. A genre that fails to resolve is searched as a keyword instead, and the result header says so. Landmarks (Dotonbori) are not areas; use the nearest station.

Times are Japan time. --open-at reads the English page's weekly hours; a restaurant with no parsable hours is kept and marked unknown, never dropped. --near is straight-line distance and applies to the fetched page only, so pair it with an area that already narrows the candidates.

MCP

tabelog mcp

Serves the same commands as MCP tools over stdio: search, detail, review, menu, rating, photo, vacancy, suggest. The server is a hand-written JSON-RPC loop rather than the official SDK, which pulls in a hundred packages for HTTP transports this never uses. Register it with your host as command tabelog, arguments ["mcp"].

How it reads the site

If Tabelog changes its markup the parsers here will need to follow. Every selector is a BEM class name the site has kept stable for years, and each command fails loudly rather than returning an empty page as success.

License

MIT