The Conclusion: Room Only Is Another Name for Freedom
Is an inn that serves no meals a bad deal? To give the conclusion first: it is the opposite. With a room only (no meals) stay, the decisions about dinner and breakfast come back into your own hands. There is no need to head for a dining room at a fixed hour; you can fit your meals around a festival or a sunset. It is the room-only traveler who holds the timetable of the trip.
For dinner, you go out into town. Toyama is a place whose pride is the fish of its bay. At an eatery where local people slip through the curtain, you choose while checking what came in that day. A dish you would never have met if dinner came with the room can turn out to be the most vivid part of the whole trip.
On a festival night, you can stay out in the streets until the dancing ends. Not being bound to a meal time means exactly this: being free to linger in the town after dark. Choose a place within walking distance, and a room-only evening can be designed to include the slow walk home through the night streets.
Breakfast Is Decided by the Previous Day's Shopping
The real strength of a room-only stay is actually the morning. The plan is simple.
- The day before, buy rice or bread and some eggs at a local supermarket or farm stand
- If the inn has a kitchen, all you need to do in the morning is cook the rice
- Just check the inn's guide for hot-water equipment and basic seasonings
The shopping itself becomes sightseeing. Fish names you have never seen; the sheer width of the kobujime (kombu-cured sashimi) shelf. The shelves of a local supermarket display the life of the region exactly as it is lived. Walking back to the inn with a shopping bag in hand, you see the same streets the locals see on their way home.
And Toyama is rice country. The deliciousness of plain white rice in the morning is like a free bonus that comes with any room-only stay in this region. Set the rice cooker's timer the night before, and by the time you wake the whole house smells of cooked rice. Put local seaweed in your miso soup, and the breakfast table becomes this prefecture's own.
Steam rising from freshly cooked rice in the kitchen of an old house — that is where a room-only morning begins.