Otoshi: the charge on your bill nobody warns you about
Better Translate Team ·
You sit down at an izakaya, you order nothing, and a small dish arrives anyway.
At the end there is a line on the bill you do not recognise. That is お通し, otoshi, and it is on
the real menu we use to test the app, at 300 yen.
What it actually is
Otoshi is a seat charge that arrives as food. The small dish is not a gift and it is not a
mistake. It is roughly a cover charge, in the region of 300 to 500 yen a head, and it is normal at
izakaya rather than at restaurants generally.
It is also the line most likely to confuse you on the bill, because you never ordered it and
because character by character お通し does not obviously mean "seat charge".
Why a translator often gets it wrong
This is a good example of why single lines are hard. お通し translated on its own is not
informative. What makes it legible is where it sits: near the bottom of a menu, in the small print,
alongside a fixed price rather than a dish description.
Our own scan of that board returns it as "Seat charge, with a small dish, 300円", which is the
useful answer rather than the literal one.
What to do about it
- Expect it at izakaya. If there is a counter, small plates and a drinks list,
assume otoshi.
- Do not send it back. Refusing is possible in some places and reads as odd in
most. It is the price of the seat.
- Check the bill against the number of people. It is per head, so a table of
four carries four of them.