This ‘exquisitely simple’ show is the perfect antidote to these frantic times

July 31, 2025
12:14 am

Quiet Japanese gem Midnight Diner will leave you with new cooking skills, a strange and beautiful perspective on life – and most likely in tears.

In Shinjuku, Tokyo, a tiny 12-seat diner opens at midnight and closes at 7am. The proprietor, known to all only as “Master”, has a handwritten menu on the wall with only four items: pork miso soup, beer, sake and shochu. But he’ll make you whatever you want, as long as he has the ingredients and it’s not so complex as to be beyond his skills. Every night, he serves up what is requested, and 25 minutes later, you’re filled with a strange and beautiful new perspective on life and most likely in tears.

The phlegmatic proprietor of the fictitious Midnight Diner, known only as Master.

This is Midnight Diner, a Japanese Netflix show that, like the Master’s irresistible dishes, is possessed of an exquisite simplicity that brings feelings bubbling up like simmering sauce with a minimum of fuss or action – a stillness and serenity that is almost startling to those of us used to the frantic flailing of stories told by Western filmmakers.

It is about food, in a very deep sense, and about life, in an equally deep sense, and it strongly pushes the philosophy that the two are indivisible.

There is magic in the air at the Midnight Diner: there is always just the faintest hint that something might be going on beyond our ken.

The Master is played by Kaoru Kobayashi, one of those actors who can convey countless universes of meaning through what seems to be a total absence of expression. His calm, knowing manner, his phlegmatic bearing in the face of all that he encounters – customers bursting with joy, sadness, frustration or anger – is a masterclass in minimalism.

Those customers pass through the diner, and the Master observes their stories. Sometimes these stories burst with hilarity, sometimes they ache with tragedy, sometimes they crackle with the electricity of human passion. The Master watches and is fascinated, but though he might be overjoyed, or his heart might be breaking, he carries on, serving whatever the punters have requested.

The clientele is eccentric – the lonely, the lovelorn, the hopeful and the desperate; cops and criminals and strippers and singers and drunks. Some are regulars, some pass through in a single episode. All find themselves bound by deep and mysterious bonds to the Master’s establishment, his wisdom and, most of all, his food.

There is magic in the air at the Midnight Diner: there is always just the faintest hint that something might be going on beyond our ken. Perhaps the diner doesn’t even exist – or perhaps it exists somewhere you can’t get to by any mortal transport. Then again, maybe it’s just a diner, and maybe a delicious meal in the middle of the night is enough.

It’s a basic, almost home-made show. The main diner set is tiny and cramped, as is appropriate. Sometimes it feels more like a play in a tiny theatre than anything else: the tiniest of worlds containing everything that is human and alive.

But the masterstroke of the show comes at the end of each episode, when one character joins the Master in the kitchen and addresses the viewer, giving handy tips on how to prepare the dish the Master has cooked. That’s right, it’s not just a show about cooking, it is a cooking show.

Customers pass through the diner, and the Master observes their stories.

It’s like an existential culinary version of those old cartoons where He-Man or Inspector Gadget would break the fourth wall at the end of the adventure and give you tips about how to be a good friend or stranger danger. And somehow, that little handy-hint segment ties everything up in a beautiful bow every time.

It’s a show about cooking, a cooking show, and a show that is itself like great cooking: a dish made of basic ingredients using simple techniques, but when you gobble it down, it sets your whole being alight.