Budget
Khao San
A good place for Thai street-stall style food. It's always packed and hectic for lunch, with attendants hollering to attract customers.
Doner Kebab Stand
Serves delicious roasted meat with a special Turkish sauce.
Blumare
All-you-can-eat pizza and pasta chain restaurant.
Lumine
The Lumine and Mylord department stores atop the south side of the JR station both have inexpensive restaurant arcades on their upper floors.
Sansyoku-Sansun-Bashi
All-you-can-eat food.
Saam-Rot Thai & Vietnam Cafe Restaurant
Original Thai & Vietnamese food.
Takoyaki Stand
Nearby the McDonald's you'll see a small cart selling this strange but delicious snack: small pieces of octopus mixed into a sort of pancake batter and fried in small spheres. Watch as the elderly vendor liberally applies sauces, scallions and fish flakes. You get six for only ¥500 and it's a terrific snack after a night of sake and beer. Unfortunately there's no seats but no one will fault you for standing there and chowing down.
Midrange
Brusca
Excellent Italian bruschetta, bread topped with a variety of meat, cheese, vegetables and herbs. Wide selection of bottled beers, and 6 beers on tap. Second restaurant opened by the enthusiastic Stefano.
Shunka Shuto
Enjoy the view while dining on seafood and other specialties of Hokkaido.
Botejyu
Botejyu is an okonomiyaki shop that sells a variety of okonomiyaki. They also have various yaki-soba dishes. Beware that at times, this restaurant can be busy with wait times of up to 30 min.
Bosphorus Hasan
Authentic Turkish food.
España
In the same building, has good paella.
The Lockup
A Shinjuku original that has since spawned several branches elsewhere in Tokyo. It has a hybrid prison/dungeon/horror movie theme: customers are led to tables inside stone cells by waitresses in plastic-miniskirt police uniforms, where they are "locked up" and given menus filled with bizarre drinks the most well-known of which consists of a rack of test tubes filled with flavored syrups, a flask full of alcohol, and a beaker to mix everything in and relatively normal food. Twice every night, a "jailbreak" is staged in which the lights go out and costumed hoodlums scare the living daylights out of random patrons.
Din Tai Fung
Tokyo branch of the renowned Taiwan dim sum restaurant; speciality is the dumplings.
Yanbaru
There's nothing pretentious about this restaurant specializing in Okinawan food, which emphasizes pork and vegetables that are unusual even to Honshu Japanese. Recommend is beni imo ¥450, tempura-style sweet potato; and hechima misoni ¥600, an eggplant-like vegetable served in a strongly fermented miso sauce. A picture menu is available.
Juttoku
This izakaya has an excellent selection of sake.
Court Lodge
A few buildings away on the ground floor; serves spicy dishes of Sri Lanka.
KappÅ Nakajima
Specializes in sardine dishes. Yanagawa teishoku is deep-fried sardines with scrambled eggs on rice it tastes better than it sounds.
A great way to get by in Tokyo on a budget is to make lunch your main meal. Many restaurants cater to the business lunch crowd and offer an excellent two or three course meal for between ¥800-1300. Going to the same places for dinner would be up to three times more expensive.
Torafugu-Tei
Specializing in the infamous fugu blowfish, it's one of the huge number of seafood restaurants in Kabukicho see below. Set dinners go for around ¥5000, featuring fugu prepared five or six ways, fresh from the tank.