Yoi-no-Kuchi – 78 points

Today was a beautiful late summer day in Tokyo.  The sun was shinning and the breeze has the cooling feel of autumn on it.  All in all a perfect day for sitting outside and having a couple of beers watching the afternoon slowly turn to dusk. Unfortunately given that this was a Tuesday and not one of the many public holidays that September in Tokyo gives us, our options were limited to a dry lunch, which hopefully would not take longer than an hour. 

 

So off we walked.  We walked down the road, turned up another road we had not explored much and saw a nice looking old Japanese building.  And just as the warm sun and cooling breezes had foreshadowed, today was to be a good day (at least in terms of lunch).

 

The food:  Only three choices on the lunch menu; yakitori-don, oyako-don and fried chicken in a mustard sauce, of which the yakitori-don was sold out.  I like this, a restaurant that specialises in one thing, in this case chicken, knows its thing and does it well.  Simplicity at its best, no attempts to match foods, which don’t match, no attempts to show off, nothing fancy, just the basics done well.  So simple, but so many places forget this basic principle.  We all went for the fried chicken and it was done perfectly, crisp freshly cooked flavoursome thigh meat with a tangy, but not over-powering mustard sauce.  It was accompanied by refreshing shredded vegetable salad, which went every well with the fried dish, a subtle light chicken based clear soup and very good rice.  Perfect.  35 points.

 

The price:  1,000 yen for a very tasty lunch in a nice location – can’t complain. 8 points.

 

The volume:  There was a fair amount of chicken and plenty of rice.  So much so that Harry left some of the chicken, which RB promptly devoured before wondering whether he could get any more rice. 12 points.

 

The extras:  The soup, which was very tasty and a small serving of pickles (too overloaded with takuan for my taste).  8 points.

 

Bonus:  Lovely old building that centred around a courtyard with a very lush garden.  What made it even better was instead of a perfectly manicured Japanese garden that one would expect in an area where a pin head worth of land is probably worth more than all the land in a medium sized city back in God’s Own, the garden was a rather overgrown unkempt affair.  I kind of liked it, it even gave us a conversation point. 15 points.

 

The details: 4-3-29 Akasaka, Minato-ku

Phone 03 5575 7433

Dante – 78 points

Michael Jackson’s favourite restaurant in Tokyo apparently.  Unfortunately not the recently deceased brilliant beer and whisky writer, but that kind of weird sepo that sung a few songs back in the 80’s that were sort of cool, but has been generally weird since.  Which reminds me of a joke, ‘what is the difference between Michael Jackson (the US one) and Neil Armstrong – one of them was the first man to walk on the moon, the other is just a weirdo that molests children’ (credit to RB).

 

Dante has been an old favourite.  When in need of a meat fix, the Ladds would even make the trek over the hill from our old digs all the way to Akasaka to get a protein fix here.  It was still a bit of a surprise to end up here.  Big Trouble wanted to have lunch together and apparently spent the morning searching for child friendly restaurants in Akasaka, and she came up with Dante.  They were great, had a high chair, didn’t bat an eyelid when Little Trouble decided that she would rather eat with her hands, but the idea of a three year old sitting within 20cm of a white hot metal plate and some bloke doing a dance with knives wouldn’t have been my choice of a child friendly joint.  Still though, I am not the sort of guy that would turn down dead, rotting flesh

 

The food:  The meat here is not prime grade Kobe beef, 40 day aged prime New Zealand Rib Eye (which, in my opinion tastes about as good as there is, perhaps something to do with the cows eating grass all year long as opposed to dead sheep and what ever other muck is in the grain that animals are fed elsewhere), it is rather pinkish looking unidentified meat – probably Ocker.  This is definitely a place where quantity prevails over quality.  Still though, a very pleasant way to get a fill of protein.  30 points.

 

The price:  I always end up spending around 2,500 yen, which is expensive for lunch, but perhaps not expensive to leave with a gut full of meat.  A Friday special, after pay-day type joint, but the sort of place you always look forward to visiting and are happy, if a little sleepy, after visiting. 5 points.

 

The volume:  So long as you order the large steak (at a mammoth, for Japan, 300g) and another dish, such as the ginger pork or chicken, you leave stuffed. 15 points.

 

The extras:  No coffee unless you enter after 1pm, also no dessert.  Still, three different sauces for the meat, including a very tasty tomato one, and rice, salad and soup.  Not bad.  8 points.

 

Bonus: For the shear weirdness of having photos of Micky J on the wall (as opposed to Off the Wall), along with the fact that this is an old favourite. 20 points.

 

The details: 2-14-9 Akasaka, Minato-ku

Phone 03 3583 5460

Web site: http://r.gnavi.co.jp/g139000/

Housen – 55 points

How many roads must a man walk down, before he finds the perfect lunch.  In a Bob Dylan sort of way, Cherry led us down (or up as the case was) one of the roads less visited in our new stomping ground.  Down Hitotsugi dori and turn left at the corner where Sam and Dave’s and up the road.  Today’s was about being disappointed, not bitterly disappointed like every true rugby fan is at the final of a World Cup (except the magnicent one in 1987, the only one that really counts), but just a mild feeling that things were not as good as they could have been; perhaps with no particular reason why.

 

Sam and Dave is one of those places.  I used to go there every time I was in the Kansai area, brilliant place, packed with cheap booze and even cheaper women.  A place you would always leave with a smile on your face and something smiling on your arm.  When I heard that they were going to open in Tokyo I was happy; when I heard that they were opening in Akasaka (and not the hell hole of the Pong) I was even more happy.  Every time I have been in there though, there crowd has not quite been enough, in fact it has been near empty.  For a dive to be fun it needs to be crowded, perhaps S&D’s could have moving partitions so even if there are on ten people in the joint, they can all feel squashed together like they should at a dive.  For every additional ten people in the room, they could even move the walls together another 10cm, sort of like that scene in Star Wars where Luke and the Princess are in the garbage compactor and as the walls get closer and closer, you know that they are also going to get closer (although at that stage, I am betting that not many people thought it would be in an incestuous way).  One of Tokyo’s greatest, sorry perhaps Tokyo’s greatest ever dive, the Rolling Stone (R.I.P.) lost almost all of its magic when it moved to a larger place.  The whole point of the place was being so squashed into a bunch of other sweating maniacs that you could not tell whose limb belonged to who.  The only problem with the new Stones is that it is not the old Stones, and therefore for anyone who knew the old Stones, just not enough.  I am sure to a younger generation, it is a great proper dive, but to us old timers, we know that the young’uns of today never had it as good as we did.

 

Back on track.  Housen was not a dive, not was it overly crowded.  It was a rather attractive looking Japanese restaurant.  It had a sort of stone path on a stone garden leading from the road to the door; an impressive single piece of lumber used as a counter for at least eight people; waitresses wearing Kimonos (which must be, next to a gimp suit, one of the most uncomfortable get-ups for doing what is a rather active job); a well priced menu that looked very tasty; all in all, it looked very good. 

 

The food:  I ordered the teppanyaki set (1,300 yen), which looked very good, bowl of rice, bowl of miso soup, a nimono dish of chicken and winter melon; some pickles and a cook-at-your table plate of bean sprouts, white asparagus, mushrooms and some very well marbled beef.  The problem was, after everything looking so promising, the food was not bad, but just not that exciting.  The beef was very tender, but perhaps lacking in flavour a bit, the sauce it was cooked in was a sort of sweetish soy-sauce based sauce, not bad, but just not that impressive.  The rice was nice, the pickles were a standard selection of takuwan and kuri asazuke.  I wanted to go wow, but I didn’t.  The food is by no means bad, it was just not as good as the lead up had lead me to want to believe.  22 points.

 

The price:  Not bad for what you got. 7 points.

 

The volume:  Although the serving was not huge, extra rice was on offer.  I guess I can’t really complain. 9 points.

 

The extras:  No desert, no caffeine, which are the essentials for scoring high on extras, but for a Japanese style place, in line with expectations I guess.  7 points.

 

Bonus:  Walking back to the office, RB asked what I was going to give the place.  After a bit of debate, I said probably about 55 points, i.e. it wasn’t bad, would not object to going there again, but it is not going to be the meal I order on my death bed.  Lapp said that I was doing the equivalent of sticking my finger in the air and coming up with a score as opposed to conducting a thorough analysis based on the categories set out above.  Today that is what I have done, so to come up with the score which I reckon is about right: 10 points.

 

The details:  Akasaka, Minato-ku

Phone 03 5545 4161

Web site: http://r.gnavi.co.jp/p868700/

 

Inageya – 54 points

Make you strong!  That was the aim of today’s lunch, although the thought of eel liver soup made most of our wide-eyes look somewhat weak in the stomach.  Without much of an explanation, other than today is ‘Eel Day’ we were dragged to Inageya in pursuit of eel.  It was not until halfway through the meal that we learnt that said dragger had a gokon this evening that we understood why he wanted to have eel so desperately.  I guess in the heat, raw oysters were not really a sensible option.  He did however try to argue that each day has its own special food, citing this Friday (8 August) as Samgyetang day.  Which leads me to believe he has a big weekend lined up if he needs both eel and ginseng in the same week.

 

Or maybe the heat is having a negative impact on his performance.  Why anyone would want to be within arm’s reach of another human being at this time of year is beyond me and the only thing I really want to snuggle up to in bed is a ice cold tinnie.

 

The food:  Good eel, very good eel.  Delicately roasted on a bed of rice, some nice crispy/chewy bits where the sauce had started to caramelise over the flame, good, but not over powering smoke flavours from the charcoals which I assume were used to grill it.  The soup that came with it (at an additional cost of 310 yen) was a very flavoursome clear soup with an eel liver floating in it.  For those of you who find the thought of eel liver too much to even consider, I beg you to try one.  It is rather small, not longer than 2cm in length, with a very delicate soft taste and creamy texture, nowhere near the strong flavours you get with chicken/pork/beef liver etc.  32 points.

 

The price:  The cheapest dish started at about 1,400 yen I think.  With my one grade up dish, I had a small box with two very small fillets of grilled ell on top of the rice and a small soup, which came in just shy of 2,000 yen.  News reports seem to indicate that eel is very expensive this year as a result of (i) global warming, (ii) the sub-prime crisis, (iii) the Chinese doing something, (iv) oil prices, (v) lack of availability of Viagra, or perhaps all of the above combined, but still a little more rice in the bowl wouldn’t break the bank, would it? 3 points.

 

The volume:  Sorry, just not there, which for a lunch that cost 2,000 yen, is not quite right.  The unspoken rule is that lunches should cost 1,000, if you are going to double the prices, at least make sure the punters aren’t going to leave feeling unsatisfied.  2 points.

 

The extras:  Having to pay an extra 310 for the suimono was a bit cheeky, but still a little bit of coffee jelly was a nice touch and one that usually doesn’t come with unadon.  7 points.

 

Bonus: Not sure if it made me strong, but at least I had enough strength to give it a try.  10 points.

 

The details: Nakamura Building 3-7-15 Akasaka, Minato-ku

Phone 03 3583 2650

Web site: http://r.tabelog.com/tokyo/rstdtl/13015104/

 

 

Umai Sushikan Akasaka branch – 56 points

Wide-eyes and sushi are never an easy combination, even though every sandwich shop, vaguely looking oriental restaurant, and the UK, even the local chemist, stocks it.  The problem comes down to the fact that notwithstanding that most wide-eyes with a vaguely cosmopolitan outlook are prepared to eat raw fish, they are not really up to facing all the other things that sit on top of rice in the name of sushi.  Fish eggs, too smell; squid, too slimy; octopus, don’t like the look of those suckers on the tentacles; uni – radioactive coloured slime was always going to be a hard sell. 

 

If I had a tokujo uni-don for each time a friend has visited, told me they lurve sushi, only to leave me facing a plate of sushi with everything left except the salmon and the tuna, I would be a happy lad.  Whilst the Lads are better than your average fresh-of –the-boat wide eye, RB’s insistence of fish on a Friday (something to do with some indoctrination he suffered as a kid about some other kid who died a nasty death far too long ago for anyone to remember) left me with slight apprehension.  Especially given his insistence on putting the rice not the topping in the soy sauce.

 

The Office Manager, who claims to be an old Japan head, orders the tokujo set as would be expected before saying that she does not like ikura and uni and then swapping her otoro with RB for his kanpyo-maki.  Now I am not an expert on art, but that seems a little bit like swapping one of Monet’s masterpieces for one of Little Trouble’ finger paintings.  Still though RB had a smile on his face when he managed to get rid of one of his kanpyo-maki.

 

The food: the earth didn’t move, but it was good.  We are not talking about Jiro or Kyubei here, but for a cheapish sushi chain store it was very good, especially given that this time of year is never the best time for most types of seafood.  The ikura was real (you may laugh, but in the case of a lot of chain store type places, this is not always the case), the fish was fresh, the uni was not quite there (but it never is unless you live in Reibun Island of the coast of Northern Hokkaido or are spending big bucks), the prawn was lovely, plump and creamy, the anago was good, but perhaps a few too many bones in it.  28 points.

 

The price: 1850 yen for a tokujo set with two otoro, plus uni, ikura, anago etc. was a bargain. 8 points.

 

The volume:  So long as you did not order the super cheap lunch and were prepared to eat what was served, fine.  Better than fine in fact, they even had a ‘full stomach set’ for 1200 yen or so, which left RB playing (or in his words organising) his food, so he must have been satisfied. 12 points.

 

The extras: Bowl of miso soup and as much green tea as you ask for, guess it was in line with what you would expect.  8 points.

 

Bonus: Almost led me to reassess the point scoring system to see if minus points could be awarded.  Really bad Japanese rap as BGM does not go with sushi.  No, no no!  Someone there must tell the boss that even if it is his favourite musak, it should be banned and all people who listen to it should be blindfolded and put against the wall for supporting the suffering that it causes.  Koto musak, naff but so long as it is quite, not likely to offend, ditto light classical music.  Even the dirty old radio behind the counter with NHK broadcasting high school baseball would be better.  Further whilst they have one of those fancy push a button and someone comes running systems, it was about as useful as a needle in a condom factory, they didn’t even have the excuse of being busy to ignore us (unless they were perhaps taking a stance against RB’s abuse of the sushi).  Sorry, but 0 points.

 

The details: Shinakasaka Building 3-13-10 Akasaka, Minato-ku

Phone 03 3560 6711

Web site: http://www.sushikan.co.jp