Star Kebab House – 17 points

Is not a star.  It is a simple as this.  The only point of merit here was that they managed to reach an all time low of 17 points on this fountain of wisdom that the lads are behind.  This place should rename itself the No-Star Kebab House.  Which is rather sad, given that along with five daily servings of green vegetables, kebabs are one of life’s essential food groupings; especially when one has been primed with 12 pints of larger.  Perhaps that may be the reason why I though that this place was no good, i.e. I was not drunk and every other time I have had Turkish (i.e. a kebab), I was starving and pished.

 

The place offers a 1,000 yen lunch buffet – which alone seems to be one of those offers that appear to be going for maximum points.  But alas the buffet at the kebab house did not have any kebabs on offer.  What it did have was some rather uninspired meat in a sauce that apart from being slimy didn’t taste of much. 

 

The food:  Harry and I braved it and went for the buffet.  It was a bad choice, mince, chicken and mixed vegetables in a rather bland slime.  I was going to say that it was not bad, just tasteless, but given the way I felt after I left, it was pretty bad.  RB and Lapp insisted that given the place was a kebab house they would have a kebab, which must have confused the guy as I think that no one ever orders off the a-la-carte menu at lunch but just braves the buffet.  The most entertaining part of a-la-carte set menu was that it purportedly came with a side of salad and pilaf.  The waiter went promptly to the buffet table dumped some lettuce in a bowl and gave it to them.  I am sure you could have also sorts of debates about what constitutes a salad, but a bowl of lettuce does not, it is a bowl of lettuce.  Even better was the pilaf, which the new source of all knowledge, wikipedia, defines as “dish in which a grain, such as rice or cracked wheat, is browned in oil, and then cooked in a seasoned broth. Depending on the local cuisine it may also contain a variety of meat and vegetables”.  So instead of preparing some fantastic rice dish, the waiter goes to the rice cooker at the buffet table, puts some rice in a bowl and sprinkles some salt on it.  This was frankly taking the piss.  5 points.

 

The price:  1,000 for a lunch buffet is cheap, but then I would want to be paid to eat here again. 5 points.

 

The volume:  A buffet should score maximum points here, but this was a place where the food was so bad, you would not want to eat enough to get full. 7 points.

 

The extras:  Were shite.  There was a soup, straight of a tin, as well as a desert, fruit, straight out of a tin.  0 points.

 

Bonus: No bonus for the unforgivable sin of serving soup and fruit directly from a tin.  That is not cooking, in the case of the soup, that is simply reheating, and in the case of the fruit that is simply knowing how to operate a tin opener.  If a restaurant can’t even make the smallest attempt at cooking, it should close down and reopen as a supermarket. 0 points.

 

The details: 4^th Floor Akasaka Sangyo Bldg, 2-17-74 Akasaka, Minato-ku

Phone 03 6229 2868

Web site: http://www.starkebabhouse.com

OGO Ono-loa Hawaii – 64 points

The Sepos (RB’s term) are generally not known for their culinary expertise.  Admittedly they like to talk about it a fair bit, but at the end of the day they are just not that good at it.  They can talk all they like about their appreciation of food (and everybody knows that they like to talk a fair bit), but this is the country whose greatest offerring to global cuisine is hot milk with a hint of coffee flavour (come on *$s, that is not coffee) and a real estate company famous for its cheap hamburgers, which I am guessing were the invention of an immigrant from that other bastion of fine cooking, Scotland.  To support my claim, I would suggest taking a look at this great site (http://fxcuisine.com/default.asp?language=2&Display=129) for its explanation of artesian Jock cooking.

 

Anyway, enough bad mouthing a country with more nuclear bombs that Michelin stars.  There is one thing the Sepos do well, and that is pigs.  They can create food from a pig that no other country can get close to.  Whilst the Portuguese can do great things with a whole pig that deserve due credit, and I am sure the Chinese can use every bit of it in some way, they are no match for the yanks and what they can do to a swine.  Southern style ribs, dripping in a sauce that makes you want to use the rib as a spoon and eat the sauce direct; Mr. Brown & Mrs. White sandwiches of pork so soft and tasty it could be used as a pillow; bacon, that essential food stuff that can be abused so much (Danes in particular should be banned from ever touching a pig; perhaps we could adopt a sort of kosher eater for pigs, pigs should not be touched, processed, baconed or eaten by anyone with any connection to Denmark), can reach levels in the Big ‘ol US of A that it really reaches anywhere else.

 

The only state in the union to proudly bear Her Majesty’s insignia on its flag also can do great things to a pig, most famously its Kalua Pig.  I was recently in the Islands and had some steak, which was OK, but over priced and not that exciting; some fish that was fine, next to the beach, romantic and all, but not a shade on what you would get here; most other stuff tasted as if it had come out of a factory that uses by-products of the oil industry to produce human consumable products (sorry I am not going to call such muck food).  One of the more memorable meals I had was a loco-moco using Kalua pig instead of the usual hamburger in a dive of a bar a couple of blocks back of the beach with dodgy looking crew-cut boys from Ohio trying to chat up the hookers whose skirts were shorter in length than my belt was wide; real comfort food, rice, with a heap of shredded pork on top covered with a smallish lake of gravy and finished off with a fried egg.

 

The food:  So the test for today was, would Ogo’s pig, be as good as the pig in a dive on the back streets of Waikiki.  And low and behold the answer is yes.  The pork was great, flavoursome, dripping with just enough oil to be moist, but not overbearing, ripped into more pieces that Roy, Siegfried’s mate.  31 points.

 

The price:  Small portion 800 yen, medium portion 900 yen and large portion 1,000 yen.  I instinctively went for the large portion and it was a good size.  A lot of places skimp in the meat in their large portions and try and fill you up with the cheap carbs, but Ogo did not do that.  A good generous serving of meat, the way it should be.  8 points.

 

The volume:  I arrived hungry, I left full, of meat, I was happy.  Oink oink. 13 points.

 

The extras:  100 yen for the desert set, a coffee and 4 ice cream balls, not much other than that, but I had my caffeine and sugar hit so I was happy.  8 points.

 

Bonus: .The place is obviously an old hostess bar, where the guys have put up a couple of Hawaiian posters, some grass on the walls a fish tank and try to pass off as being like a local beach shack in the Islands, doesn’t quite work, but I found it kind of cute, in a high school festival stand type of way.  What didn’t work was the sound system.  They claim to have Tokyo’s largest selection of Hawaiian karaoke songs (although I would try and hide that point if possible), but the sound system just didn’t work.  In the days of digital radio from any planet within a few gillion light-years available from the net, why their Hawaiian sounding radio channel had so much static was beyond me.  Surely they are not picking it up by shortwave in this day and age.  If so, bonus points for being retro cool, but I doubt that was the case.  5 points.

 

The details:  Akasaka, Minato-ku

Phone 03 3585-5337

Web site: http://www.ogo-onoloahawaii.com/

West Park Cafe: Akasaka – 68 points

 

By the heat of the debate over today’s lunch about what extras are needed to make a hamburger complete, you would almost think a slice of cheese or accompanying soft drink were more important than the hamburger itself.  Lapp in particular seemed to take it personally that they would charge extra for a coke and slice of cheese; making bold statements that a burger is not a burger unless is had cheese and came with a coke.  For me so long as the meat is tasty and there is some bread on the same plate then I am satisfied, but I guess if I was forced to eat nothing but herrings for the first 20 years of my life, I would feel that I had a right to be demanding about what I ate after that.

 

RB, true to style though, came up with a great one, the ‘Hobo Burger’, which he described as consisting of two McDonalds hamburgers squished together with a layer of chips and tomato sauce between.  If 20 years of herrings had an impact on Lapp; one can only guess the impact of a similar amount of time at an English boarding school had on RB.  The mind boggles at what would drive a man to take bad food and deliberately making it worse in order t eat.

 

The food:  Very good hamburger, well seasoned high quality meat.  Even better is that they will cook it to order; when offered the choice, I will always tell the waiter to cook it rare and make sure that it is really rare.  In their case, the followed orders and it came back almost raw, which it the way I like it, but really does need a glass or three of something strong to act as a disinfectant.  Note to self, when eating beef for lunch, the need to be an alpha male is less than in the evenings (especially if stone cold sober) and in such circumstances, it is OK (if only ever so slightly girly) to order beef done medium rare.  The fries were great though. 31 points.

 

The price:  Had to knock off a couple of points for the rather high charges for slices of cheese/avocado/bacon etc.  If the restaurant can put together a lunch of soup (or salad), good fries, a good size burger and coffee for under 1,300 yen it is doing well, but after such a performance, it is pretty hard to justify 300 yen for a measly slice of cheese, and 500 yen for a can of coke is frankly taking the piss. 5 points.

 

The volume:  Good size burger, the patty must have been at least half a pound, fair serving of chips, the only thing it lets itself down with is the couple of leaves that masquerades as a salad.  Let it be noted that the first restaurant in Akasaka that serves a proper size side salad will get the full 20 bonus points. 12 points.

 

The extras:  Endless coffee was much appreciated, evening if it did leave me bouncing around for the rest of the afternoon.  RB and Lapp were not impressed about the meal not coming with coke or cheese though.  5 points.

 

Bonus:  For the rareness of the meat and three large cups of coffee, 10 points.  For stocking Metropolis, which is getting hard to find in Akasaka an extra 5 points.. 15 points.

 

The details:  2-14-3 Nagatacho, Chiyoda-ku

Phone 03 3580-9090

Web site: http://maysfood.com/wpc/wpc_akasaka.html