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

Asterix – 93 points

The Gaul.  An old favourite and rightly so.  This place does by far and away the best pepper sauce to ever grace a hunk of dead flesh. The guy ruling the stove is an old surly bloke, who always appears to be in a cow of a mood and regularly abuses his staff in the foulest French a non-native has ever spoken.  There is a tendency of a lot of French restaurants to adopt the typical Gaul service style, i.e. rude, unhelpful and generally not the sort of people you want to sit down and have a pint with.  This is annoying in France, but even worse here as you always get the feeling that if the waiter was in any other restaurant, he would be formal and polite as expected.  At the Gaul however, the guy behind the counter really does appear to be a grumpy old git; he can probably get away with it because the food is so good.

 

The food:  Fantastic.  The steak is great, it is better than great, it is a force surhumaine that goes well beyond la potin magique.  The menu consists of two options, an A course for 1,500 yen and a B course for 2,000 yen.  Both courses have 3 or so options as a starter, 3 options as a main and a desert plate that contains more calories than a grown man needs for a week.  I have visited a number of times, and almost always have the steak, but the lamb there is also very good.  37 points.

 

The price:  For what you get, a bargain. 8 points.

 

The volume:  Only 1 point lost for its ability to induce sleep about half an hour after eating. 14 points.

 

The extras:  A coffee and Tokyo’s best lunch desert place.  14 points.

 

Bonus.  Full bonus points because I always leave this place happy.  This is a place to look forward to, a Friday lunch to celebrate the end of the week, the sort of lunch that if you had more than once a week (or year perhaps) you would keel over with a heart attack.  20 points.

 

The details: 6-3-16 Akasaka, Minato-ku

Phone 03 5561 0980

 

The Taj – 55 points

A couple of drinks the night before had left me feeling a bit foggy.  With drinks planned for this evening with a couple of old colleagues, curry was the obvious choice.  I have written before about the incredible health benefits of a curry when trying to deal with a hangover, and following some sage advice by a cabbie, I have recently starting drinking turmeric supplement drinks before a session.  I am usually not a fan of old wives’ type potions, but I think there is something to turmeric as a hangover remedy. 

 

I had been to this place before, wasn’t overly impressed, but given that RB complained about the size of the portions at Moti, this place, which served a lunch time buffet, seemed the obvious choice. 

 

The food:  This is another quantity over quality place.  Not the best curry in town, but by no means offensive.  The buffet had a chicken curry, vegetable curry, dal curry and prawn curry.  Each had generous servings of meat.  There was also salad, popadoms, nan bread, rice, some potato balls and chutney etc. on offer.  The nan was a bit dry, but to be expected after sitting in a heating dish for a while..  22 points.

 

The price:  1,200 yen for all you can eat is a pretty good deal for this part of town. 8 points.

 

The volume:  It’s a buffet, could have as much as I wanted.  Even better, with unlimited coffee (not very good), desert (a rather bad tapioca desert) and salad (shredded lettuce, cabbage and carrot, with dressing – not imaginative in any way, but a more than satisfactory way to get some roughage). 15 points.

 

The extras:  They did have desert and coffee, but they just weren’t that good.  The popadoms and chutney was nice though.  8 points.

 

Bonus:  Lost points as there was no where suitable to wait.  Having to hang around a very crowded entrance way with people banging into from each direction was just annoying. 5 points.

 

The details: 3-2-7 Akasaka, Minato-ku

Phone 03 3586 6606

Web site: http://www.thetaj-jp.com

 

Hostellerie Suzuki – 56 points

In memory of what happened on a date that shares the same date (at least in terms of day and month) many years ago, the lads decided it would be appropriate to raise a couple of glasses to fallen heroes near one of Tokyo’s well known (notorious) centres of remembrance, Yasukuni Jinja.  Unfortunately, whilst the location chosen to remember the history that brought us where we are today was the lovely and high recommendable Kudan Kaikan, due to the existence of a very reasonable nomi hodai (i.e. all you can drink) plan on the menu, none of us are in any position (or until at least a couple of days after, any condition) to give any comment on how the place was.  Photos of the evening suggest however that the local wildlife was rather pretty.

 

Which leads me on to lunch, which at least, if not more memorable, I can remember more about.  Hostellerie Suzuki is a very nice French restaurant, just up the road and almost opposite what is currently my top French restaurant for lunch in Tokyo (more about that soon).  I had visited this place before and had a very tasty bit of lamb with Big Trouble, so it was with hope that we ventured out into the oven for a bit of Frog.

 

The food:  Not quite as good as the first time round, but still not bad.  RB had I both went for the homemade bacon, on a salad bed.  The bacon was good, but a little overcooked.  As a result of my recent interest in charcuterie, much credit goes to a restaurant that will make the effort of curing its own bacon, although to really show off a home made bacon, it needs to be cooked to the stage where there is a little crispiness around the edges, but the meat is still soft so that when you bite into it the flavours of the cure come through.  The place can do better, I know as the lamb I had there a month or so ago was fantastic, which is saying something a city that doesn’t generally do lamb well.  25 points.

 

The price:  About 1,500 yen for a lunch that comes with a salad or soup, main, bread and a choice of three deserts from the desert buffet. 6 points.

 

The volume:  Not quite there, although extra bread was provided (on request). 7 points.

 

The extras:  Coffee and a desert buffet, with good deserts.  Almost perfect, the only lost points were due to the coffee being a bit small and the desert buffet being limited to a choice of three cakes.  13 points.

 

Bonus: Sorry, but not having the air conditioner working properly at this time of year almost gets you no bonus points, the only redeeming point was that some workman was in there trying to fix it.  Still French is generally not the type of cuisine that goes well with buckets of sweat, unless there is a well-chilled bottle of something pink to go with it, hopefully next to a beach. Still though, we will visit again, hopefully when the heat has dissipated a bit, the bonus score should be a bit higher as this place deserves more than 56 points.  5 points.

 

The details: B1F Maeda Building 5-4-17 Akasaka, Minato-ku

Phone 03 3585 6080

Web site: http://www.hos-suzuki.com

 

Pizza Salvatore – 63 points

I once saw a great interview with Gordon Ramsey, in which when asked about whether RamGord was behind the stoves in any of the restaurants branded with his name, he went into a great rant about whether the journo actually expected that Giorgio Armani had personally stitched the Armani suit the journo was wearing.  He had a good point perhaps, but perhaps not a perfect point.

 

There are certain types of food (and perhaps certain particular restaurants) where the food may depend on the actual physical skill of the person preparing it.  It is often said that good sushi depends just as much on the chef’s knowledge as his actual physical technique in making it; hands that are too small, too warm or too week just cannot physically make the perfect bed of rice on which to lay the perfectly cut bit of dead protein.

 

Perhaps pizza may be the same.  I once had a discussion with a pizza chef from the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, who said that in training to become a pizza chef, a process that takes a number of years apparently, the first year was spend doing nothing but kneading the dough.  In the case of a pizza restaurant using a wood fired oven (that gets extra points, especially given that they appear to be using hand-cut oak to fire it), it surely takes a number of years experience to get a feeling for how the oven is operating at any one time; how hot the floor is, how hot the walls are, whether extra wood needs to be added, whether there is too much smoke in the over, and most importantly how long the pizza should be left in to reach the perfect state where the dough is perfectly cooked and the cheese, just starting to bubble.

 

Salvatore is by and large my favourite pizza joint in Tokyo.  The person behind the Salvatore chain is a guy called Makoto Onishi, one of the only (perhaps the only) non-native to win the Naples Pizzafest competition.  I am sure he is good, if the best of Naples say that he is good, he must be very good.  And whilst the pizzas at Salvatore are very good, it was clear that he was not wielding the peel today.

 

The food:  A very good pizza, the tomato sauce had the perfect balance of tangyness and fruityness, the mozzarella was buffalo and generously applied; the olive oil was seeping through the pizza onto the plate leaving a nice puddle to be mopped up.  But the bottom was burnt.  I love this place, I love their pizzas, I was looking forward to one today, but the burnt flavour just cuts through everything.  I have faith in this place, I will visit again, but the guy with the peel was not having the perfect day when he put my lunch in the oven .  25 points.

 

The price:  1,400 yen for a pizza, drink, cold soup and a couple of leaves masquerading as salad (nice dressing though)  5 points.

 

The volume:  Good size pizzas, a bit more in the way of salad leaves would be nice though, it is not as though lettuce is expensive at this time of year. 10 points.

 

The extras:  A salad, soup, drink and pizza in the set is not bad, but surely a salad can be more than a couple of lettuce leaves.  8 points.

 

Bonus: For using a wood fired oven, and burning proper hard grain wood in it – 20 points.  For not being able to use the thing properly – minus 5 points. 15 points.

 

The details: 1 Fl Prudential Plaza, 2-13-10, Nagatacho Chiyoda-ku

Phone 03 3500 5700

Web site: http://www.salvatore.jp/

 

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/

 

 

Kintaro – 68 points

Is it culinary imperialism to appreciate plastic plates?  There are certain places where you can get away with plastic plates.  A beer garden in a obvious one; a pool side is another – in fact when with Little Trouble, a place that served drinks in glass next to a pool would lose points for the resulting danger of broken glass.  Now if that is not a sign of getting old and mature, I am not sure what it. 

 

One other place where plastic plates always seems to make a place feel that little bit more authentic is a cheep Asian restaurant.  Kintaro uses plastic plates, and I liked them.  I am a sucker for simple things like that, but aren’t most wanna-be wide-eye foodies?  Somehow the cable channel in some unrecognisable language playing in the background along with plastic plates for the food and metal rice bowls for the rice makes it seem so much more Korean, which in turn leads me to believe the food will be that much closer to the real deal.  I feel as if I am entering a restaurant in the back streets of Seoul, just because of a couple of plates and some tatty posters for the local fire water, written in a language I don’t read. 

 

Funny thing though, is if anyone asked me where I had eaten the best yakiniku, my answer would be Japan, without a doubt.  Whilst I have had some great yakiniku meals in Korea, the highlight of which was a fantastic beach side place on the outskirts of Seogwipo on Cheju Island where this drop-dead beauty served up this rib with enough meat on it to feed half the island and then proceeded to take to it with a pair of scissors in way that still causes me to have wet nightmares, generally the best yakiniku I have had has been in Tokyo. 

 

The food:  Although there were various types of branded beef on the menu, we went with the mixed plate of skirt steak (harami) and ribs (karubi), which came with ten or so generous chunks of meat.  For a cheap lunch menu the meat was surprisingly tasty; both cuts had decent amount of fat on them, making them tender but not overdone as is often the case.  28 points.

 

The price:  980 yen for a good filling meat lunch.  Can’t complain. 8 points.

 

The volume:  Good amount of meat, which could be increased to a Bearded One size for an extra 400 yen.  There was a stand in the restaurant where you could help yourself to extra rice and miso soup.  All in all, I left feeling rather well fed, but not as stuffed as the poor cows probably were. 12 points.

 

The extras:  Big bowls of kimchee and kakuteki on the table, along with a bunch of smaller dishes containing pickled bean sprouts, pa jeon, some egg dish (which I wasn’t able to identify but nevertheless very tasty) along with a big bowl of shredded cabbage, which Lapp promptly mixed with kimchee, poured dressing all over and claimed to have created a Korean salad.  10 points.

 

Bonus:  The plastic plates, signs with signatures written in hangul on them, bottles of soju and makkoli lining the walls, having to go past a dodgy looking shop selling dresses for the angles of the night and down some stairs at the back of a building gave it a very authentic feeling.  10 points.

 

The details: B1 Fl, 2-13-16 Akasaka, Minato-ku

Phone 03 5562 3727

Web site: http://r.gnavi.co.jp/p421100/

Thai Suki Dining – 45 points

There is old saying in this part of town about mad dogs and the Lads. Just as a rabid infested mongrel would say (assuming he could talk as opposed to just foam at the mouth), Lapp came up with a cracker as we walked out of the air conditioned cocoon of the ‘stork in the dump’ to the searing desert of Akasaka’s pavements. It was hot, it was damm hot, it was so hot that even rabid dogs would be sensible enough to find a bit of shade. So there I was standing in this heat, sweating like a swine in an abattoir, when Lapp suggests that we should go and have a Thai curry. Having vetoed it the day before, I was not in a position to put up much of a fight to his delight. Although I strongly believe that his need for heat has something to do with being brought up somewhere north of the North Pole with only polar bears and penguins for friends. Perhaps there may even be a concept in this mystical land of the northern lights and human eating polar bears that if you do not experience an average temperature of more than zero during your life time, then you are dammed to spend eternity in a frozen wasteland.

So anyway, after swimming the approximately 5 million centimetres between the office and Thai Suki Dining, we arrived in to its every so slightly air-conditioned environment. Cheery then suggested it was a nice day so we should all sit at the outside table. Now I am all in favour of al fresco dining. Get me outside in almost any weather and suddenly the food tastes a little better, the beer goes down just that little bit more smoothly, but next to a jam packed road with taxis belching out fumes when the mercury is higher than the Crane sitting outside is not a good idea.

Anyway, getting to the point.

The food: a few more chunks of meat and the score would have been a few points higher. The green curry consisted of sauce and aubergines. Not that I don’t like aubergines, they are in season now, a great versatile vegetable, but as the sole filling for a curry, just not quite enough. The curry was average, a bit too much heat without the flavour to match, and disappointingly no where near as good as their sister store Ti Nun over in Tameike Sanno, the Lads old regular for a Thai curry hit. 23 points.

The price: 1,000 yen for as much as you can eat is not bad in this part of town. Also they had a couple of curries, a couple of other dishes as well as a bad desert, so price wise, not bad. 7 points.

The volume: Begrudgingly I cannot fault them on this as being a buffet, I could have as much as I wanted. 15 points.

The extras: There was a desert, but it was some sort of pumpkin based muck, so no credit for that. Also a couple of jugs of ice tea or coffee at a buffet isn’t too much to hope for these days is it?. 0 points.

Bonus: None, it was hot, I was grumpy, I had to sit outside, all I really needed was a caffeine hit and the meal didn’t even come with a coffee. 0 points.

Dudes, in summary, the Lads are wet behind the ears (probably as a result of the heat), lost in a new town, albeit 10 minutes walk from the old stomping ground.  We need a good curry, we are open to options.  A bit of work at it could be you, but it needs a bit of work. 

The details: 2Fl, 2-13-1 Akasaka, Minato-ku
Phone 03 5114 5507
Web site: http://www.spiceroad.co.jp/tenpo.html