Horumon Masaru is a yakiniku place in much the same style as, say, Kameido Horumon. What makes it unusual is that it opens for lunch, and the 1,000-yen lunch set is hugely popular.

The entrance

There’s already a long queue before it even opens.

The fire

Almost exactly the same style as Kameido Horumon, only this place is a little tidier.

The menu

The prices are pretty good.

Horumon Masaru’s greatest hits

No. 1 shimacho, No. 2 the signature Masaru horumon, No. 3 shiro reba (white liver), No. 4 gopchang, No. 5 negi hatsu, No. 6 Ganchu pork, No. 7 kalbi, No. 8 engawa, apparently. Looking around at the other tables, adding shimacho to the 1,000-yen lunch seemed to be the unwritten rule here, so I did that and threw in a raw egg as well. In the end my 1,000-yen lunch turned into a 1,660-yen lunch.

Recommended items

I was here alone for lunch, so these I could only look at…

Raw egg

It lets you eat the meat sukiyaki style. It would have been a disaster if I hadn’t ordered it.

Salad

Suimono

The yakiniku set meal

Beautiful colour on it.

Barley rice

Shimacho

The best thing on the menu here. It’s what Koreans call daechang, and it has a charm all of its own, different from how it tastes back in Korea.

Nicely grilled…

Eating yakiniku alone really is an advanced course. You have to grill while you eat, and getting that timing right is not easy. Put the meat on, sneak a spoonful of rice before it’s done, dip the cooked pieces in the sauce and eat them… then put on as much meat as you’ve just eaten… slip up and it burns, so you have to keep the rhythm going. But I’m an advanced player… so I ate very well. The yakiniku itself was fantastic, but the shimacho was so fresh it tasted like chocolate. It had been a long time since I’d enjoyed yakiniku this much.

One thing did surprise me that day. For some reason, even though the place opens at 11:30, plenty of people were drinking beer and ordering a full yakiniku spread from the moment the doors opened. Does nobody work? I thought — and then I thought, well, maybe this is what happiness looks like.

한국어로 읽기日本語で読む