When I was planning this Osaka/Kobe/Kyoto trip, the very first restaurant I locked in was Il Ghiottone, an Italian place in Kyoto. It’s famous enough that you could call it Kyoto’s number one, and it even has a branch in Marunouchi, Tokyo. (Though the branch’s reviews aren’t all that great..) I originally wanted to book lunch, but it’s so popular that you can’t get a reservation unless you call about two weeks ahead. So I had no choice but to book late at night on the day I was heading home. The one saving grace was that a friend came all the way to Osaka, so we could go together. Otherwise I might never have made it there.
As its name almost suggests, Il Ghiottone is close to Gion. To be exact, it’s right next to the Yasaka Pagoda. If you’re not sure where that is, just look up and find the pagoda. I already knew where it was, so it wasn’t hard to find.
A rickshaw girl
She was waiting for customers right in front of the pagoda.
The front entrance
It looks small from the outside, but inside it’s surprisingly spacious with plenty of tables. The service staff give solid support, and I liked that the kitchen is open. The only downside was that the tables are packed too close together.
House champagne
Just so-so. I had to drive, so I stuck with sparkling water.
Sparkling water
The lighting was dim, so most of the photos didn’t come out well. Can’t be helped. I can only blame my own lack of photography skills.
When I went to order, the menu only listed prices. It’s a full omakase course. Even for dinner it’s very cheap, in the 10,000-yen range. That’s about 60-70% of what comparable restaurants charge. Since there was no menu, everything from here on is written purely from memory, but I drove a long way home right after eating, so I don’t remember much. Anyway, I’ll do my best.
Stick
I forgot its proper name.. A very ordinary taste. Maybe because the place was packed that day, the timing of the service wasn’t great. So we spent a long time waiting, nibbling on sticks and bread. Well.. it’s a restaurant in a tourist spot, so you have to put up with that to some degree.
Breads
Focaccia and walnut bread. Pretty standard.
The breads my friend ordered
Cheese bread, bread made with Italian flour, and a stick. The Italian-flour bread was the best.
Starter: sea urchin and jelly
I think there was potato underneath. If you want to taste the richness of sea urchin, it needs to be piled on this generously. Including the tangy jelly, it was a very satisfying dish.
Peach and shrimp with yogurt sauce
My friend liked this one better. It brought out the flavor of the seasonal fruit well. It’s peach season right now, so there are peaches everywhere you go. They sell Okayama peaches near my place too, so I’ve been eating them a lot.
Tuna tataki salad
Somehow the ingredients overlap with what I had for lunch. Tuna is such a commonly eaten fish anyway, so I’ll pass..
Scallop ratatouille
A dish of a huge grilled scallop wrapped in prosciutto, ratatouille, and three colored sauces. I remember the sauces being yellow pepper, paprika and spinach. The scallop tasted great, of course. But I liked the ratatouille more. It’s not an expensive ingredient, but you could tell a lot of care went into it. With so many colors, it looked pretty too.
Ayu consommé and corn soup
They said the ayu (sweetfish) is from Gifu and semi-wild. You could see at a glance it was small, and again the ingredients weren’t great, but the cooking was good. It had a crispy, cracker-like taste. As for the soup, the corn and fresh cream went well together, so an ordinary dish ended up tasting better than ordinary.
Bacon rolls
This one was very ordinary
Hamo pasta
As I mentioned in my last post, in summer the only fish really worth eating are hamo (pike conger) and tuna. Pasta made with hamo, how very Kyoto. But the noodles and the other ingredients were overcooked overall, so it felt a bit lacking. Still, you’re getting Kyoto-style cooking at an Italian place you drop into while sightseeing in Kyoto, so that alone deserves some credit.
Pasta with an ingredient called togan
This was on the lunch menu too. Maybe because the restaurants are in the same neighborhood, there’s a lot of overlap. Togan (winter melon) is a vegetable that looks like a Korean melon and tastes somewhere between daikon radish and pumpkin. As a pasta.. hmm.. the noodles were overcooked, so I can’t rate it well. It was a moment that made me think of the superb pasta at Acqua Pazza.
Pasta with quail
They tried to bring out quail’s distinctive flavor, but I’m not a big fan of quail myself.
Getting the risotto ready
They bring over a whole table just for the risotto. That’s service with impact. No wonder the place is overflowing with customers. It felt like a restaurant that really knows how business works.
Served into bowls
Maybe because they used a ton of cheese, it tasted fantastic, but too much cheese always makes things a bit heavy. Anyway, it was good.
Foie gras with pistachio ice cream and pumpkin
Just as I was thinking I was getting sick of foie gras and couldn’t eat any more, something unusual came out. Warm foie gras eaten with cold pistachio ice cream and a pumpkin soup (?). Foie gras really does go well with sweet ingredients. And eating the warmed foie gras together with the cold ice cream, the contrast is amazing. I don’t think I’ll be saying I can’t eat foie gras anymore for a while.
The bowl looked like a UFO, so here’s a close-up for proof..
Pork from Parma, Italy
Honestly, Japan is a country rich in ingredients, so I don’t think there’s any need to import meat. Imported meat probably comes over by ship, so it can’t taste that good. I’d say it was neither bad nor good.
French beef
Same verdict for this one. But it deserves credit for not being an ordinary steak. And the asparagus was cooked almost perfectly. I eat asparagus pretty often myself, but when I cook it, it never turns out tasty.
With the main course out, it’s almost dessert time. You can choose your own dessert, but none of them looked all that great. It was about the level of La Bettola. I wish they’d put in a bit more effort, it’s quite a different concept from Kobe.
Green grape jelly.
A palate-cleansing dessert before the dessert. Refreshing.
Grapefruit jelly
Good for cleansing the palate, but the taste was just so-so.
My crème brûlée-like dessert
I expected something like pudding, but it was firm. The taste was so-so too..
Vanilla ice cream and pineapple
There seemed to be coconut in it, but it was just so-so.
Tea
And with that, a grand three-and-a-half-hour meal more or less came to an end. There’s also an option to have dessert wine or port after the tea, but we were short on time, so we didn’t get that far.
To sum up this place: the food is good overall, and at the low end of the 10,000-yen range it’s very cheap for a dinner course at a restaurant of this class. You get to make happy memories over more than three and a half hours, after all. (For example, at Graciani in Kobe I paid 10,000 yen for a one-hour lunch.) It’d work not only for dates but also for anniversaries or a proposal. I didn’t order the expensive menu, so I can’t be sure, but they didn’t use any particularly special ingredients. Still, they put a lot of care into each dish, so I have no complaints. I just wish they’d pay a bit more attention to dessert. Also, I didn’t like how, being so famous, they’ve squeezed in as many tables as possible, but I guess that’s unavoidable once a restaurant gets famous and reservations come flooding in. La Bettola was the same. I’ve decided to stay away from famous restaurants for a while.