This post was written in 2005. Shop details and prices may have changed since then.
I went to Hiro, a famous Italian restaurant that competes for the number one or two spot even in Tokyo.
It’s in the basement of a building right in the middle of a residential area, so it’s a little hard to find. This is the sign on the way
down to the basement.
With a reservation you can order from the 3,800 yen menu up. Without one, courses start at 2,000 yen.
But even at 3,800 yen, add tax and a glass of wine and it comes to 5,000 yen.
At Hiro you’re fine without a reservation if you show up at exactly noon, but I don’t recommend going for lunch. The lunch menu
has no real main to speak of. T_T And I ordered the cheapest course, which I don’t recommend either.
Unlike La Bettola, here you have to order the expensive course to get to choose the good dishes.. (-_-;;)
The name was too complicated for me to remember, but the vegetables were insanely fresh.
It came out blurry, but this is a yellowtail (buri) salad. Maybe because winter is its season, the yellowtail was delicious..
Breadsticks, two per person. (I’d already eaten one.) They have a unique flavour.
The house wine. I skipped the red and ordered a sparkling wine.
As long as it’s not a meat dish, sparkling wine seems to go pretty well with pasta.
Bread and olive oil. You can pick as much as you like from several kinds of bread.
The one with parsley and carrot was the best, but it didn’t make it into the photo..
Squid ink risotto topped with crab meat. The ingredients were so good that the whole thing reeked of crab, in the best way.
A beef + potato dish. Apart from dessert, I think this was the best dish of the day.
The beef and potato were a killer match..
Here comes the pasta. Hiro is famous for tomatoes (^_^), and the tomato pasta was excellent.
But then I looked over at the next table and they were getting sea urchin pasta -_-;; I learned the hard way that
you must never order the cheapest course here. T_T
Dessert. Vanilla ice cream and baked apple! The best dish of the day!!
The ice cream and the apple are each perfectly convincing on their own, but when they meet in your mouth you get a
fantastic flavour.. La Bettola’s pasta was good, but the dessert was a bit of a mess..
In that sense, apart from the price, there was nothing at all to fault at Hiro. My guess is that if you want to
eat here properly, it’ll set you back over 10,000 yen per person.
Another dessert. It was coffee-based, so I didn’t touch it.
Tea comes with dessert, but I didn’t take a picture.
Overall it was a good place, but price-wise it’s a bit of a burden. T_T
I don’t know if I’ll ever go back. For this money I’d go to Din Tai Fung three times. ^_^;