For the first time in a while I had some CDs to buy, so I headed over to the Kanda / Ochanomizu / Jimbocho area. While thinking about where to have lunch, I decided on Restaurant Shichijo, a yoshoku (Western-style) restaurant that’s been getting popular lately. At lunch they serve yoshoku like fried shrimp and beef curry, and in the evening it’s a French bistro, and apparently both are really good. They say the food got better after the chef trained at Kitajima-tei, a famous French restaurant.
The entrance
It’s very close to Jimbocho Station, in the basement restaurant arcade of a building next to a women’s university. It isn’t hard to find, but the surroundings aren’t as nice as I expected… and here I was, going out for a proper knife-and-fork meal…
The lunch menu
The items with a line through them are already sold out. The live-anago fry, where they take a live conger eel and fry it on the spot, must be popular, because it was gone.
Salad
Ordinary…
Soup
A hot vegetable soup. Not bad.
My order: fried shrimp + menchi-katsu, à la carte
If you order it à la carte without rice, they take 100 yen off. The shrimp was a really hefty one with plump, springy flesh. I hear they use frozen shrimp to keep the cost down, but even taking that into account it’s plenty tasty. The menchi-katsu was tasty too, but it’s not my kind. I like the style where meat and vegetables are mixed together, and theirs is packed with nothing but meat.
Beef curry, half portion
If you order a full plate the curry comes separately, but maybe because this was a half, it came poured over the rice. The beef has turned gelatinous and melts softly, the curry is slightly sweet and clearly simmered with care, and spooned over well-cooked rice it’s really delicious. The skill is on a par with Loup de Mer. Still, good as the curry is, I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say you must have the curry here. Tokyo is just full of places famous for their curry. If I come back for lunch again, I’ll order the fried shrimp set or the anago fry set.