Every day around lunchtime I find myself wondering what to eat. When I have time I cook for myself, but with a working life that isn’t always easy. Right before lunch I happened to be searching the web and found out that Nakajima, a well-known Japanese restaurant in Shinjuku, has a cheap lunch menu, so I went to check it out.
The entrance
It’s in a basement, not far from the South Exit of Shinjuku Station. It was already fairly well known, but it got even more famous after earning a Michelin star.
The 900-yen iwashi (sardine) yanagawa set
Every lunch item here is built around iwashi. There’s sashimi and there’s tempura, but I went for the yanagawa, which is 100 yen more. Yanagawa is normally made with loach. Their iwashi yanagawa is well made, but because of the ingredient itself it falls a little short of a loach yanagawa. (The burdock is missing too.) It even feels a notch below a katsu nabe. If you really want to enjoy the iwashi, I think the sashimi would have been the better pick. Although that sashimi isn’t ordinary sashimi either..
Rice
One extra serving is free. It tastes fine, but it’s not as good as the rice I had at Mont Blanc the other day.. which is why you can’t trust Michelin..
Miso soup and oshinko pickles
Clean-tasting but ordinary. Not much goes into it, so that’s to be expected.
For a 900-yen Japanese set meal, it’s very good. But I don’t think it’s worth making a special trip just for this lunch set. The basics are solid, but something special is missing. And eating lunch here doesn’t mean you can say you’ve been to a one-Michelin-star restaurant, either. I guess you shouldn’t expect too much from a set meal that costs under 1,000 yen..