Elynna C.
Google
READ THIS IF YOU’RE A FOREIGNER/TOURIST
tl;dr The food is good, but not good enough to warrant a 3-hr wait. Queue at your own risk.
There’s probably a cultural/taste difference between locals and tourists, so I’m writing this review for the non-Japanese foreigners who are in the process of being lured to tales of “the best curry in Japan” (spoiler: cap).
Here’s the breakdown:
Food: 3/5
The curry was clearly made with love and stewed for hours. The beef was extremely tender. The issues I have with it are: 1) the spices weren’t blended very well and left a bunch of hard pieces in the curry, which took away from the taste and texture; 2) there was about 3 cubes of beef in the curry and nothing else. I felt like I was eating purely just sauce and rice; 3) it literally looks like slop. The presentation is awful; 4) the flavor profile made it seem more like Indian curry. I realized later that “European curry” is a subgenre of Japanese curry that takes more from the Indian spice profile, so it actually fits the categorization here, but it’s still missing the toppings that are typically offered in European curry. So for all of that I’m docking 2 stars.
Service: 2/5
The lady running the restaurant was very nice, but I think there is something severely wrong with restaurant management when people are queueing for 3 hours in the hot summer sun in the street in front. On top of that, if the curry runs out, you don’t get a bowl no matter how long you’ve queued. Thankfully we were able to get our food, but that’s ridiculous. For context, we started queueing at 11am (restaurant opens at 11:30am). We were already 18th in line. We weren’t seated until a bit past 2pm. Imagine going to the restaurant 30 minutes before it opens and still needing to queue for 3 hours. At the very least we should be able to leave our name and phone numbers down and be given a 2 minute grace period once we’re next. Or if you can’t manage that, then do reservations. The store itself also only seats 12 people total, which makes the turnaround incredibly slow. Four more people were seated after us, and then everyone else was sent away because they ran out of curry. There were 6 people after us, so the last 2 people had to wait for hours before then being turned away. Ridiculous.
Atmosphere: 4/5
Cute shop playing calm classical music. Everything was a bit old but clean. All the diners were just sweaty and hungry, as expected.
Conclusion: I’m happy I came to see what the fuss was about, but sorely disappointed with what I tasted and experienced. Until they switch their ancient queueing system or add the elixir of life to their curries, I will never come here again and will be warning anyone else about this place.