Fukuwauchi, Kyushu Cuisine, Izakaya – Shirokane Takanawa

The Master chef is also the owner of Oni wa Soto a Yakitori restaurant across the road and also good friends with the Master chef of Toritama, Shirokane.

This restaurant specialises in Kyushu Cuisine, an island to the far South West of Tokyo, the 3rd largest island in Japan, after Honshu (main island including Tokyo) and Hokkaido. Kyushu is famous for Shochu and soy sauce, which is sweeter than regular soy sauce.

This restaurant is one of my favourites and I would go daily if it wasn’t for the high cost of dining, dinner for 2, including drinks approx JPY 30,000-40,000 total.

The restaurant serves an excellent sashimi plate with about 8 different varieties of fish/ shellfish, presented on a long platter. The menu is eclectic with a lot of variety using an assortment of ingredients depending on the season. One of the main specialities is Niku-Jaga (Jaga is short for Jaga-imo (potato) and Niku means meat), which translates as beef and potato stew. This dish is really excellent though the portion is very small, for 1-2 persons max. The sauce is beautiful, slightly sweet from the soy sauce and the carrot, potato and beef are cooked to perfection.

In Autumn the speciality is turtle (suppon), which contains collagen and is good for the skin. Turtle meat tends to heat up the body so a small amount only is recommended for women, for men it is fine and is believed to improve health and virility (similar to snake in this respect).  There are many other regular dishes from green salads, potato salad, whole steamed fish Japanese style with soy sauce and mirin to tuna tonkatsu which is deep-fried and battered tuna cutlet with wasabi which is amazingly rich and beautiful. 

As with all Japanese food presentation is key and each dish is paired with a different plate chosen to match the food. The same applies for drinks with a beautiful selection of Sake (Nihon-shu), Tokkuri (sake servers) and cups used.

The restaurant has about 10 counter seats and 3 tables on tatami mats. Shoes need to be taken off for all seating, including counter seating.  Japanese menu only.

There is a good selection of Shochu as one might expect, Kyushu being the original home of Shochu as well as many good Sake (Nihon-shu) varieties. 

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