Saraku, Tokyo (茶らく)

I have a feeling that I need to adjust my rating system. The lunch contained herein felt like Y1200 or even Y1500 by Roppongi standards, but was Y1100 (and the under-Y1000 lunch looked just fine too). Similarly, if every day is going to bring a new teishoku, just tagging all these entries 'washoku' isn't going to work so well.

Right, after concluding our 2 hour meeting with someone who was pretending to care about the topic but knew that he was only minutes away from being formally transferred to another continent (the announcement was being made as we left the meeting), everyone really needed a decent lunch. My initial thought was to walk over to Nihonbashi and hit up Coredo (コレどう？), but along the way I saw Tokyo station, and remembered the delicious and quite luxurious miso katsu I once had in the basement. We changed course and headed for Kitchen Street.

There are a lot of options there, but the mutually agreed winner was the ochazuke, Saraku. The lunch options were essentially combinations of a few things: ochazuke with regular dashi (white, for some reason), ochazuke with tonkotsu dashi, toppings of your choice, and cooked items. We each had an ochaz + cooked - for her, grilled fish (probably sanma. When will they go away? It's 秋刀魚, after all, and 秋 is almost over.) and for me grilled eggplant ankake. Cooked things were surprisingly good, ochazuke with your choice of two toppings (gomakonbu, mentai, shisonomi, takuan, etc) plus standard toppings (nori, those crunchy little bread balls) was quite surprising, the ocha came in small iron pots, the rice and cha were refillable...all in all, a very pleasant experience.

It does worry me a little that there were practically no men in the place though...that happens to me far too often.

http://saraku.tub.co.jp/
03-5224-3838