A note on the words: yoshoku is Japanese-style Western food — dishes like hamburg steak (a knife-and-fork ground-meat patty), fried shrimp and cream croquettes, reinvented in Japan over a century ago. Hiyashi chuka is chilled ramen noodles with toppings and a sweet-tart sauce, a summer standard. Royal Host is a well-known Japanese family-restaurant chain.
ISETAN DINING on Tabelog (English) — opening hours, payment details and the Japanese address are kept up to date there, not here.
Drinkers of the world, thank you for waiting. It is Hangover Meshi time!
So, this time I had a bit of shopping to do in Shinjuku and went to Isetan! Figuring I might as well have lunch while I was there, I headed up to the restaurant floor — and found unbelievable lines, ha. Wow, that is a department store for you. I had clearly underestimated it. Among all of them, the line that was still bearable was this place, “ISETAN DINING“.
“ISETAN DINING” is a family restaurant inside Isetan where you can enjoy all sorts of cooking — Japanese, yoshoku and Chinese. It has the feel of the old “dining hall inside the department store,” I suppose. I do not really remember going to one as a child, but “slightly classy family restaurant” fits it perfectly.
They were selling Royal Host frozen foods on the premises, so the real body (the inside) may well be Royal Host, ha
After a short wait we were shown to a table! Looking at the menu, everything runs a fine price! Curry, tonkatsu and hamburg steak are in the 3,000-yen range. Steak is 5,000 yen! W-well, everywhere else was packed anyway, ha.
Back in the day, a trip to the department store was probably a major event, so eating yoshoku you never saw at home, at prices like these, must have been the treat. Truly a special-occasion feast!
Well, I am having a beer first regardless! ha
We ordered the lot and waited over beer.
THE hamburg steak, right? ha
By the way, the official name of this dish is long, so I cut it short — it is actually called the “Kuroge Wagyu and Kurobuta Hamburg Steak & Fried Natural Shrimp and Red Snow Crab Cream Croquette,” ha
Sitting on the piping-hot iron plate is the “everything-on-it” of yoshoku, ha. I may have gotten a little greedy. The star is the hamburg steak of Kuroge Wagyu beef blended with kurobuta pork, well seared on the outside and juicy within. Juicy — or rather, an unbelievable amount of meat juice? Juice? ha — comes flooding out. This has to be the type where they put something inside, right? ha. Taken together with the red-wine-forward demi-glace, it is seriously delicious! The very picture of a classic hamburg steak.
The fried shrimp on the side is packed with firm flesh, plump and sweet. Why is it that fried shrimp somehow makes you happy just by being there?
One more: the red snow crab cream croquette, its rich white sauce loaded with crab oozing out. That slightly sweet flavor is irresistible. And this greedy set comes with soup, salad and rice.
I went and added a highball too!
This is my friend’s hiyashi chuka. It was listed as a summer recommendation, so I believe it is a seasonal item. It comes with a kurobuta shumai and annin tofu. I had a bite — the classic sweet-and-sour Chinese-style sauce is delicious! The ingredients are good ones, so it comes out as a refined hiyashi chuka! 2,420 yen! Not bad at all.
And so: a department-store restaurant! Somehow, ordering yoshoku in a place like this does lift your spirits a little, and that is rather nice! In the end it seems we had simply walked in at the right moment — by the time we left the place was nearly full. That said, it did feel vaguely Royal Host-ish — but it is delicious, so who cares.
May you meet something delicious today too!
ISETAN DINING (Restaurant / Shinjuku-sanchome Station, Shinjuku Station, Shinjuku-nishiguchi Station)
Tabelog lunch rating ★★★☆☆ 3.3
I ate here and paid for it myself. Nothing on this site is a comped meal.
One more for the road?
