A note on the words: a gozen is a Japanese set meal served on a tray, with a main dish, rice, soup and a scatter of small side dishes. Katsu is meat or fish breaded in panko crumbs and fried, and here it is served rare, with the center left barely cooked. Chazuke is rice with hot broth or tea poured over it, eaten at the end of a meal; sea bream is tai in Japanese. Koji is the cultured mold used to make miso, soy sauce and sake, and shoyu-koji is a seasoning paste made from it. Yokan is a firm block of sweetened jelly, usually set with agar. Zha cai is a pickled mustard stem, and kikurage is the wood ear mushroom. Nameko are small glossy mushrooms and wakame is a soft seaweed, both common in miso soup. Umeboshi are salted, pickled plums, tsukudani is a salty preserve simmered in soy sauce, and nori is dried seaweed sheet. Karaage is Japanese-style fried chicken, and an onsen egg is one cooked slowly in its shell until the yolk is custardy. Enbudaki is the name of the rice cooker line the shop uses.
Zojirushi Shokudo on Tabelog (English) — opening hours, payment details and the Japanese address are kept up to date there, not here.
Drinkers, thank you for waiting! It is Hangover Meshi time!
Well now, hungover again today…. Which meant I wanted a lunch that would go easy on me ><, and so….
I went to “Zojirushi Shokudo,” on the fifth floor of KITTE Marunouchi, right by Tokyo Station. It is a “rice restaurant” that the Zojirushi we all know opened on the fifth floor of KITTE Marunouchi as its second location, after the main shop in Osaka. The rice is cooked in their top-of-the-line “Enbudaki” rice cooker (a pricey machine, that one), and the grain itself is “Zojirushi Shokudo rice,” a blend put together by Kaneko Shoten, a Five-Star Rice Meister. At the rice station you can have as much freshly cooked rice as you like, from plain white rice to a health-minded rice that changes every month!
I had steeled myself for a line, but on a weekday lunchtime I walked straight in.
Right then — my stomach had recovered a little, so a beer^^
This beer, it turns out, is made from the surplus tasting rice left over from developing their rice cookers. Zojirushi’s own beer, “Zou no Mai”! I had no idea such a thing existed. The bitterness is held back, so it goes down easily.
A little later the gozen tray arrived!
Look at these colors!!! Far too pretty!!
You can see at a glance that they have dressed good salmon in a light coating of crumbs and stopped the cooking early! The cut face is left close to raw. Press the chopsticks in and it breaks apart softly, and just inside the crisp bite of the crumb coating you find rich, silky flesh. Less a fried dish than a piece of warmed sashimi wearing a thin coat of batter. Deep-fried, and yet gentle.
Three ways to eat it come alongside: salt, a shoyu-koji sauce, and a tartar sauce with celery and lemon. Since they are all there, you want to try all of them, do you not! Start with the salt and work your way up in strength. Salt to judge the sweetness of the salmon itself. Then the shoyu-koji sauce to add depth, and finally the tart tartar to reset the mouth. The celery and lemon chopped into the tartar cut the weight of the fat off cleanly.
The rice goes down fastest with the shoyu-koji sauce, I think. The fermented sweet-savory note of the koji suits white rice, and if you set the cooking to “chewy” it stands up to the sauce, while “firm” feels lighter. Lining rice up side by side and tasting it that way really does bring out the difference.
To close, the sea bream chazuke. First you eat the thin-sliced sea bream as sashimi with a sesame sauce, then lay the rest over rice and pour hot sea bream broth over it. A mouth full of fried food goes suddenly light again along with the scent of the broth. Having this one small chazuke included makes me very happy.
Incidentally, this is the Zojirushi Gozen with the main dish swapped for the “cold shabu-shabu salad of pork and colorful vegetables.” That looks good too. Since it is two kinds of rice per person, I did not get to have the brown rice, but I was given a little of my friend’s. The brown rice is good as well!
I think I understand the secret behind a lunch that is said to draw a line day after day! Every part of it is carefully made and delicious, and it looks good for you besides. On top of that it is very pretty to look at, and once the rice is this good, it makes complete sense that people working around Marunouchi would want to come. Aim for a weekday and give it a try!
Even hungover, I could eat it happily^^
May you meet something good to eat today too.
Zojirushi Shokudo Tokyo — menu
Lunch (gozen sets)
No reservations for any of these. Each comes with a tasting of two Enbudaki-cooked rices and free refills.
Choose the main dish from two options (cold shabu-shabu salad of pork and colorful vegetables / Cajun-spiced grilled chicken), plus thin-sliced sea bream, sea bream broth, three small side dishes, three rice toppings, two Enbudaki-cooked rices, and miso soup with nameko mushrooms and wakame
The main dish is the rare salmon katsu, served three ways: salt, shoyu-koji sauce, and celery-and-lemon tartar. Otherwise the same as above
The main dish is a kuroge wagyu cutlet in a demi-glace and miso sauce. Otherwise the same as above
Three small side dishes = fried eggplant with a jelly of chopped ginger / white kikurage mushroom and early-picked zha cai with plum and wasabi / corn yokan
Three rice toppings = miso-pickled Chinese yam / nori tsukudani with wasabi and pickled cucumber / umeboshi steeped in olive oil
Lunchtime extras (7 items)
Drinks
A rice beer made with domestic rice, brewed from the tasting rice left over from developing rice cookers. Its selling point is said to be an easy drinkability with the bitterness held back
※ From the menu posted in the shop at the time of my visit in July 2026. Prices include tax, and the contents change with the season. For the latest, please check the official website or the shop itself.
※ A notice states that they do not accommodate food allergies.
Zojirushi Shokudo Tokyo (Cafeteria / Tokyo Station, Nijubashimae Station, Kyobashi Station)
Tabelog lunch rating ★★★☆☆ 3.7
I ate here and paid for it myself. Nothing on this site is a comped meal.
One more for the road?
