A note on the words: borscht is a sour, deep-red Eastern European soup built on beets, usually finished with sour cream stirred in at the table, and dill is the feathery green herb often scattered over it. Lagman is a Central Asian dish of hand-pulled noodles, pirozhki are small filled buns, and pilaf is rice cooked in a seasoned broth. Hamburg steak, called hambagu in Japan, is a seasoned patty of ground meat served on a plate rather than in a bun.
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GoodTime Tokyo Akasaka on Tabelog (English) — opening hours, payment details and the Japanese address are kept up to date there, not here.
Hello, this is Hangover Meshi. The place I dropped into for lunch this time is “GoodTime Tokyo Akasaka” in Akasaka. It sits on the ground floor of a hotel called MIMARU Tokyo… I think? Around midday I had occasionally caught sight of a member of staff — I think? ha — playing the accordion, and it had struck me as a spot that somehow did not feel like Japan. Looking at the menu by the entrance, it gives off a Russian-food impression. It seems you can eat Eastern European cooking here — Russian, Ukrainian, Uzbek and so on.
I went in a little on the early side, just after 11:30, so the playing had not started yet, but it began some time after twelve, so if you want the music, after twelve may be the better bet.
Lunch special, hamburg steak — 980 yen
Lunch special, borscht — 980 yen
Pilaf — 1,080 yen
Lagman — 1,080 yen
Pirozhki — 1,080 yen
You order on your phone by reading a QR code. More and more places do this lately, and it is easier for both sides.
There is a lunch set and a lunch special, and the lunch special runs 100 yen cheaper. The regular lunch set is 1,080 yen, and borscht, for one, is on both, so I would look at the lunch special first to see whether what you want is on it, and go to the regular lunch set menu after that.
After a short wait, the borscht arrived!
You can have it with rice, but they asked me which I would prefer, bread or rice, so I went with bread.
The borscht looks good! It has a proper look to it, that deep red from the beets. Behind it there was a small dish of sour cream, and they said to stir it in as I ate. Put the white sour cream in and the deep red shifts to something a little pink. One mouthful in: a gentle flavor, and delicious! It is light on the salt, and that is what makes it. Nothing heavy about it at all, very easy to keep eating. Stir in a little sour cream and a faint sourness and some richness come with it, and it is delicious all over again. Is that dill on top? The fresh smell of it is good too.
Scooping through the middle, there are vegetables everywhere. I could make out cabbage, carrot and potato, but there may well be vegetables in there I could not identify, ha. Either way, a healthy vegetable soup. There is something like roast beef in it as an ingredient too, so while it looks good for you it also has real heft, and there is nothing lacking about it. Rice would be fine as well, but the bread is a chewy, dense loaf, and spreading sour cream on it and dipping it into the borscht was very good indeed.
Since the main was a vegetable soup I had forgotten about it for a while, but there is a generous vegetable salad as well — health-minded! A crisp, juicy salad and a borscht full of vegetables; a detox once in a while is no bad thing.
So there it is, I went and ate borscht. Full of vegetables, gentle in flavor, and with the salad alongside I thought it made a really good meal! Coffee after the meal comes with it as well, so it feels like good value. It tasted like the real thing to me (though I have never been to where it comes from, so what would I know, ha), so I would like to try the pilaf, the lagman and the pirozhki too. Ordering by QR is quick, and I thought I would come again.
GoodTime Tokyo Akasaka (Russian / Akasaka Station, Nogizaka Station, Roppongi Itchome Station)
Tabelog lunch rating ★★★☆☆ 3.4
I ate here and paid for it myself. Nothing on this site is a comped meal.
One more for the road?
