A note on the words: achar is a spiced pickle, vegetables or fruit preserved with chili and other seasonings. Panipuri is a snack of small hollow fried shells that you fill with a seasoned liquid and eat in one go. Momo are steamed or fried dumplings, filling wrapped in a thin skin. Ebi chili is the Japanese name for shrimp in chili sauce, borrowed from Chinese cooking, and takoyaki is the round griddled batter ball sold at Japanese street stalls — both come up here as points of comparison. The Yamanote line is the loop railway that circles central Tokyo.
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Aagan 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 phrase “a trip to Nepal you can reach on the Yamanote line” caught my attention, and that is how I heard about the Nepalese restaurant Aagan. I had been meaning to go, and when the chance came along I finally did. It is within walking distance of both Higashi-shinjuku and Shin-okubo. The place is on the fourth floor of a building!
Step inside and it suddenly feels like Nepal!
Is Nepalese food close to Indian food, I wonder! Curries and spiced dishes are the mainstay, and everything looks delicious!
We decided to work through the a la carte menu, picking whatever looked good.
A salad bearing the restaurant’s own name! House dressing, plus raisins and apple and the like giving it a sweet element too.
Achar, familiar from Indian food. It said “spicy! very hot!” on the menu, and eating it, the heat certainly is strong — but it is rather like a spiced pickle, so it is not something you eat all at once. Picking at it a bit at a time, this level is just right.
This was the best of the lot! Mutton tossed with spices. It is basically like a curry, and the complex spicing combined with mutton’s distinctive character made it absolutely delicious! You can also choose chicken, pork, duck or soy meat for the meat, but it has to be mutton, does it not. It had been cooked properly tender, which was superb!
I did not really understand what this was, but it is a bit like takoyaki. You have these hard, hollow snack-like shells, you pour the liquid from the center into them, and you throw them into your mouth before they leak. This is a genuinely fun thing to eat, ha. You bite down with a crisp crack and the spiced soup bursts out inside your mouth. Delicious.
This one is grilled. Spice-grilled mutton. A little different from the spice-tossed version, with a toasty fragrance added and a slightly firmer texture. There is plenty to chew on, and you eat it with the sauce sitting behind it. Delicious.
This is nothing at all like the Chinese version of ebi chili!
More like shrimp stir-fried in a sweet-and-spicy sauce, I would say. The shrimp are plump and springy and go well with the spices.
“Shall we go for brain?” — and so I ordered the fry. It does not feel much like something fried, though. More like a stir-fry. In the photos it looked a lot more brain-like and I was a bit worried, but this I can handle! One bite in: a soft texture, but no off-flavor at all, just plain good. The spicing is strong, so as for the taste of the brain itself, it was about as far as “there is a milky quality here.”
Fried beans. Just right as a drinking snack.
Momo is a food where filling is wrapped in a skin, like xiaolongbao or gyoza. This dish takes those and tosses them with spices. The spicing really is too good. Probably every one of these is the flavor of this same spicing, but the way it changes when combined with different ingredients — enough that you would not think it was the same seasoning — is amazing.
So there we are: ordering one after another of whatever we felt like eating, and thoroughly satisfying it was! What I actually wanted was the curry, but with drink flowing in the back half of the evening I completely forgot! Argh. Next time I am definitely having the curry. Even ordering all of that, the bill was seriously reasonable, so there is nothing for it but to go again! Recommended!
Aagan, Nepalese Ethnic Cuisine (Nepalese / Shin-okubo Station, Okubo Station, Higashi-shinjuku Station)
Tabelog dinner rating ★★★☆☆ 3.6
I ate here and paid for it myself. Nothing on this site is a comped meal.
