A note on the words: shabu-shabu means thin slices of meat swished briefly through hot broth at the table, the name being the sound of the swishing. Heitan is the reading given here for the characters meaning black soup. Yodare-dori, literally drooling chicken, is poached chicken served cold under a chili-oil dressing, and an ohitashi is a vegetable blanched and then steeped in a light seasoned stock. Goma-dare is a sesame dipping sauce, and five-spice is the Chinese blend the Japanese call gokoshun. The mushrooms are given here by their Japanese names: -take on the end of each simply means mushroom, and hiratake is the Japanese word for the oyster mushroom. Shime is the closing dish of a drinking meal, usually noodles or rice, and soba is a word for noodles generally as much as for the buckwheat kind.
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Shangri-La’s secret, Roppongi 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 had my eye on for lunch this time is “Shangri-La’s secret, Roppongi” in Roppongi. I have known about it since it opened, and for a good ten years I have been saying I want to go, I want to go — and at last the chance came around! Since I had finally worked myself up to it, I booked properly and went. When I got there, the inside was exotic and beautifully done!
[No. 1 at lunch] Biraku heitan 4,950 yen
Unnan heitan 3,300 yen
Hojo heitan 6,930 yen
At lunch you can apparently eat the evening menu at a lower price, so it is good value.
This time it is the lunch-only, reasonably priced try-it set of the black soup.
The meat is chicken as standard, but they said I could switch it to lamb for 450 yen more, so I had them switch it to lamb.
On the left, yodare-dori; on the right, something like an ohitashi of mushrooms. The yodare-dori is delicious.
Cilantro and scallion. The aromatics come properly loaded too.
And this is the pot. A very distinctive, elegantly Asian-looking hotpot.
Once it has warmed through for a while, the staff lift the lid and tell you to start by drinking the soup on its own while you wait.
The soup is extremely gentle and extremely good. There is a medicinal-herb quality to it, and the mushroom stock comes through clearly — really delicious. There is almost no salt in it, so you can just keep drinking. You may find the soup disappears fast, but do not worry. They top it up again and again as it runs low, so drink away.
And then, mushrooms in every color, the lamb, and a bed of vegetables underneath!
Look how good it all looks. The mushrooms, from the left, are tamogitake, kogen hiratake, tokiiro hiratake and kakinokitake. Every single one of them is a mushroom I have never seen before! The rough guide for boiling the mushrooms is three minutes, so you check that against the hourglass sitting on the table.
Eating the mushrooms once they are done — delicious.
There are two dipping sauces, a goma-dare and a plain soy-based one, and in the goma-dare the five-spice and the other spices really stand out, giving it a flavor with something Taiwanese about it. Very good. The soup has almost no salt but a strong savory depth, so honestly the mushrooms are delicious with no dipping sauce at all. Is there any other dish that looks this good for you, ha.
The chicken must be good too, but the lamb goes brilliantly with that spiced goma-dare!
Switching might be worth recommending!
This is the shime, a chicken soba. You put the noodles in, wait a minute and a half, then move them into the black soup and pour over the chicken oil — and the closing chicken soba is done!
And at the very end, a dessert comes with it too.
A sherbet, and the thing you can see behind it is mushroom tea, ha. A clean, light tea with a faint mushroom flavor to it.
From start to finish, what strikes you is simply how healthy the meal is! The black soup is so good that I must have been gulping it down, because even the 3,300 yen course left me completely full. They sell this black soup as an ordinary product, so I could buy some and do my own black soup hotpot at home (the mushrooms look hard to get hold of, so it might be better to put something else in!)
Shangri-La’s secret, Roppongi (Shabu-shabu / Roppongi Station, Nogizaka Station, Roppongi-itchome 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?
