A note on the words: zhu rou bing is a Chinese pork pastry, sold from a street counter and eaten in the hand; hanten in a shop name simply means restaurant; shumai are steamed pork dumplings and nikuman a steamed meat bun; five-spice is the Chinese spice blend that gives the filling its scent. Prices are as of this writing (August 2026).
Table of Contents hide
Ryusei Hanten on Tabelog (English) — opening hours, payment details and the Japanese address are kept up to date there, not here.
I want something good to eat today too! This is Hangover Meshi.
If you have come all the way to Chinatown, you want to eat as you walk, don’t you. So, in the middle of a very crowded Chinatown, this is what caught my eye: “Ryusei Hanten”. It says hanten, restaurant, on the sign, so there may well be a dining room, but the crowd was all at the counter out front.
Zhu rou bing (pork pastry) — 450 yen
Shanghai niu rou bing (beef pastry) — 480 yen
They sell all sorts of interesting things.
Deep-fried (and steamed) shumai on skewers, nikuman buns, bubble milk tea, cheese mochi, candied strawberries — even Peking duck.
Doesn’t that pork pastry look good!
Having ordered, I got myself a Tsingtao beer to go with it!
Zhu rou bing!
It is tall rather than wide, and the outside is pastry — flaky. A palm-sized disc, a little rough-looking. The balance between the fragrantly browned surface and that plump thickness is rather good!
A big bite: the pastry crumbles away, and inside there is a chewier, mochi-like part.
It took a while to reach the actual filling, so I broke it in half, and out came meat seasoned rather like gyoza filling. The dough is moist, and the pork filling comes bursting out of the middle. A fresh spice fragrance rises up — five-spice, I think. Since the first bites had been pastry alone, the whole scenery changed the moment I hit the centre.
The part of the dough where the pork fat and juices have soaked in is delicious!
The zhu rou bing was really rather good! It went well with the beer, and it is easy to eat on the move. That said, I ended up walking back to the shop to throw the wrapper away — was there a bin somewhere? Looking around, most people seemed to eat near the shop and dispose of things on the spot. Working out where the bins are before you start eating would probably make the whole thing more comfortable.
Ryusei Hanten (Chinese / Nihon-odori Station, Ishikawacho Station, Motomachi-Chukagai Station)
Tabelog lunch rating ★★★☆☆ 3.0
I ate here and paid for it myself. Nothing on this site is a comped meal.
One more for the road?
