A note on the words: the habanero is among the hottest chillies in common kitchen use, fruity in scent and slow to arrive on the palate; ceviche is raw seafood cured in citrus; and Tex-Mex, invoked here as the contrast, is the heavier Texan branch of the same cooking. Prices are as of this writing (August 2026).
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EL ARBOL on Tabelog (English) — opening hours, payment details and the Japanese address are kept up to date there, not here.
I want to eat something good today as well. This is Hangover Meshi.
Our regular let-us-go-and-eat-something-hot society. The stage this time is a Mexican restaurant in Yotsuya called “EL ARBOL”.
As the website says, “forty-five years in business, thirty-five of them in Yotsuya” — a proper old house. And, apparently, the first place in Japan to serve habanero cooking.
Well, of course one wants to go and eat that. So off we went.
The outside of the place is handsome, and inside there is a calm Mexican feel to it (not that I have been to Mexico).
Course A, 2,310 yen
Course B, 3,520 yen
Course C, 4,400 yen
There were rather a lot of us, so the plan was to take the smallest, Course A, to begin with,
and then add anything else we wanted — the fiery habanero dishes included — as we went.
Turning up unannounced and ordering a great deal would only cause trouble.
Right — Mexican beer first!
Corona included, the thing about Mexican beers is that they are all light and easy to drink.
It is a nice touch that the bottles come with half a lime.
Prawn ceviche laid on lettuce, more or less. Prawn, acidity, and a note of spice.
The one-bite size is good too.
Chorizo grilled to a crisp on a thick bed of sweetcorn.
Not especially hot, and the juices run out of it.
A slim sausage, tightly packed with meat and flavour, which may make it ideal to drink alongside. Beer goes down fast with this.
Cheese and salsa are a superb match. It feels a little different from a Tex-Mex nacho plate.
This version feels carefully built one by one.
The other kind gets heaped up and the toppings poured over in a great rush. I like that type too, of course.
Mexican-style fried chicken. Paprika powder worked into the coating. Crunchy.
Each piece is quite large. Juicy, and as something to drink with it rates very highly.
Still not hot, incidentally.
And then, thinking it might be time to drink something other than beer, I looked at the menu.
And found it. The Devil.
This, I can tell you, is seriously hot.
Anybody who dislikes heat will not order it, but it makes a liar of everything that came before. The heat and the alcohol arrive together, all at once, and your throat feels as though it is burning.
That sting is irresistible.
Going straight to maximum heat was a bit of a shock, but I think anybody who likes hot food will love this tequila.
Stuffed with three house salsas and vegetables. Inside was cheese and ham, I think.
We were warned that one of the three salsas was hot, and to be careful,
but thanks to the habanero tequila my mouth was on fire throughout, so I could not really tell which was hot and which was not.
If you find something insufficiently hot, drink habanero tequila alongside it and any dish will become very hot indeed.
Beef tacos! Grilled beef and vegetables, rolled up in a scalding tortilla to eat.
Arrange it like this, roll it, in it goes. Yes, good!
It does feel like proper Mexican cooking. Without the sheer heft of Tex-Mex.
And with those beef tacos the course was over.
It was a fairly substantial course, and at 2,310 yen a head, is that not far too cheap?
Right, on to the extras.
The house speciality (?), habaneros stuffed with meat. A simple dish: small habaneros filled with minced meat and grilled.
It looks good. One mouthful and — oh, that is delicious.
Hm? Hot!
It arrives on a delay. Yes, that is quite hot.
The first thing you register on biting in is the fragrance of well-browned meat and the savour of the juices.
The mince is properly seasoned, and the depth of the meat itself fills the mouth.
And then — with no time at all to enjoy that — a few seconds later the sharp heat particular to habanero comes rolling in.
It reads at first as a good meat dish, and then before you know it a heat is spreading at the back of the tongue, of a kind that has you reaching for water or beer. That gap between the heat and the savour is habit-forming.
Yes: hot and good.
And, once again, anybody who dislikes heat had better not take this on.
One more: the habanero with stir-fried prawns.
Not “prawns stir-fried with habanero”, note. “Habanero with stir-fried prawns”.
The main body of the dish is the habanero.
The prawns, in fact, are not especially hot. Sweet prawn, and the fragrance of a good hot pan.
Cooked through properly, they are firm and yet juicy, and the savour of the sea spreads the longer you chew.
But these habaneros are fresher than the ones in the stuffed dish.
There is a faintly fruity scent to them, and the heat is extremely sharp.
If anything, this habanero is more of a stabbing pain than the stuffed one. It comes at you harder!
And the pain goes on for some while afterwards. A seriously hot dish.
Only two properly fiery dishes (leaving the habanero tequila aside), but they were hot at just the right pitch, and good.
Last, something that looked unlikely to be hot: cactus in cream.
Beef and cactus dressed in a tequila-scented cream sauce, which looked like a good idea for a mouth in this condition.
My tongue may have been past reliable judgement by then, but I did detect a faint heat in it.
Cactus with the texture of aloe, and beef. The cream sauce takes the edge off the pain.
It was good!
Usually, taking on a challenge at a very hot restaurant means that more or less everything is hot to some degree.
At “EL ARBOL”, only the habanero dishes actually marked as fiery are hot.
And they really are fiery, so the gap with the ordinary dishes is enormous.
Which means people who love heat and people who do not (just avoid the habaneros) can both eat well here.
It is a short walk from Yotsuya Station, too. Recommended!
EL ARBOL (Mexican / Yotsuya Station, Yotsuya-sanchome Station, Ichigaya Station)
Tabelog dinner rating ★★★☆☆ 3.7
I ate here and paid for it myself. Nothing on this site is a comped meal.
One more for the road?
