Inakaya is a famous Robatayaki place in Roppongi, Tokyo’s famous club and bar district. The restaurant is particularly famous for it’s theatrical style serving of food where every order is shouted across like a military order repeated by all the staff in one major chorus. The restaurant in itself is quite small and the food is cooked and served by the two Chefs who are in a kneeling position and don’t move (except perhaps to go the bathroom), they serve all the food with an extended long stick to you to every guest in the restaurant, including the Beer!

The quality of the food is excellent, but the ingredients are really not that special, it relies primarily on the freshness and the quality of the raw materials instead, you can feast your eyes on this, the king prawns were still moving and the vegetables looked like they were just plucked from the ground. Each dish was well made and tasted incredibly.

This photo was taken from where you sit and eat, the two Chef’s are kneeling in their position preparing the food and basically putting everything on a grill (or around it). At around 830pm they have a different "show" or display of food preparation of some kind, this time it was about pounding rice, and the restaurant guests had a turn in pounding the rice.

The big bucket of rice is pounded by a giant ehr, pounding stick I guess and it is pounded with such force that the rice eventually (already cooked and sticky) just turns into a gooey mass of stickiness.

The rice is then stirred around, flattened, and then pounded again, this process went on for at least 15 minutes or more, they then served the sticky rice in some kind of brown coating, tasted like sweet sticky rice, and you could hardly feel the rice grains, not surprisingly.

Now if someone could bring this concept to Hong Kong!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Japanese. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.