Roast Dinners Around The World

Konnichiwa! It’s the first outing for Emperor Gravy for a couple of years, this time at the Swan & Lion in Tokyo.

Is calling myself Emperor whilst reviewing a Japanese restaurant acceptable?

Maybe let’s have some anime characters eating roast dinners.

So, I’ve been to Japan.  Believe it or not, I didn’t have enough time to write this whilst on holiday, the initial tones are being written whilst on the long flight home.

Oh and believe or not, I had a roast dinner in Japan.

Chill, I had ramen too.

Konnichiwa Rōsuto Dinā San

I know, I know, I chose to have British food whilst on holiday, whilst in the home of fried chicken, tempura fried chicken, deep fried chicken and southern fried chicken.  Gosh and I thought I was obsessed.

Impossible not to love a country that loves fried chicken that much, and has a Thatcher as Prime Minister, and has those Lolita women…

And is ridiculously cheap to eat, ridiculously polite, ridiculously clean…if only they had more pubs selling roast dinners,

So Swan & Lion is in Meguru City (I think) district of Tokyo, and you could get there from London in about 20hours.  Or just 22 minutes from Shinjuku, once the boys had completed their samurai training and the girls their tea ceremoney.  It’s a small venue, seats probably around 40 including the outside, and yes, actual Japanese people were eating there.

I wonder if there is a Japanese person in Tokyo with a blog about ramen?  Or heck, fried chicken?

Alas, there aren’t enough roast dinner places, but there were a few. Japan has a surprisingly high amount of British pubs.

Hajimemashite, Rōsuto Dinā San

Swan & Lion was the one that most looked like it might do a half-decent restaurant meal.

And they sold Yorkshire Tea.  It was meant to be.

On the menu was ローストビーフランチ
ローストポテト＆ヨークシャープディング、季節の野菜
ホースラディッシュソース＆赤ワイングレイビーソース添え

Fine, if you must need it translating, the only option was sirloin of beef priced at ¥NO IDEA because it isn’t on the menu, and that converts to £ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA.  Shall we look at more Japanese women eating roast dinners?

Fine, I’ll try to look on the website, because using Japanese websites is soooooo easy…it was ¥5100 which is about £24.00 at the time of writing.

How do you say “no peas” in Japanese?

Rorīta no josei-tachi ga rōsuto dīnaa o tabete iru yume o mite iru

Well, they understood my request anyway. As peas are standard in foreign roast dinners, in the same way they were in 1980’s British roast dinners before we discovered a second vegetable.

So let’s start with the carrots which manage to make it all the way over for my first ever roast dinner in Asia – and was very long, soft and quite on the peppery side.

The broccoli was a bit undercooked for personal preferences, and also came with some gravy-diluting water.

Red cabbage was thankfully limited and also a little pickled.  Quite nice but not really my bag.  Then again, I’d take it right now sat on a plane after having had zero vegetables in 3 days.

We were consistently surprised about how cheap meals were, though one assumes the carrot was imported and hence added lots on to the price of this.

3 roast potatoes as per the London, sorry, Tokyo standard.  They weren’t bad, one had a slight crisp, the others didn’t – overall they were a bit chewy.

Rōsuto dinā ga daisuki dashi, Nihon mo daisuki desu.

The Yorkshire pudding was a bit cooked earlier (I cannot imagine their kitchen being huge so maybe there needs to be some forgiveness here), it was quite eggy in terms of flavour and came with a crisp.

Certainly the beef wasn’t wagyu – though as I hadn’t had any by this stage of my holiday, I wasn’t comparing it to wagyu.  It might be a very long time before I eat beef again in the UK though.

It was a generous portion, rather hearty, some of it was quite rare, some more towards well done.  Decent though not spectacular.  Must not compare it to wagyu, Emperor Gravy…

Finally, the gravy was pretty thick, likely some granules going on – thankfully I didn’t need to use my samurai training to get the chef to sort it out.

Swan & Lion desu

Overall it was kind of a Brits Abroad type of roast dinner – the idea of getting a really good roast dinner in Spain is of course for the birds, so Japan…yeah.

So whilst nothing impressed me per se, it was all creditable and a decent representation of a mum-style roast dinner up north.

The highlight was probably the beef, and the lowlight – maybe the potatoes but they didn’t exactly offend me.

Scores around the table were varied, my regular accomplice a 6.30, our Canadian guest an 8.00 (who thought she was having her first roast dinner yet realised her mum used to cook them), and the two other gravy gang guests from London a 4.00 and a 7.50

My score is a pleasant enough 6.20 out of 10.

Service was friendly and uber-polite (as it was everywhere we went in Japan) and the pale ale was decent if nothing special.  Certainly better than the bang average lager of my European roast dinners.

Arigatō gozaimasu

Food was a mixed bag elsewhere in Tokyo, though normally very good – it was a fairly loosely planned holiday so most places were unbooked with maybe 10 minutes research whilst on a train.

The worst thing was this under-cooked chicken ball with slimy cheese on top, from a shack near a street known as “piss alley”. Probably should have researched this.

Mixer’s near Takeshita Street (which of course I went to because of the name) offered gorgeous broth in their ramen, but horrid thick noodles. Not for me.

CALDO PARADISO was a Thai place and I ended up with a bean sprout omelette – and some very necessary salad:

We pretty much went there because it was close to a damn excellent craft beer place called Beer Bomb in Shinjuku.

One of my favourite meals of the whole holiday was a broccoli steak at Enrich:

Cajun broccoli steak, quinoa and raspberry yogurt – this was the stage of my trip where not everything was fried.

Another one of my favourite meals was at Nonki – an Izakaya restaurant where the total bill came to about £15.00 for multiple dishes each, sake, wine and beer – an insanely cheap price.

I cannot quite remember what I ordered – I definitely had fried chicken too.

The final meal was at shibuya zetton, another Izakaya restaurant where I tried angelfish (probably shouldn’t eat almost-uncooked fish the night before a 14 hour flight but was too late before I clocked) along with some other things like beef ribs.

Not sure I’d say any dish was OMG you have to go to Tokyo just for that dish, but OMG you have to go to Tokyo.

Japan deserves every superlative you read about it.