Bravo! Actually the praise runs out more or less right there, scotching my budding plans to make this a hilariously positive joke post. Bravo is an adequate pasta-pizza lunch spot.
It’s almost the last thing in line under the train tracks leading north from Tokyo station, on the Marunouchi side. Mildly inspired by my crazy colleague Tez (colleague in the sense that he writes a food blog, not that he has the slightest clue who I am), I think it might be time to set some goals for this blog – eating at all the lunch places under the Marunouchi tracks seemed like a good place to start. Tez has gone one better by polishing off huge targets like Shin Maru – that’s a lotta lunches to get through, and you’re going to have to take the unappealing right along with the bad. Much love. I’ve gotta go small and achievable; the string of under-track places is doable, although it includes a Nakau (なか卯) and another branch of Kassen Ichiba. And a depressing looking Nagasaki-style place. And a couple other yucky looking ones. Is this really a good idea?
I digress.
Bravo gives you about 6 pastas (you can guess this offhand and be right, but they include carbonara, clam, spicy penne, chicken cream and mushroom) that you can get as they are, with a salad and coffee, or with S+C and dessert. There’s also pizza if you go all the way up to Y1100. Gita did this and said the margherita was good. From my side of the table, it looked like papery-crisp thin crust and American-style mozarella (which I regard as a prefectly OK thing. You don’t need gin-u-wine imported water buffalo foolishness all the time, right?). My carbonara was somehow quite OK; not especially eggy and rich, but that’s probably because there wasn’t any real egg in it. It compelled me to add copious quantities of tabasco, which was very enjoyable but always reminds me of the the first time I came to Japan. I ate to much new and weird stuff, developed a powerful craving for foreign food, had an omrice, and made myself sick by putting too much tabasco on it.
Anyway, if you’ve been to one casual Italian, you’ve been to most of them. With some obvious exceptions – Savoy or Baggio are the same price for a pizza that you can tell is better across the room with your eyes closed. Bravo could be adequate for dinner, but I think I’ve now worked this post around to the point where I can say “Eh. Another day, another place visited.” If you read all the way to this point, you could well be thinking the same thing.
Bravo doesn’t sleep. It waits.
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