Line curry, Nihonbashi (らいん)

Fresh fish! Arriving tonight! Caught off the coast of Tokyo! Eat raw kawagahi, with sauce made from its liver!

There are a few puzzling signs like this outside Line, which is famous in my company as ‘that curry place where the waitress used to work in our main branch’. I’m guessing the name is Line (or ‘Rain’ if you want to transliterate it that way, but then you’d say it wrong) because everyone knows the chef’s hobby is fishing. The fish they serve is supposedly self-caught. Trying this would be well worth the hassle of arriving at the 5 PM opening. Probably fills up pretty quick. Come to think of it, laying off work at 5 isn’t a hassle at all, is it?

No, not a hassle. If you go for lunch, you’ll just get curry, and a simple choice – beef or pork? I swear the waitress just said “Which?” as a greeting. She didn’t seem to think she had to say anything, more that it was our responsibility to get our order in.

You can tell by the color that this is beef. I think it’s the popular choice, but I saw someone eating pork as we were leaving, and it looked good too. The sauce is a little thin, which just means it’s not artificially propped up with thickeners (or thicked up with propellers), there’s plenty of flavor, the beef is soft, and the pickles are excellent – very natural tasting compared to the chemical crap you so often get next to curry. If you’re like me, you get a bit desperate for vegetable matter at these times and eat lots of pickles, so it’s helpful if they’re quality. And they are here. But the curry is really the good thing. Don’t let me distract you by talking about pickles when this is really a curry house.

In fact, don’t let me distract you from anything any longer. Go about your business.