Sure, I have a weakness for bright-yellow-themed curry restaurants. And I definitely have a weakness for curry when I had a long night eating tempura and then had to work the next day. So when I finished work of a Saturday and traipsed up to Akiba mid-afternoon, all that was on my mind was supplementing the inadequate BLT provided as compensation for attending the special weekend meeting with some real, cheap, greasy food. Ahhhh, the healthy Japanese diet.
Akiba has a lot of Chinese options, a fair amount of ramen, the odd kebab shop, and of course lots of curry. For some reason I was opposed to the more Indian-looking places; it had to be Japanese curry. And Mammoth was appropriately yellow…A quick Google makes me think that it might actually not be a chain, wonder of wonders. That can’t be right.
At the cheap end of the scale, cleanliness is not a factor that I put next to tastiness. Mammoth, however, is unclean in a weird way – sort of unkempt rather than worn-but-clean. The floor was muddy (even weirder since it hasn’t rained for a few days), and the kitchen area was funny to look at – they had half a dozen pots of curry perpetually on the boil, with thick rims of curry sludge around the top of each pot. Mmmmm, curry sludge.
In a half-hearted attempt to avoid unhealthy eating (I know, I know. Read the header.), I got something with no obvious meat – eggplant curry, with a boiled egg for topping. The eggplant was deep-fried briefly, the curry was appropriately brown and Japanese-tasting, and the whole thing went down smoothly and with appropriate medicinal effects. The pickles get an honorable mention, both the daikon and the rakyou.
Katsu or ‘stamina’ (yakiniku + raw egg?) curry seemed to be the go here, judging by what my fellow otaku were otucking into. You might want to consider that when you go.
Try the special frozen-in-arctic-ice-for-100,000-years curry
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