Man, I feel like writing a capsule review of this place. First day back from vacation, and hitting it hard with a plunge into the basement of the Otemachi Building and yet another new restaurant. Not intentional, I swear it.
Shouya is part of the big, bad New Tokyo group, which includes about 15 brands (lots of beer-specialist brands, then split between izakaya and Italian. Weird, as usual for one of these big groups.). I’m not sure where it fits into the hierarchy of their brands since I’m not familiar with Dining Out 53, Italico, La Stella, New Hoppen, Takao, Burian, Duffy’s or any of the others. Maybe I’ll see them on the street now? This branch (out of the 4 in the Otemachi area) has a distinct retro thing going on; Koala’s comment was that it looked like a Japanese restaurant in America. I could see what she means, with the sorta shabby dark wood thing, but there were far too many Japanese people for any real confusion.
Lest we try to stretch this out too much, I’ll just get to the point and say that all of us on today’s team had the soba-eel set (zaru soba + una don). The soba was actually pretty good; maybe it’s just been a while since I had soba, because now that I think back it was pretty soft. I guess the taste was decent. The eel was downright poor; still some largish uncut pieces of bone remained, and the taste was pure mud (I’ve come around to the view that things like eel and carp taste ‘muddy’, but it’s not always a bad thing). Also came with some sliced omeletsu, pickles, soup, etc. If you could replace the eel with something else, this would be pretty good value for Y880.
Since 1937. We got trust and carry it out.
03-3211-1022