If it quacks like a duck…I dunno. Things get really crowded around Otemachi at lunch time. I mean like “If you don’t leave the office at 11:30, lots of places will have lines of people waiting outside”-full. This is one of those places (quacks) but it didn’t really taste like duck (platypus?).
Going with the dark-wood-lightly-carved genre of Chinese restaurant decoration, Wu Shang Lu (I’m just going to call him Wu from now on, ‘k?) is one of the big places in the basement of the Sankei building, like Manhattan Blah. I didn’t quite follow the layout, but a long corridor with lots of 2-person tables gives way onto a big room in back that holds a lot of people and allows service for a big lunch crowd.
Honestly, there are a lot of choices for a lunch like this. Benefits of scale? Several types of noodles (soup, dry, ankake), fried rice (looked good, with a lot of color on the rice), weekly sets. I had the weekly lunch (Y930, everything more or less the same price within Y150). Stir-fried chicken with an unfortunate level of steamed skin still on it (it’s Chinese food, so I suppose I should regard textures that I find unpleasant to be ‘authentic’. If you could get Chinese food like that in South Jersey, it wouldn’t be authentic.) mixed with eggplant and a few green vegetable shoots. Big bowl of rice. Egg Drop soup (at least that’s the South Jersey term) distinguished by a meatier broth and the inclusion of some minced pork. Almond tofu. Reasonable food, in a quantity that tends to make one feel a bit stuffed. I noticed that the fried rice didn’t get finished either…
One inspired comment from Koala: “The prices in Otemachi are all about Y100 cheaper than Roppongi, but the quality is definitely off by more than Y100.”
What does platypus taste like? They’re too small to have much meat…
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