Bamboo, Otemachi

Ladies and gentlemen…

I present to you

after weeks of searching

a pretty good restaurant in an Otemachi basement. And it’s Ethnic!

Bamboo is in the long, long, forbiddingly long and crowded corridors of the Otemachi Building (creative names abound here). It’s in a strange place where the walls of the canyon press in a little tighter, so the stream of people rushing through is squeezed and accelerates, creating dangerous rapids. And Bamboo does a huge business in bentos – they have two big tables out front, and I thought when I saw it before that they didn’t even have eat-in for lunch. But Ponkan had been there, and suggested we go today.

Dad, there isn’t a lot more I can say that will interest you here. The generic Ethnic food (pho + Thai) is only slightly Japanized, and not in bad ways. My green curry was a big, big bowl with good rice, lots of thick, coconutty, sweet (Japanized), oily curry, a few pieces of chicken, a few shrimps, and lots of fried eggplant. And it tasted good, and I stuffed myself. It also came with a bowl of nori-heavy soup (Japanized) and few leaves of lettuce being passed off as salad. And it was Y1000, which was perfectly reasonable. Ponkan and Wolf both had Ga Prao’s, which looked nice except for the (Japanized) half-boiled egg that replaced the more normal fried one. Choco had pho, which is hard to judge from a distance and was pronounced ‘unique’ (looked light on herbs, and was pre-spiced as opposed to 自由 spicing at the table).

There you go! I could go back any time, but from today I promise to redouble efforts to find the second worthwhile restaurant in Otemachi. Should take more than another 15 days.

Weird, this is part of the group that includes the lovely house-restaurant Bamboo in Omotesando and the lovlier Ogasawaratei near Shinjuku.
03-3211-0087