Kanda Haus, Kanda

You don’t expect to visit a Japanese ‘hambagu’ place and come away thinking ‘That was good!’ I don’t, at least. But this place, picked out by Zoner on a random walk around Jinbocho, was a winner in my book.

The inside is minimal to the point of feeling like they didn’t want to pay for a fitout. I respect that, it’s cool, it’s cool. The menu is pretty basic too – a lunch-steak, or else several kinds of hambagu (plain, curry, cheese).

The tasty-looking cheese burger was done for the day (bastards next to us finished off the inventory), so I had a curry burger. There was a lot of clear ‘juice’ (some call it tallow, some call it fat) running off this burger, and I thought it was nicely cooked. But the taste really did it for me, and the curry sauce was deeply flavored, I think with onions and beef fat.

This beat the hell out of the only other hambagu I can remember having in the area, at Vimon in Tokyo Station (which was much more expensive and really lame by comparison, especially after the theater that they went through in cooking it. Yummers. I’d go back here.

 03-5577-6547

Random neighborhood building – tucked into a set of alleys mostly filled with smaller, dirtier, old buildings, this new Death-Star-styled embouchure is actually a theater of some stripe.