Lumine Ikebukuro is a large department store within the Metropolitan Plaza Building. There are 2 whole floors just for restaurants alone and many more cafes and eateries dispersed throughout the multi-floor department store!
We headed up to the 8th floor, restaurant level, to look around for interesting places. There were so many options but a lot of them had long line-ups already. We decided to try Keisho-An, a restaurant specializing in Japanese-style chicken dishes.
Hiyashi Tofu
We ordered a bunch of items to share and the first to arrive was the chilled tofu. The fresh and soft tofu came with the cutest, smallest bottle of sweet soya sauce! Eaten by itself, the tofu was super creamy and soft, with a mild yet sweet soy bean flavour. A little drop of the sauce turned the dish into a savoury appetizer.
Karaage
The deep fried chicken pieces were so yummy, we ordered it twice! They were seriously juicy inside, and salty and crispy on the outside. It's a glass of ice-cold beer's best friend!
Agedashi Tofu with Chicken
To mellow out the crunchy goodness, we had a dish of fried soft tofu sitting in a savoury broth. Usually, the agedashi tofu back at home just has tofu and sauce. However, at Keisho-An, their version had pieces of simmered chicken and oyster mushrooms. If there was a bowl of rice, this could have been a full meal by itself!
Chicken skewers - Tsukune Set (top) and Yakitori Set (bottom)
Next up, 2 sets of chicken skewers!
The Tsukune Set consisted of 5 skewers of minced chicken meat balls, all with different sauces on top. From left to right, there was teriyaki, umeshiso (pickled plum and a type of Perilla leaf), Nagoya miso, mentaiko (salted pollock roe), and teri-mayo.
The little meatballs were great for sharing but because of its size, the meat was not as juicy as I expected.
The Yakitori Set had 5 skewers of different parts of the chicken: the gizzard, thigh, skin, thigh with leeks and another that I can't remember (sorry!). These were simply grilled over charcoal and brushed with a sweet soya sauce. These went well with beer too! Yum!
Oyako-don
For our starch dish, we chose the chicken and egg rice bowl. Typically, the chicken would be simmered with onion in sweet dashi broth and then topped with soft scrambled eggs. This version actually had a raw egg on top instead of the chicken! This lent a different kind of silkiness to the rice and chicken.
Caprese Salad
Our lone veggie dish of the night was the Caprese salad...though technically, this did not actually have any vegetables in it! LOL... We originally wanted to order a green salad with lotus root but they ran out of lotus root :( Caprese became our second choice. It was a small portion but the ingredients were fresh and helped lighten up the chicken-heavy dishes on our table.
Even though we had to wait a while for a table, all those yummy chicken-centric dishes were well worth the time!
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