Tonkatsu with Salt at “Fujiro”, Kayaba-cho

Good evening.
Thank you very much for visiting this blog.
Today I’d like to write about a restaurant in Kayaba-cho, “Fujiro”.

Contents

About “Fujiro”

The day was a Friday in the middle of April.
I had a soar right heel, just under Achilles tendon, from 2 days before.

It hurt even though I didn’t hit it or anything, so I thought that it was because of gout.
Sure enough, my heel started to hurt even more like gout attack when I woke up in the morning.

The sore part was around the bottom of Achilles, so I didn’t put my weight on the part when I walked.
However, the skin stretched when I walked, so the gout attack on this part made it difficult to walk normally anyway.
I feel that any parts of the body have meanings and important rolls in such situations.

When gout starts to hurt my body, there are no other ways than drinking water as much as possible, and taking painkillers and waiting until the pain ceases.
On that day, I came to my regular clinic in Kayaba-cho to receive a painkiller.

My knees or heels hurt due to gout in April every year, since I started to work at the present place.
Probably that’s because I’m busier from February to April and I often overwork during that time.

I care about my diet to be healthy, and I’ve lost 10kg.
So, my job should be the reason for the gout.

The sick might disappear if I quit my job, but I can’t make a living without the job.
In this case, I can only take dietary supplements to avoid the attack^^;

Well, on the way home from the clinic, I visited today’s restaurant, “Fujiro”, to have lunch.
It was a new restaurant which opened on July 7th, 2017, and whole the building was their floors.

The signboard of the name was written by a famous calligrapher, Mr. Soun Takeda. The third floor was a sushi restaurant for members only.

I knew these facts later when I researched this restaurant to write this blog.
If I knew such things beforehand, I wouldn’t go there because I should have been nervous too much^^;

I couldn’t tell that this restaurant was such a gorgeous place, but I could feel that the restaurant was not casual because the appearance was different from normal restaurants.
Therefore, I hesitated to try at first. However, as usual, I couldn’t decide which to enter even though I wandered around for a while.
When I came in front of Fujiro again, I found a signboard about their lunch menu.

The price on the board was not so expensive, but rather normal.
I thought that I could try it (in the points of the price and the atmosphere), so I encouraged myself to enter the building.

The interior and their menu

Inside of the first floor, there were 2 blocks of counter seats, which looked like a high-class tempura restaurant.
One block was facing the kitchen and located in the back of the room, and the other block was near the entrance, and there were many bottles of liquor over the counter.
I was guided to the counter near the entrance with bottles.

This is their menu.

I basically take Kara-age (Japanese deep fried chicken) meal to compare different restaurants through Kara-age, so I ordered “Fujiro’s special Kara-age meal”.
But,

“We are very sorry that Kara-age is sold out today.”
“Oh my god (T T)!!”

So, I looked for the alternative in the menu.
Then,

“Fujiro Tonkatsu (pork cutlet)”
“(French chef, Hidenori Sakai’s special) Hash and rice”

caught my eyes.
“French chef, Hidenori Sakai”……, is he the famous “Iron Chef”…? But I noticed that “Iron Chef” was Hiroyuki Sakai^^;

The names of the menus were unique compared to other normal restaurants.
I decided to order “Fujiro tonkatsu” because I thought it should be their biggest recommend as it had “Fujiro” in the name.
After I ordered the food, I read the menu book for dinner time to check what kind of Nihonshu they had.

They had various sake; expensive ones which matched the restaurant’s atmosphere,

And also cheaper ones.

I have an image that Kayaba-cho is a town of local small stock companies (mainly for the local private investors) and new IT companies.
While Kayaba-cho doesn’t have many foreign-owned companies or head offices of big corporations, foreign stock companies which have plenty of money sometimes treat the local small stock companies in Kayaba-cho to sell them foreign bonds or stocks.

I imagined that this restaurant had different types of pricing/menus because they aimed both usual use of the local workers and business receptions.
Kayaba-cho is next to Nihonbashi, and not so far from Ginza or Otemachi, so there should be demands for expensive restaurants.

Amazing tonkatsu lunch

While I was thinking about such things, my tonkatsu meal arrived.

The tonkatsu was beautifully cooked in light brown, and the size was big!
The tonkatsu was placed on a stand of metal net not to make the coating wet with the oil.

The vegetables next to tonkatsu is usually only cabbage, but there were also onion, potherb mustard, and lettuce.
It was like salad and looked delicious!

The staff told me that I could use 2 types of sauces and salt for seasoning, and left these pots.

“Salt?”
I believed that tonkatsu should go with sauce, or, I had never thought of anything other than sauce to put on tonkatsu, so I repeated it in my mind.
But when I thought about tempura which are often enjoyed with salt, tonkatsu with salt wasn’t so strange.
My common sense was made by my 20s mainly in Gunma Prefecture, so tonkatsu with salt might be normal for Tokyo people…?

While I got excited about salt, I started my tonkatsu with sauce first.
I’m a type of person who leaves my favorites or the main thing until last^^;

The first sauce was spicy sauce.
It was “spicy”, but it didn’t have really spicy taste.
“Not sweet” was more accurate words to describe the taste.
It was an ordinary tonkatsu sauce.

It might have been some special sauce with special recipe and special ingredients, but I’m not a gourmet person so I couldn’t tell it.
The taste was not so strong, not too unique, so it didn’t disturb tonkatsu’s flavor. (I don’t mean that the sauce was not delicious!! It was good, but not characteristic.)

The next sauce was “sweet” sauce (I took this photo later because I forgot to take it at first).

This sauce was clearly sweet, and I thought that some fruits were mixed in the sauce.
Not like the previous spicy sauce, the sweet sauce had a unique taste itself.
But it matched tonkatsu well, and it made a good combination with the coating and meat.
I liked it very much, and I wanted to keep eating with the sauce more.

The next was finally “salt“.
My first tonkatsu with salt.
The taste was…

It was so good!
The appearance was not so interesting, but it made taste of the coating and the meat richer, and I could enjoy the tonkatsu’s original flavor even more.

The meat was like medium-rare.
It was cooked and brown, but not hard.
The texture was very soft, and the oil was moderately coming out from the meat which was the perfect condition.
Salt didn’t kill such textures and tastes, and it made them rather clearer.

Sauce usually kills crispiness of the coating, or sometimes sauce’s taste is stronger than meat’s flavor.
I noticed for the first time that salt doesn’t kill tonkatsu’s characteristics, and it makes tonkatsu’s good points clearer.

Also, I noticed that the combination of lemon, salt, and tonkatsu was nice.
Lemon made the tonkatsu more refreshing, and I could keep eating without getting tired of tonkatsu’s thick taste.

My parents ran a ramen restaurant, and I used to create new ramen menus for their restaurant.
I made ideas of various ramen, but the one which most impressed my father who was very particular about foods and rarely said positive things to my ideas was ramen with salt-based soup with citrus.

Salt and citrus are good partners, indeed!
In addition, salt also go great with steamed white rice( ￣▽￣)

I ate them all!
I’ve hesitated to eat tonkatsu since I turned 30 years old because I had to control my intake calorie, and because too much oil made me feel sick.
However, I liked this tonkatsu very much, and I thought that I could have tonkatsu more often if it’s Fujiro’s tonkatsu.

As I already mentioned, I cannot eat and drink whatever I feel like because of my gout, but I would be happy to restrict my diet more to eat this tonkatsu once in a month.
The tonkatsu meal should be around 900kcal, and it is already a half of the limit of my daily intake calorie which is 1700kcal, though….
I hope that supplements such as “Metabaria” or “Bejifasu” which reduce fat absorption will work if I take them before the meal.
(By the way, this is “Bejifasu”.)

Conclusion

I see many old buildings disappear and new ones appear in Kayaba-cho for last few years, and the town looks very different from when I was working there.
The building which gave me this feeling the most was “Fujiro”.
The appearance was very gorgeous, and it made me think that Kayaba-cho became a town for rich people, which was sad for me.

However, when I entered the restaurant, I understood that that wasn’t right.
They do their best performance for lunch tonkatsu, and provide it with reasonable price.
Their food moves heart of people who are not professional gourmet but ordinary people with normal tongue like I am.

I hear and see that many restaurants serve simple menus which don’t take much work for lunch to increase sales as much as possible.
However, I learnt from Fujiro that a good restaurant does their best even in lunch menus which are often regarded as lower priority, and provide the best things to people.

Another example was Torinabe (chicken hot pot dish) of a restaurant “Akasaka Tosaka” which I introduced in a previous blog.
I only go to Kayaba-cho when I go to the clinic now, but I thought that I want to visit Fujiro in dinner time once and enjoy their food with sake.
…… Well, I need to get out of my gout first^^;