Shanghai Shokudo Fukuan + SHIBUYA, TOKYO

This is it. At long last, it took me almost 6 years to find this, but I knew it existed. Chinese pop music lightly playing in the background, chefs chattering in Mandarin, crappy decor, AUTHENTIC HOME-STYLE CHINESE FOOD. Don’t let the dirty alley location fool you, this is no hole in the wall to be ignored. At long last there is a contender to China Cafe 8. The menu may be half the size, but the portions are of absurd proportions. There were days when I almost felt like begging for real Chinese food in Tokyo. The smell, the busy kitchen, a restaurant full of Chinese customers! How I tired of ebi chili and mabo tofu, but NO MORE.

It’s as though someone in heaven knew my desired meal budget and my desired tastes, and granted my wish. You’ll be hard pressed to find a meal that won’t leave you feeling stuffed to the brim for over 600 yen. That includes a soup, Chinese pickles and the main dish(depending on what you order). My first dish was pork fried rice, an otherwise simple dish in name yet tasting of overwhelming complexity. I’m sure these chefs make this dish like an afterthought, but you’ll never find fried rice like this at any Tokyo Chinese restaurant. Scattered inside are little bits of Chinese broccoli, shredded pork, egg, and other minced vegetables. It’s served in bucket portions with a small soup and little dish of Chinese pickles, the kind drizzled in chili oil. Health risks aside, if the concept of calories didn’t exist, this would be my daily lunch.

This evening I had the eggplant and Chinese miso sauce. I had a sinking feeling that I might have ordered the wrong thing, that I would be served typical Japanese mabo-nasu, which is the eggplant version of their standard mabo-tofu. How wrong I was. Cue Chinese kung-fu flute music, cue shouting chefs, along comes a big plate piled high with chopped roasted eggplant, skins seared, meat thick and sweet, roasted minced garlic and ground meat thoroughly cooked in Chinese miso sauce. It tasted like every kung fu fighter in the world beat the hell out of these eggplants, then exploded them with flavor power and landed them on my plate in an atomic explosion of aroma and richness. Nothing could express my feeling after eating this. How I’ve waited so long for food like this, food NOT squeezed out of a bottle or thrown in a pan from a can. Could I but speak more than a few words of Chinese, I would gratefully thank these people for maintaining a restaurant like this in a sea of boring standards(there are six “hambagu” restaurants around my office, how… original).

I know this isn’t meant for the locals, no matter when I go, the majority of customers are Chinese. This is a dead giveaway that the menu isn’t going to change any time soon. Having tried this place three times, I feel like it can do no wrong. Even my wife, a very choosey eater, deeply enjoyed her meal of stewed vegetables and Chinese meatballs wrapped in delicate tofu skins. I’m not sure yet if they offer vegetarian options, but I can easily imagine my eggplant dish this evening having the same impact with or without the minced meat. In fact, there were several dishes on the menu which could potentially be vegan, so I will have to take one of my vegan friends there to find out.

This is not an easy restaurant to find if you’re not already familiar with Shibuya. If you can make it to the McDonalds in the central shopping area then you’re close. You need to walk down the street between this McDonalds and the kebab restaurant(there’s a sashimi ricebowl restaurant just after the kebab place). Keep walking straight, and just past the big ramen shop on the right, take a right and you’ll see it. It’s in the middle of that alley. Busted sign out front, steamy windows, menu splayed out in front. Once inside there are menus at the tables. The menus have photos, for the most part, but there are items which cannot be ordered with reading the kanji. Some of these items are very tempting so it’s recommended to bring a friend who can read kanji if you want to go beyond their house specials(which will knock your socks off, mind you).

Shanghai Shokudo Fukuan

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