We had avoided curry all vacation long – purely from a lack of trying than from consciously avoiding it – because why would anyone – especially The European and I – avoid a bowl of glorious Japanese karē raisu (curry and rice)? It was sheer luck, being in the right place at the right time, that we enjoyed some curry on the last afternoon of the holiday. Sad to be leaving and running low on the boundless energy that carried us through two amazing weeks in the most incredible country, we headed back to Akihabara, where we started the trip, to finish our shopping. As we pondered what to have for our last lunch, we spotted a CoCo ICHIBANYA just up the road.
This popular curry and rice restaurant chain has over thirteen hundred locations in Japan and has almost two hundred branches in far-flung international destinations like the UK (there’s one near Bond Street). As with most things in Japan, getting a meal in front of you at ICHIBANYA seems complicated but is in fact a piece of cake. You find a seat (easier said than done, to be fair, as they’re very popular), and order your food and drinks via the screen in front of you. You’re waiting for mere minutes.
We used our trusty Google Lens (another useful discovery made at the end of the vacation) to translate the menu and ordered a couple of chicken katsu curries, hers with spice and pickle and mine with tons of cheese all over it. You can order a McDonald’s-style meal deal where you get a beer and a salad included. For about two thousand yen each, you get a man decent meal. The curry is beautiful. Maybe it’s the placebo effect of eating it in Japan, but it tasted better than any of the katsu curries I have eaten in the U.K. For a final meal in the country, not counting a disappointing airport rice dish I had that same evening, it was a wonderful stodgy and tasty mess.
Note to self: vist more CoCo ICHIBANYA more often when we return in October (which, as I write this post, beyond late, is exactly one month away).
The food thing. 
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