Yum! Yakiniku!

Name: Maritan / まりたん
Neighborhood: Shimokitazawa / 下北沢
Style: Yakiniku
Website: None, but there's a Yahoo Gourmet page

At the recommendation of Polygon's head of Human Resources, Kikuchi-san, we trekked north from Shimokitazawa on Friday night to this allegedly superior yakiniku restaurant.

Yakiniku is the style of Japanese eating with a charcoal pit in the center of the table. The raw meat is brought thinly sliced on separate plates -- usually they'll try to bring as many slices as you have people at your table, roughly -- and diners grill the meat themselves, followed with dipping in ponzu, shoyu, or lemon sauces.

Yakiniku is always pretty good, we actually have a yummy place right next to work with very reasonably priced lunch yakiniku set (Y1000). But Kikuchi-san attested that Maritan was special in that regard, and so we found ourselves trekking north from Shimokitazawa station.

Unlike the extremely nigayakana (lively) south side of Shimakitazawa, the north side is actually very quiet, and it took a little backtracking to find Maritan, especially because we were distracted by the barkers for the restaurant upstairs (Maritan is on B1). They were very friendly and tried their best to convince us to abandon our reservation and accompany them inside their street-level new restaurant. With diligence we pried Damien away and went down to Maritan.

The ambience of the restuarant is, frankly, nothing special; it had the expected four-person tables, that we squeezed 5 around. Drink ordering was a challenge for the non-Katakana readers, but we realized they had a selection of 3-4 French wines, one of which Damien knew the Chateau for. This led to our first disappointment: high-class yakiniku or no, they refrigerate their red wines, like most restaurants in Japan. It took plenty of persuasion to convince Damien not to try and instruct the proprietress in the error of her way (refrigerated red wine is what the Japanese customers will expect).

As we went through trying to order our meat, the proprietress wasn't looking any too happy at having a table full of gaijin in her restaurant. While I can read the names in the menu (most names are written in katakana), that doesn't help much unless you know what the words actually mean (anybody: what is horumon?), so we were asking lots of questions in Japanese, then struggling with food-word-vocabulary to understand the answers. At one point she asked, "Have you ever eaten Yakiniku before?"

We got through ordering various courses of meat and went on to the daily-special appetizer (always order the daily special in a Japanese restaurant): Yukke / ユッケ. Yukke is a lot like Steak Tartare, it's raw beef minced with various spices. However, the big difference is that Yukke is better! It was absolutely delicious. We all uttered appropriate exclamations of happiness, mostly in Japanese, which warmed up the proprietress' attitude a bit.

They started bringing our plates of meat, and the proprietress had decided that as soulless barbarians we would ruin the meat if she let us cook it ourselves. Since that absolutely would not do, she took over and started cooking the meat for us, which she continued to do for pretty much the entire meal.

We got into the main part of the meal: sliced pieces of various parts of a cow. Omigod. It. Was. Good. We actually didn't realize there could be this much variation among yakiniku places, but everything we tried was good: rohsu / ロース, which is basically short for roast beef; horumon / ホルモン, which we think is intestine although we're not sure; karupi / カルピ, etc. We exercised all of our complimentary vocabulary expressing our delight.

The highlight of the mail by universal acclamation was the hattsu / ハッつ, beef heart. It was delicious, tender, and totally came apart in your mouth. We were also pretty grateful for the lady's cooking assistance, since the heart only wanted to be cooked for a very short time; left to our own devices, we would indeed have overcooked it.

By the end of the mail, the now-friendly proprietress introduced herself as the restaurant's namesake: her name is Maritan, and she's been there since the place opened 15 years ago. They're clearly learned how to run a superior yakiniku operation in that time and we'll be back! Big thanks to Kikuchi-san!

After we left Damien went back to causing trouble with the cute barkers upstairs, but that's a story for another post ;-).

Note: The only warning I would have about Maritan is that it's really not practical to go unless you either have some Japanese speakers in your party, or know at least know the various dishes you're likely to encounter at a yakiniku restaurant by heart. You're not in Roppongi anymore.