Homey Cafe near Home

Restaurant: Mona Records Music Cafe / モナレコード音楽カフェー
Neighborhood: Shimokitazawa / 下北沢
Style: Homey Japanese / 日本料理
Website: www.mona-records.com

Recently my friend Katie leant me a cafe book covering Shimokitazawa and Sangenjaya. These books are available for most neighborhoods in Japan and go through listing the local (non-national-chain) businesses in a given neighborhood, with a little bit of text and a few photos of each. When I first saw them a few years ago, they weren't that useful to me, both because they're written in Japanese only and because I didn't understand the tropes of Japanese food culture as well.

Now, I can generally work my way through the Japanese text and I actually know what a lot more of the dishes are (monjya, agemon, chanko, etc.) so I can actually get an idea from a book like this where I might want to go. Since I live in the neighborhood, I would explore a lot of these places anyway, but the good thing about this kind of book is that they will find some places that are so out-of-the-way you would never see them.

The book definitely prompted me to go to Mona Music Cafe and I'm glad I did! Mona is an indie record label, from what I've explored they seem to focus on acoustic and mellow music. The second floor is the cafe and record store and the third floor is the live space where performers connected to the label play.

This article is about the cafe as a cafe though! And it's a great place. It's shoeless, meaning all the tables are low tables with cushions. The overall vibe fits an acoustic label, meaning it's low-key and very homey. There's plenty of space (rare at a Japanese restaurant) so you won't feel hemmed in. On a Monday night at 8ish it was busy enough to not be empty but not crowded.

I got one of the daily teishoku (set meals), which by the way is generally the right thing to do in Japan. It was simple fare very well-done. The main was grilled organic chicken and vegetables, and the great thing is that they were flame-broiled, meaning that the food actually had carbonization and the associated taste (carcinogens, yum!). Besides a generous bowl of rice, it came with miso soup, some sesame-oil-laced noodle/tofu, and a pickled root vegetable (the exact nature of which I couldn't identify). 900yen.

It was a cold night so I started with a pot of kocha (black tea) and followed up with their housemade ginger ale. It was nice and gingery, but like a lot of housemade ginger ale here, very very sweet. Still tasty though!

This is a great place to hang out and grab a meal on a cold winter's night. I'm sure I'll be back.