Tonki/Kameari豚喜/亀有

 

Right around the corner and across the street from JR Kameari station - go out the south exit, you will see a McDonald's. The Ito Yokado you see on your left is across the street from the place - the Ito Yokado has a fairly large basement food floor, almost all supermarket, pretty large even for this area of the city. Note that you can come "almost" this far on the Chiyoda-sen, but you have to get off at the last stop and then change to the Joban-sen for one more stop to Kameari. Tonki is obviously tring to be a Jiro-look-alike, with the bright yellow banner, the dishes, the red counter, No other Jiro that I know of is in a basement restaurant food floor. It's a new shop, within the last couple of months I believe (some of the congratulatory flowers are still out front). Most of Tonki's ranks are fairly high on ranking sites. It has a very spartan interior consisting of two tables for 4, no bathroom (there's one elsewhere on the restaurant floor) and 8 counter seats - but no place to stow jackets or hang them though. A very friendly waitress who spoke in nice slow Japanese for me took my order. They have both sho and dai tsukemen and you can add a large amount of buta for 200 yen - but you cannot select the number of slices, you just get a big hunk. A cute touch is that the menu has "smile" as a topping - the sho is 200g, large is 400g of noodles - the tsukemen will come with nori on top. Overall it was like a Jiro taste, but the soup was not very greasy at all, it was much more tonkotsu shoyu than shoyu tonkotsu like most instances of Jiros are - this place had virtually no suspended fat. The cabbage/moyashi ratio was 5:5. The noodles were very mochi mochi, like udon, only much darker in color - you can order them thick or thin, I got the thick, and they were a bit thinner than fettucine. Fresh onions on the counter along with shoyu tare, tissues and good strong mugi cha, if you don't want mugi cha than get a bottle of water before you go in. The volume of the sho was huge, I would hate to have to eat the dai. The line varied widely while i was waiting and then eating. Recommended.

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