Thursday, May 31, 2007

Lamb BBQ in Jiyugaoka, Tokyo

One evening in Tokyo, my cousin took Fougoo and I to a local restaurant in his neighborhood, Jiyugaoka. I apologize for not having an English name, but I unfortunately don't read or write Japanese. I did take a picture of the storefront.
My cousin told us that the restaurant was a style of Mongolian BBQ that specialized in lamb. The restaurant was on the second floor, small, a little dark, but it smelled nice.
We sat in a booth with a large charcoal burning stove with a cast iron grill on top. The grill was then prepped with a sizeable piece of lamb fat smeared onto the heated iron top.





We ordered a few plates of lamb, and the meat looked beautiful. The first plate was of thin strips of lamb, and the quality of meat was so good that we pretty much ate the lamb rare-medium rare from the grill. Unlike Korean BBQ, no marinade was used. It was meat- pure and simple.







The second plate was more of a lamb steak. It came with a sauce made with soy sauce and sesame oil that we could dip the cooked pieces of meat.
We also got several kabob skewers of lamb (below). These were lightly seasoned, as the focus of the flavor was the actual lamb meat.






On the grill, we added onion, mushrooms, and bean sprouts. This restaurant was pretty amazing, something I had never tried before. We all smelled liked smoke and lamb afterwards.

3 comments:

fougoo said...

oooh nice pics of the meat!

Deborah Dowd said...

No vegetarians here! That lamb makes my mouth water!

Anonymous said...

From the picture, it looks like the restaurant's name is gengisu kan (Ghengis Khan). Looks great, I'll have to try that place sometime. Thanks!