TsubaraTsubara

To drive past you wouldn’t even think that such treats could lie within; I mean it just looks like a pile of shipping containers stacked up next to a paintball field. But with an inside tip that there was much more than meets the eye to these containers we went to investigate. Soup curry is big in Japan and like I’ve said before I’m not a big fan of Japanese style curry (I’m coming round slowly) but here at TsubaraTsubara we were told, was a good thing. We peeked inside and were surprised to see the interior of a restaurant, had you somehow been magiked inside from some other place you would not know the exterior was a shipping container, and to add to our surprise all the seats were full. We were lucky enough that someone was just finishing up so with but a brief wait we were on our way.



The menu is a choose your own adventure, starting you choose the filling for the soup from five choices: chicken leg, pork and leek, prawn, all vegetables or chicken meatball. Then it’s on to your soup of choice; original or with added coconut cream, now onto additional extras from fried wonton skins (50¥) through to roast pork (300¥) with a multitude of other choices in-between. How hungry are exactly is the next question as you pick the size of your rice 140g through to 260g with the choice also of oatmeal rice, a mixed grain rice with all sorts of things in it. Lastly how hot do you want to go, this is an interesting concept as chilli is not really an acquired taste here in cabbage country, so to have a scale that goes from one to twenty with a recommended heat level of 5 is nice for someone who likes the spice.

We went through the adventure Kat having a coconut soup with chicken, additional chicken meatballs and fried garlic with a spicing of 8, myself having the original soup with pork, leek and boiled egg, additional sausage and a spicing of 8. Kat also has the oatmeal rice which is a good and a bad thing, good because it’s so tasty, bad because since then they’ve always been sold out of it leaving us craving.
My soup is tasty and flavourful, the spice heat is good (I’d like to see someone attempt the 20) as well as the pork, leek and egg there is maitake mushroom and roast capsicum, it a generous portion.



Kats soup with the addition of the coconut cream makes the taste similar to a Thai Khao soy, again it’s a generous portion and the additional meatballs, well, next time I’m going to have a bowlful of just them, they’re sooooo delicious.



I guess the moral of the story is: walk into many strange buildings because there’s delicious food in side or not all shipping containers are created equal, something like that.

Address
On the corner at the first set of traffic lights out of Hirafu towards Kutchan.