Chien-Fu

After visiting the magnificent Studio Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, located in the western side of the greater Tokyo area, we went for lunch somewhere that was further west from the centre of the city. The Granduo department store in Tachikawa (立川), which was right next to the JR rail station, has a 'China Street' on the 7th floor that houses a number of restaurants that serves various Chinese regional cuisines. We were there for Chien-Fu (健福), a Taiwanese vegetarian restaurant. Chien-Fu also follows the same buddhist vegetarian principles as was at It's Vegetable!, so the food here did not contain strong-smelling plants such as garlic, onion and leek. The name of the restaurant means something like good health and good fortune.



Yes, they had an even larger number of food models outside than most places! Less need to spend time studying since everything was vegetarian. Inside the restaurant looked really nice. They had backlit pictures of vegetables up on the wall (you can sort of see them in the middle of the photo above) which were quite arty and cool.

They had rather large menu, with a range of starters/side dishes on offer. Among these were very nicely pan-fried vegetable dumplings and pan-fried turnip cakes (大根もち). You could also get steamed turnip cakes at Chinese dim sum restaurants, but pan-frying gives a crispy exterior which is better in my opinion. Most of the turnip cakes in normal Chinese restaurants come with ham and dry shrimp, so we took advantage of the opportunity to indugle ourselves! We are dumpling fans, so we got some pan-fried dumplings (焼餃子) as well.



And for good measure, we had to get the boiled dumplings (水餃子) too! Boiled dumplings are appreciated differently because this way you could taste the freshness of the dough and ingredients and juicy-ness of the whole dumpling. Ihascupcake couldn't resist the range of deep fried starters on offer; rather than going for the usually easily available veg spring rolls, we picked the crunchy deep fried veggie 'prawns' (海老風フライ). They were very tasty, the texture of the 'prawns' were rather realistic, and they went well with the ketchup type sauce provided.



There were so many different noodles, rice dishes, main entree dishes to choose from (and all vegetarian!!) that it was slightly overwhelming. We both decided to go for noodles, maybe to compensate for the lack of noodles during this trip, since most places did not have meat-free broth. Ihascupcake went for taami/danzi noodles (担仔麺), a humble siganture dish from Tainan (southern Taiwan). This vegetarian version contained a mixture of fake pork, beansprouts and chinese vegetables. It was lovely though in a sublte, home cooking sort of way.



I had braised aubergine and noodles (麻茄魯麺). It was very saucy, and the aubergine was delicious.



All of this came to ¥3,790. Great value for a very wide choice of great tasting vegetarian food! The place wasn't packed when we went but we probably arrived towards the end of lunch time; there were quite a few customers that came and went during our stay, and most of them seemed middle age. The staff were friendly; we chatted with a couple of them in a combination of languages. The young man at the front counter spoke very good English; he explained to us that he was the only Japanese member of staff there, so he was trying to learn a bit of Mandarin.

Tachikawa is a bit away from central Tokyo, but if you are already in west side of Tokyo, an express train on the JR Chūō Line can get you there relatively quickly. There is another branch of Chien-Fu in Kunitachi (国立市), also in western greater Tokyo, but I think only the local train stops there and it worked out easier for us to get to the branch that was further out west from Mitaka. For those who don't have time to venture outside central Tokyo, we found out that Chien-Fu also has a food counter inside Matsuzakaya (松坂屋) department store in Ginza on the food floor at B1F. There is an additional branch in Iga city in the Kansai region in western Japan.


健福 Chien-Fu
Granduo bldg. 7F, 3-2-1 Shibasaki-cho,Tachikawa, Tokyo
東京都立川市柴崎町3-2-1グランデュオ立川7F
TEL: 042-540-2296

It's Vegetable!

Quite possibly the best named restaurant that we visited, It's Vegetable (イッツベジタブル) is a simple short walk from Kinshicho station (go out the north exit and follow along the train line to the right). It's not the most central location, but it was quite near the Edo Tokyo Museum (Ryogoku Station), which we highly recommend.

It's Vegetable serves Taiwanese Buddhist vegetarian cuisine (台湾素食), which means not only no meat or fish but also no dairy and no garlic or onions. Buffet restaurants are quite common in Japan, going under the inititally puzzling name of Viking (バイキング, 'baikingu') style. It's Vegetable was unusual in not being all-you-can-eat but instead offering fixed size plastic trays of different sizes. Still a generous meal, particularly for lunch, though.



The friendly man at the restaurant spoke good amount of English and explained to us that we could choose the size of tray (we got the medium size that costed ¥850 each) and fill them up once. He also gave us brief descriptions of the food available at the buffet. There were various different kinds of vegetables, tofu and fake meats in sauce, as well as balls of konyakku (the jelly looking things in the middle right in the pic), fried vegetables and a couple of different choices of rice including more healthy brown rice. There was also tea and vegetable soup included (without having to fit them in the tray!). The food was pretty good for buffets, and we got to try out different things but the down side was you couldn't go back to get more (unless you come back for lunch again)! The price seems quite reasonable for what we got.



The man also told us the owner was from Taiwan, but she was busy talking on the phone as we were leaving, so we didn't get to speak to her and thank her for the nice cooking. We also saw some health food products being sold at the cash register. We'd happy to go back to It's Vegetable next time we're in Tokyo.


It's Vegetable!
4-1-9 Kinshi, Sumida-ku, Tokyo
東京都墨田区錦糸4丁目1-9
Phone & Fax 03-3625-1245