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fvz
Mon Dec 18, 2006 1:55 pm

Re: Ueno - Asian food
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Song Huong - Vietnamese
Reviewed by Tim Field

Address - Mizuno Building 2F, 3-20-2 Ueno Taito-ku Tokyo 110-0005
Opening Hours Monday to Friday 5pm – 11pm, Sat 11am – 11pm, Closed on Sundays
Telephone - 03-3836-1877
Credit Cards - No

We were lucky enough to find this restaurant in our end of Tokyo about 2 years ago, since then we have made it a regular haunt.
Song Huong won’t thrill you with its décor or flashy “art food” presentation; rather it’s more homely and authentic.  The kitchen does it’s best to prepare authentic Vietnamese dishes with the goods available to them in Japan. The staff (possibly a group of sisters) is friendly and accommodating. English, to my knowledge, isn’t spoken and the menu is in Japanese and Vietnamese. It does, however, have pictures. 
Some of our favourite dishes are :
GOI CUON (Fresh Spring Rolls) 600 yens
CHA GIO (Fried Spring Rolls) 700 yens
GOI DU DU (Papaya Salad) 900 yens
BAHN CUON (Dumplings) 850 yens
CANH GA CHIEN NUOC MAM (Fried Chicken Wings in Nuoc Mam) 680 yens
BAHN XEO (“Vietnamese Okonomiyaki”) 1200 yens
BUN CHA GIO (Cold Noodles served with Fried Spring Rolls & Pickles) 800 yens
333 (Vietnamese beer Access : SONG HUONG is located near JR Okachimachi station, not far from Ueno’s Ameyoko area.
January 2005



Senriko - Korean Chinese ****
Okubo and Ueno 

Ueno :
Address - Taito-ku, Ueno 6-8-19 Ueno Matsushima Bldg B1 F.
Opening hours - 12:00 pm to 5 am. Closed on Sundays
Telephone - 03-5807-1761
Menu - In Japanese, Chinese and Korean
Credit Cards - No

Okubo :
Address - Shinjuku-ku, Hyakunincho 1-7-10 Hosono Bldg 2F
Opening hours 12:00 pm to 3 am. Closed on Sundays
Telephone - 03-5338-6918
Menu - In Japanese, Chinese and Korean
Credit Cards - No

My old friend Masami is a jack of many trades.
Not being afraid of hard work, over the years he has turned himself in a sort of Renaissance man with different and diverging interests. 
A computer power user at home as much with motherboards as with Adobe Illustrator, a Trados technical translator, a very expert cook, but first of all a true anarchist, to make ends meet at the moment he is cooking ramen in a shop in Ueno, where he heard from his Chinese boss about a nearby restaurant that serves dog meat.
Since I am curious by nature, I decided to go there in the instant he told me. And since going to eat dog with my only true love was out of question (she is a real lady), I had to content myself with Masami's company. 
Had I known it's not a Chinese restaurant, as I had thought, but a Korean restaurant, I probably wouldn't have gone: the absence of Korean restaurants in this site is no coincidence.
But I did, and that's good, because it isn't simply a Korean restaurant, but rather a Korean-Chinese one, that is one of the Ethnic Korean minority in China.
I am pleased to say Senriko turned out to be very nice and original regardless of dog meat. I must have been the first white devil they had seen in a while, because some customers just couldn't hide their surprise. The cute waitress was nonetheless impeccably polite and helpful.
The way you eat here is unusual and deserves a couple of words: the lion's share of the menu is made of meat (beef, pork, mutton or chicken as you like).
The base order unit is the skewer, prices being around 250 - 350 yen each.
To grill the stuff, you get your own "konro", a conical terracotta oven full of hot wood coals, over which there's a two tiered thing. The lower one is to cook the skewered meat, the upper one to keep it warm while you eat something else.
You receive also two small dishes containing each a different powdery spice to dip your skewers in, one yellow and one red. Against all my expectations, they weren't hot at all. And the dog?
It was the only disappointing moment of the evening. You can have just the skin, which we were told is the part men usually like, just the meat as all good girls do, or both, as experimenters of good pedigree like me prefer. Either one looked and tasted like pork, was rather leathery and absolutely uninteresting.
The rest of the meal was good, but less of an adventure and more Chinese than Korean: we had some excellent Wan Tan soup, fried rice, kimchi and some fried vegetables. All in all, a pleasant variation on the Yakiniku theme that won't disappoint the carnivores.
It goes without saying that although people here are friendly, English is of no use whatsoever: you must know Korean, Chinese or Japanese.
