Nikuya Tanaka

Nikuya Tanaka (肉屋 田中)

⭐⭐⭐⭐

🐂 Niku Kappo / 📍 Ginza

📓 Visits: 1

For me, all, or very nearly all plates in a niku kappo restaurant have to contain beef.  And, at JPY 54,450, if you have one of, if not the most expensive niku kappo, courses in Tokyo then the standard of all the cooking and quality of all the ingredients needs to match the quality of the beef.  My reading suggested I'd be disappointed in that regard at Nikuya Tanaka.  So I'd never been, instead preferring Setsugekka, which is also run by the self-titled Boss (though he does not cook there).  When I got wind a lunch course run by his sous chef, with 30 years experience cooking beef and 25 years working alongside Tanaka-san, was at a 20K discount I did not think twice about booking.  Let's start with the good stuff and move on to the less good.

Tempura beef tenderloin was the best gyu katsu I've ever had.  I generally find gyu katsu quite poor, probably because most places don't use top quality beef.  Here it was stunning.  Soft all the way through, zero oily taste and deep flavour of beef.  10/10.  Also 10/10 was the Chateaubriand sumiyaki.  Good size portion, perfect cuisson: slightly rare in the centre with a good crust around the outside.  It came with salt, shoyu and wasabi but didn't need any of them.  The seasonal pickled peach to help cut through was a masterstroke.  Raw beef doesn't have a lot of flavour and unfortunately the "signature" norimaki didn't really deliver.  Kainomi tataki was delicious but it's a very fatty cut and was a bit much for me when it came to the last piece.  The sukiyaki was not for me: sirloin this time and again quite fatty but the bigger dislike was the ton of misansho.  Desserts were good.  Melon was a high quality musk melon, and I enjoyed the warabi mochi, which is something I rarely say.  The rest of the meal was less objectively good.  The gobo beef roll in the hassun was great but the hotate was not good and neither was the goma ichijiku.  Junsai was small in diameter and the flavour which there was in the raw beef sushi was obliterated by the chef burning straw.  I rated the owan 8/10.  The 99% kegani shinjo was delicious.  The dashi was quite highly seasoned and very much in your face rather than ethereal.  Corn rice was sadly no better than you could make at home.

So we come back to where we started.  The beef is some of the best you'll ever have.  All the beef today was from a Tajima cow.  Except for the owan and desserts, every dish did actually contain beef (which I wasn't expecting) but the cooking and quality of the non-beef components didn't meet the standard of a kaiseki restaurant I'd want to revisit.

The chef was able to make conversation and introduce the dishes in English.  They have already opened a restaurant in Singapore and are planning restaurants for Hong Kong and New York later this year.

The contents of this Tabelog review are identical to the food I ate.  A dinner review written in the same month shows a meal that adds an additional course of abalone noodles, but is otherwise the same.  For an excellent review, in English, of the dinner course at Nikuya Tanaka see here.

Overall, I would still recommend lunch here, but dinner is more than I want to spend on a meal of this quality.

📌 https://tabelog.com/tokyo/A1301/A130101/13237628/

❓ My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4.3

📱 Booking: 🟧 Dinner is an easy booking by phone, TableCheck or Omakase.  Lunch is less regular and might not be available via TableCheck.  Some English spoken.

📍 Location: 

9F GICROS GINZA GEMS, 6-4-3 Ginza.  2 mins South-West from the C2 or C3 (Tokyu Plaza Ginza) Exit, Ginza station.  9F multi-tenant building.
Map data ©2021 Google

📅 Visit June 2026

🕛 Lunch 27,000

🛎️ Service charge: 10%

💧 Water charge: ∅

Tai, Tajima norimaki, karasumi powder 
Hassun 
Tajima kainomi warayaki 
Kegani shinjo owan
Tajima Chateaubriand tempura 
Tajima sukiyaki 
Yuzu granita 
Tajima Chateaubriand sumiyaki 
Corn rice 
Melon
Matcha warabi mochi
Sencha

💴 Damage: 35,090 (27000 + 2 drinks @ 2000 + 10% + 10%)

⏱️ Time taken: 1h50m