Xi'an

Rating: OK
Meal:  Lunch for 3
Price: 2640 yen
Payment: Credit cards accepted
Dishes: Seafood teishoku, Beef with onions teishoku, crab fried rice
English Menu: No
Smoking:No

Last Sunday we were heading up as normal to church in Toyosu when we slammed into a wall of traffic.  Oops, we forgot it was silver week! (a set of national holidays that tons of people travel on)  So we detoured to IKEA to do some built up shopping, and then on our way back via Yokohama we decided to try a Chinese restaurant called Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi province which is also the name of the regional cuisine.  This is the same cuisine as the restaurant in Narita that I've reviewed before:  Tang Dynasty.   Hoping we were finding a great "local" alternative, we decided to brave the difficulty of finding parking near Yokohama Station and locating this Xi'an.

Crab fried rice

 First of all, I recommend taking the train if at all possible.  Second, you need to know that this restaurant is on the 2nd basement floor of the Yokohama Yodobashi building.  If you are walking underground, it can be difficult to find, so you're probably better off walking along the street til you find the building, then taking the escalator down a couple of floors to the restaurant area.  There is a little map so you can find your way from there.

Seafood dish

 The lunch menu is fairly limited, with several types of noodle dishes and a few teishokus.  None of us felt like a noodle dish (unfortunately...they do the "shaved noodle" thing and it would have been fun to try it out).  My son of course had eyes only for the fried rice, and though he thinks he doesn't like crab, since that was the only option he went for it.  My wife and I tried a couple of the teishoku dishes picked mainly from their pictures.

Beef and onion

I did not like my wife's dish, feeling it was too gloopy and a bit sweet and sour.  She said she liked it fine, except for the chunks of mountain radish that look like daikon but when you start chewing them they go all slimy.  My dish was pretty good I though, consisting of soft beef with lots of onions.  The onions were a little bit raw still and I would have preferred them softer.  Also they have a great gyoza dipping sauce there which combines chili oil with some kind of soy sauce mixture.  That made the rather bland dishes taste much better.



So, not really a replacement for Tang Dynasty at Narita, but a lot closer.