Koufuku Gyouza Sakaba

Rating: Very good
Meal: Lunch for 3
Price: 4060 yen
Payment: Credit cards accepted
Dishes: Lamb sticks, Fried rice set, Boiled dumpling set, several additional dumpling orders, green beans
English Menu: Yes
Smoking: Yes

Lamb sticks

Our church rents a dance studio room and the dance studio moved locations recently.  It's not far from the previous spot, but it feels like a completely different section of town with a whole new set of restaurants to check out.  This was the first Sunday after church where we didn't have other plans, so we took advantage and found a restaurant to eat at before heading home.

Green beans

We spotted a Chinese restaurant with signs advertising gyoza specials and popped in.  It was quite smoky, so if you can't take that, this place probably won't work.  However, everything we ate was quite tasty, more so than usual for a Chinese restaurant in Japan.  The language coming out of the kitchen was Chinese, so that was a good sign, and they had several pages of different types of gyoza, from typical fried types to boiled dumplings, to soup dumplings, to a baked/soup dumpling combo.  They even had an all you can eat Gyoza menu item where you get a couple of standard items plus as much gyoza as you can eat from all the types they serve.

Fried rice set

Anyway, I was quite impressed with the gyoza I had.  It was absolutely delicious, bursting with flavor.  And I think we only had about 4 different kinds, there were more available.  Even the mabotofu that came with my wife and son's sets was tasty, and I usually don't like it.  I'm definitely please to find a good Chinese spot as that is quite rare.

Soup dumplings

Boiled dumplings set

Fukuho Gyoza

Rating: OK
Meal: Lunch for 2
Price: 1600 yen
Payment:  Credit cards accepted
Dishes: Two gyoza teishoku
English Menu:No

Smoking:No

I've heard rumors of dedicated Gyoza restaurants before, but had not eaten at one til this morning.  After church, my son and I went looking for something new to try.  We decided to give Fukuho Gyoza a try.  It's a pretty Japanese place with little in the way of help for non-Japanese speakers.  But luckily the sign out front had pictures of the two lunch sets, which were the same except that one came with two orders of gyoza while the other had only one.  You didn't get to choose the type of gyoza and I think we got a mix of garlic and meat.  We did get to choose whether we wanted them fried or boiled.  We got some of each.  The rest of the teishoku was pretty good, a bowl of rice, a bowl of seaweed soup (smelled like the ocean...in a good way) and a plate of steamed bean sprouts covered with some very lightly spiced ground meat.  There were several tasty sauces to put in dipping bowls at the side of the table.

After perusing the menu at the table, I also figured out that you can order lots of other interesting types of gyoza a la cart, which we will be sure to try next time we come back.  It was a filling and tasty meal, but nothing spectacular.  I might upgrade the rating after trying the specialty types of gyoza at another time.