Jang

Rating: Not great
Meal: Dinner
Price: 1200 yen
Payment: Credit cards accepted
Dishes: Mini mabodofu rice bowl, gyoza, appetizer sampler (3 types)
English Menu: Yes
Smoking: No

 So I met a friend for shisha near Yokohama station the other night and afterwards was hunting for a restaurant to review.  Unfortunately I did not plan ahead, so I wandered around, wasting time, looking for a place to review that looked good.  I didn't find anything, so I ended up back at Jang, a restaurant I'd eaten at before, a long time ago.  It's a bit unusual, which is why I went back there, hoping for at least an Ok review.  However, I must, sadly, give it a Not Great, possibly due to my own poor choices, but, well, you'll see.

What sets this particular Chinese restaurant apart is their liberal use of mala sauce, a mixture sichuan peppers and other stuff that numbs the mouth and is also quite spicy.  Unfortunately, the dishes are quite limited, consisting of either noodle dishes or mabodofu (silken tofu cubes with some ground meat in spicy sauce).  Having eaten noodles for the past 3 days, I was ready for something else, so I opted for a mini rice bowl with mabodofu, a platter of gyoza and an appetizer sampler with a soy egg and two types of pickled vegetable.  Lastly, I wanted a spicy meal, so I got level 3 spice with my mabodofu.  That...was a mistake probably.

The appetizer dish was good, the gyoza fine, and then the mabodofu (a dish I generally don't like due to texture issues) was...well it's hard to tell because the spice level was so high I literally couldn't taste anything.  I added some soy sauce and garlic to try and obtain some flavor, but I guess the spice numbed me up so thoroughly, all that was left was the mushy texture of silken tofu and rice.  I ended up not finishing it because...what was the point?  I guess it would make a good weight-loss program.  There was a little bit of actual heat (I was a sweating a bit by the end), but I wouldn't call the meal super hot spicy.  Just an overdose of numbing...like going to the dentist and getting shot up with Novocaine.

I am giving the place a Not Great instead of a Nasty (which was how I felt after that meal) mainly because it was my fault for over spicing the meal.  But still...I didn't really care for the dishes available and am not likely to return in the future.