Steak House Ittoya

Rating: OK
Meal: Lunch
Price: 1674 yen
Payment: Cash only
Dishes:Pieces of steak with an egg, some veg, onion soup and rice
English Menu: No
Smoking: Yes, even if no one is smoking, it's smokey from the cooking steak

Steak House Ittoya is one of those smaller steak places that you find all over Japan.  I don't know, maybe they are someone's passion project after retirement, or a legitimately awesome restaurants.  You just have to try it to find out.

Onion soup

The place smelled a bit funky when I came up, but that appears to be the smell of stale steak cooking smoke combined with stale tobacco smoke.  You get used to it after a while.  Luckily no one lit up while I was there, though when I left people were arriving and asking for ash trays.  They have 3 lunch specials that keep the cost relatively down.  I went for the real meat option as I'm less fond of hamburg.  I also added an extra 50g of meat for a bit more, thus boosting my meal price into a loftier tier for lunch.  I think I wouldn't do that again...it may have been more, but it was pretty minuscule all around honestly.

The onion soup was delicious and prompted some searching on the Internet to see how I can make my own onion soup in a crockpot.  I learned that you can quickly caramelize onions in a crock pot while I was at it!  Oh sorry, about the food.  Eh...I wasn't too impressed.  The meat was pretty chewy, and not very flavorful.  Nothing else was really impressive.  The steak sauce was pretty vinegary and not my favorite style.  So...not bad but not great either.  Maybe if I splurged and bought the specialty meats my impression would change, but I'm not fond of plunking that kind of cash down for meat, especially for lunch.

Honestly my overall impression with the dish I had was that it wasn't much different than what can be had for less at the chain steak restaurants in the local mall, so I really can't give it much more than an Ok.