Eikarou

Rating: Very good
Meal: Lunch
Price:  800 yen
Payment: Cash only (maybe)
Dishes: Szechuan chicken teishoku
English Menu: No
Smoking: Yes

Eikarou (I'm guessing on the pronunciation as I didn't catch it.  The kanji is 榮華楼) is a Chinese restaurant near Ueno station downtown Tokyo.  After church last Sunday about 12 of us wandered towards the station hoping to find a place we could all eat at.  A difficult thing if you know anything about restaurants in Japan.  Luckily we spotted this Chinese restaurant and asked if we could take over the second floor and they allowed it.

I obviously can't account for all of the food there as I wasn't primarily there to review the place, but I ordered one of the daily specials for about 800 yen, a Szechuan chicken teishoku.  The chicken was quite good, with lots of veggies and a nice burn to it.  We also had some gyoza which was tasty too.  It was a ton of food and I ended up not needing dinner that night.

The waiter was kind of funny as he was Chinese, spoke some English and no Japanese, so we had fun trying to communicate as we had English, Japanese and Chinese speakers in our group.  After we were done we found out they were Christians too and we were grateful they allowed us to disrupt their usual lunch crowd.

Overall I was quite pleased with my meal so I'm giving it a Very Good as it was a bit better than the usual Chinese fair in Japan.