Devilcraft

Rating: OK
Meal: Lunch for 2
Price: 8300 yen
Payment: Credit cards accepted
Dishes: Greek pizza, thai pizza, "the works" pizza (Chicago style), all small size.  4 half pints and one full pint of beer
English Menu: Yes
Smoking: No

Well...this was disappointing.  For years, ever since we arrived in Japan, we've heard legends of Devilcraft, a pizza joint that brews their own beer.  They have 3 locations in town and we've never had the opportunity to go (the conditions must be perfect...) until today.  For her birthday/our anniversary my wife really wanted to go, so we made plans to eat at 3pm at the Gotanda location.

We decided to be liberal in our ordering so we could really get a feel for the beer and pizza.  As such we ended up ordering a total of 4 half pints of their locally brewed beer and finished it off with one full pint of Stone Ruination IPA (to cleans the palette perhaps?).  As for pizza, we started off with the two specials, a greek themed and a thai themed pizza.   The greek pizza had tzatziki on it...that's mostly all I recall.  The thai pizza was based on the Gapao classic dish, and we even ordered extra cilantro and an egg to go on it (for more money natch).  We were concerned that we wouldn't be able to finish them all, so made *sure* we could take any leftovers home with us before ordering the two smalls.  We were slightly taken aback once they arrived (it took forever to make them)...they were tiny...miniscule...microscopic even!  And with the big doughy crust there were hardly any toppings to speak of...plus I didn't care for the crust and gave it all to my wife.  We also realized neither of them were Chicago style, which is their claim to fame...so we went ahead and ordered a "the works" chicago style pizza and waited even longer to try it out.  It was much better than the other pizzas, with a high wall, slightly crisper crust that allowed the filling to properly fill out the pizza and feel like you were actually eating something more than crackers with toppings.  Nonetheless, it was also a bit underwhelming.

The beers were sad too...the one we liked best was their Co-Conspirator IPA, a coconut IPA that really worked quite well.  The others were just lackluster, especially compared with the amazing Portland beers we had just finished at PDX Taproom.  So we ordered a consolation pint of Ruination IPA and shared it between us.

Greek pizza

Overall, we were quite disappointed that Devilcraft did not live up to its legend, and it ended up being incredibly expensive for what you got.  So far, Pizzakaya remains the best pizza we've had in Japan, and they had much better beer too.

Thai pizza

"the works" chicago style