Fishing Restaurant ZAUO
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I remember once, while visiting my then-girlfriend Eriko in Osaka, reading about a restaurant in Namba where they gave you a fishing pole, and you got to go fishing; the restaurant would then cook whatever fish you caught. This sounded fun. We went to Namba and tried to find the restaurant, but got caught on the other side of the river and struggled to locate a bridge whose path wasn’t blocked. I was getting annoyed and hungry. We eventually found the restaurant. It seemed mostly empty.
“Would you rather just go someplace else?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
We found a restaurant that didn’t force us to catch our own food and ate rapidly. Then we got married. The end.
That was my first experience with the notion of a Japanese restaurant called ZAUO where there are little ponds and streams inside and you get to fish for your own dinner. We never really considered going there again, even after we had a food & travel blog. But then my friend Jim was visiting with his family and asked if I knew of any theme restaurants on the level of our dearly-departed Lockup. I suggested the fishing restaurant.
“I told [his young son] about that fishing restaurant and he’s all in,” he replied.
It was settled. We were gone fishin’.
ZAUO fishing restaurant in Shibuya
Zauo is a restaurant chain with 11 locations, unless I miscounted. We went to the one in Shibuya, where we had a reservation for 7:30 on a Wednesday. The place was pretty full while we were there, and not just with foreign tourists - there were Japanese people who seemed local, like they were celebrating a birthday or work party.
The staff was fairly attentive, considering they work at a chaotic theme restaurant. You press a button on your table to get them to come over, so you don’t have to worry about getting a server’s attention while she’s helping someone fish. There is an extensive menu, and you don’t HAVE to fish. They also have English menus, so you can learn how the system works without needing a translator.
There are different types of fish, organized in different tanks. The type of fish you catch determines how much it costs, and some fish are bigger than others. You can choose from several kinds of cooking, with certain mothods costing a bit extra. For example, getting sushi costs more than sashimi because of the added rice. The kids didn’t want to just sit there, so they immediately went off to fish. This isn’t a restaurant for sitting around the table and having a serious discussion - there’s work to be done.
Fishing for fish to eat at ZAUO
I’ve seen every episode of Alone, including the one where the squirrel sreams at its departed friend, so I know all there is to know about fishing. Sadly, they didn’t have hand lines where I could utilize all my wilderness knowledge. Instead, the kids got tiny poles like the kind you get at the church carnival to play that game where you cast the pole over the top of a makeshift wall and someone’s grandma attaches candy to it and then tugs so you can pull back and reveal your prize.
There are multiple tanks, with the one on the second level of the restaurant (where we sat) being the biggest. It contained the big fish, sea bream and red snapper. This tank was smaller and filled with more fish than I expected. Not exactly built for master sportsmen. The young lad (not me, the kid) caught a fish pretty quickly.
When you catch a fish, there’s a whole ceremony where they beat a drum. The lady teaches you to give a single clap in unison as a sort of celebration system. But then everyone just starts clapping a bunch, so teaching us to clap once made no sense. The point I’m making is that this restaurant is loud.
The other child in our group went down to the ground floor (or basement floor - I think this restaurant was in the basement) to try the other kinds of fish. This area was a little sad. The small fish and lobsters are just crammed into tiny tanks where you can’t really fish, so you just use your pole to snatch one and lift it up and they cook it for you. Overall, the fishing experience was a gimmick fun for kids and people on dates using “teaching her how to fish” as an excuse to touch each other. So how did this stuff taste?
Eating the fish you fished for at ZAUO
In all, we tried three fish caught by the youngsters. The first was deep-fried. One thing you will notice from the picture is that this fish has a face. It’s not uncommon in Japan for fish (such as the delicious nodoguro) to be served with the head still on it. I think this was a bit much for the boy, who stuck to the bone-free fried pieces on the plate. Eriko and I scooped out the eyes.
Japanese fish also often have the bones still in. My friend Jim (not pictured, he ugly) and I were thrown by this when we first lived in Higashi-Hiroshima 17 years ago. When we told our coworkers that we didn’t like fish with the bones in them, they laughed their butts off.
“You are children! You need your mother to take bones out for you!”
We killed those people. They are dead.
I’ve grown since then. I now remove the bones from my own fish, or in a situation where the entire skeleton is intact, pick meat out from between the bones with chopsticks. With this fried guy, I just chomped on the face bones and swallowed them. I was the only one who did this. It didn’t taste bad, but may have led to some… unpleasantness the next morning.
We then tried a fish cooked in soy sauce. This was way better than I expected. The sauce and fish tasted great together. The third fish was salt-grilled, but because it was a first-floor fish, it was rather small, meaning very little meat. I felt what meat there was should go to the youth who caught it, so I didn’t eat much of this one. I think I had a small piece. It must not have been too memorable since I don’t remember it.
Therein lies the problem with this restaurant. It is very difficult to gauge how much food you need to order because it’s tough to know how much meat a particular fish will bring you, and tough to anticipate the size of fish your young fisherman will bring in. It seemed to us, upon later reflection, that you probably need one fish per person, plus sides. We only had three fish plus a few extras ordered off the menu, and I got the feeling that no one in our group was full when we left.
Conclusion: is ZAUO a tourist trap or an actually good restaurant?
Oh, it’s definitely a tourist trap. Of course. The food wasn’t bad, but we really didn’t have that much of it. The difficulty in figuring out how much to order, and eventually getting that food (the staff has other stuff to do besides remembering your edamame as they’re running back and forth to the fish tanks and the drums and all that), made it not the most fun for us.
But this experience is not for us. It’s for the kids, and they enjoyed playing around with the fish. That’s what really matters. The quality of the food is fine and it’s not horrifically expensive. If you’re an adult, there’s no reason to go here - you can get better-quality food in a nicer setting a lot of other places. But if you’re traveling with kids - or even if you live in Tokyo with kids - this is a way to do something they’ll enjoy rather than forcing them to be quiet while you try grown-up food they don’t want.
I don’t get the people having a work party at this place. Maybe they thought it was a cute idea. But no childless person should mess with this restaurant. Childfull people should mess with this restaurant, but only if their kids are young enough to enjoy it. We will be back if any of our friends with kids come to Tokyo and want to take their children to this place. If that doesn’t happen, we’ll be eating fancy food somewhere else.
Where to find ZAUO in Tokyo
Address: 〒150-0041 Tokyo, Shibuya, Jinnan, 1 Chome−19−3 ハイマンテン神南ビル B1F
Phone: 03-6427-0207
Website: Zauo.com
Hours: 5pm-11pm weekdays, 11:30am-3:30pm & 5pm-11pm weekends and holidays
I would recommend a reservation as this is Tokyo, and a busy area of Tokyo at that, so if you really want a spot somewhere, you should book in advance.
