Restaurant Unique: French Cuisine and Game Meat in Meguro
In our house, we take any opportunity to celebrate a special day. Birthdays are a big thing for us, as are anniversaries: we celebrate our wedding anniversary, the anniversary of when we filed our paperwork with City Hall (the traditional day Japanese people consider to be “when you got married”), and also the date when I proposed to Eriko. That one happened recently, so to celebrate, we went out for a fancy meal.
Two things you should know: 1) we love French food - we’ve had it in Japan and in Paris, including one of the best meals of our lives; and 2) we love the TV show Alone, which features angry loners and annoying hippies competing to see who can last the longest in the wilderness with no human contact eating bugs and shooting grouse with a bow and arrow (grouse are apparently like the easiest animal in the world to kill). So when we found out Tokyo had a French restaurant that specialized in game meat, the choice of where to dine for our konyaku kinenbi (engagement anniversary) was made for us.
French cuisine at Restaurant Unique
Restaurant Unique is an intimate space on the second floor of a small building in a restaurant-heavy section of Meguro. It’s not big, but also not cramped - there are only a few tables, but they’re spread out. We were one of four couples seated that evening, including one couple next to us that was also celebrating something and spent the entire evening discussing and singing songs from musicals until the guy tried to show me up by giving the girl an expensive Celine wallet.
What I found most impressive about this place was that it’s a one-man show. There is a single staff member, a chef and waiter and maître d'(znuts) all rolled into one. If the place were any bigger, that’d be a crazy amount of responsibility for one person, but he manages to be polite and put great care into the food. There are a lot of small family-run eateries in Japan with very little staff, but usually they aren’t fine-dining restaurants.
The menu is in French and Japanese, which was difficult for me because neither my Japanese nor my French rises to the level of being able to understand French dishes made with obscure animals. I got some help from Eriko along with the iPhone translation app. Mostly we made our choices based on the types of animals being harmed for our dining pleasure. They had one item that wasn’t on the menu, a steak frites; the people next to us ordered it and holy cow did it look delicious. We made our selections and relaxed to enjoy our engageaversary.
Drinks and bread and pork rillettes
As a French restaurant, Unique has a decent-sized wine list. We don’t drink, so our choices were limited to grape juice, ginger ale, and sparkling water. We went with grape juice and still water and it was fine but nothing special. The chef brought out some bread and pork rillettes for us to enjoy while we waited. The rillettes was surprisingly thick - I was expecting to be able to spread it on the bread, but it wasn’t spreadable - though very tasty. The bread was okay but not French-level, definitely needed the rillettes to make it pop.
One thing to note about this restaurant is that it takes a long time to eat. There’s only one guy and he has to make everyone’s food and bring everyone’s drinks and act as busboy and cashier and everything rolled into one. On top of that, these are labor-intensive dishes, some of which involve a long roasting process, so you are going to have to wait for your meal. This might make it a bad first date spot, as you may get stuck with someone boring for an entire evening. We were there two hours, which was fine for us because I am just wonderful to talk to.
The big question, then, was whether the food would be worth the wait. Ohhhhhh my.
Wild boar pâté en croute
I want to start out my review of this dish by hoping you appreciate how I’ve cut and pasted the accents on the word pâté. This is a cold dish, with cold gelatin on top and decently thick pastry around it. It looks a little bit like the pâté we got at PATH, another Tokyo French restaurant, but this one was way, way better.
First off, wild boar tastes basically like ham, which makes sense and means the mustard went really well with it. But what really makes this dish sing is the composition - what I didn’t like about the pâté at PATH was the crunchiness of all the little bits that seemed like filler. The little pistachios and whatnots in this pâté were decidedly NOT filler. They added texture without being too much, and actually enhanced the flavor of the wild boar. Before this, I would have told you I wasn’t crazy about this kind of pâté, but I would absolutely eat this thing again because it was really, really good.
The chef said normally people get one starter and one main each, but Eriko is small so we only got one starter and two mains to share, and it ended up being the perfect amount of food. That’s one course down, two to go. And the next one’s a doozy.
The best lamb chops I’ve ever had
Lamb isn’t as common in Japan as it is in America, so Eriko was interested in trying the lamb chops. The chef nicely brought us each of our mains one by one along with extra plates so we could share, so we got this one on its own. The chops were on top of some cabbage with garlic and onions, swimming in the juice, and that was quite good.
But the lamb. Oh, my, the lamb. You have no idea. I’ve had some good lamb before, and this absolutely destroyed it. The chops looked kind of fatty, but the mix of lean and fatty meat wasn’t as imbalanced as it appeared because there was an extra sliver of lean meat hidden underneath each chop. It was juicy, perfectly-cooked, nicely salted, and… I don’t know how he did this, but it had the flavor of a piece of delicious slow-cooked barbecue, that little bit of burned bark that I’ve only ever tasted on incredible brisket. It was like he somehow combined perfect French technique with pit mastery.
These chops were transcendent. They were sublime. They were Pearl Jam. Bring them to me every day and I will eat until I perish. We were incredibly happy. And we still had one course to go.
Moon bear, pigeon, and foie gras pie with mashed potatoes
The most expensive item on the menu at 10,000 yen ($63 as of this writing), about half the price of our total bill, this was a game meat extravaganza. Just look at this thing. If you don’t know, moon bear is a specific kind of bear with a bit of white hair on its chest that is said to resemble a crescent moon although to me it looks more like the Bat-signal.
We’d had bear meat before at a game meat yakiniku restaurant in Kobe, and it was quite fatty, but this wasn’t: it was mince, ground-beef style lean meat surrounding a big hunk of pigeon and a tiny bit of foie gras, all within a perfectly crispy pastry shell and served with mashed potatoes and a sauce that was… I mean, my word. The sauce. It was great on the pie, the potatoes, the bread I used to sop it up, my socks… that sauce will forever haunt my dreams. The depth of flavor was impossible. This guy clearly has training in some top-notch French restaurants.
The bear meat tasted a bit gamy, so it benefited from the sauce and the rich foie gras. The pigeon was tasty, but quite thick. This presented a problem when cutting it, because I’d sometimes accidentally yank it out of the pastry shell and have to reconstruct the pie on my fork. I would say the bear and pigeon were interesting as flavors we don’t get too often (as was the foie gras, something we normally wouldn’t order but tried for scientific research), but when paired with that rich, deep, thoughtful, professor-of-love sauce, it was a dish that not only looked incredible but offered a taste we’d never had before and will always remember.
Restaurant Unique is a fantastic experience. This isn’t just a good French restaurant for Tokyo - it would be a good French restaurant in France. The chef manages to craft beautiful proteins with outrageous sauces and cook everything perfectly, all while serving drinks and taking orders and doing dishes. I don’t know how he does it. If you live in Tokyo, you must go here. If you are visiting Tokyo, you must go here.
Where is Restaurant Unique?
Address: 〒153-0063 Tokyo, Meguro City, Meguro, 3 Chome−12−3 松田ビル 1階
Phone: +81 03-6451-0570
Reservations can be obtained at Ikyu
Restaurant Unique is located in Meguro, which probably isn’t where your Tokyo hotel is but is definitely worth a trip for a romantic evening. This is the definition of a hidden gem: you’re not likely to hear about it elsewhere, but if you go because of this review, you will thank me. I demand that you thank me. And you need to bring me more of that lamb. I command you.
