We were feeling hungry after spending some quality time at the hospital. Although everything checked out alright, GF was still feeling twinges in her back, and it was still raining outside, so it wasn't a good time to be randomly wandering for restaurants. She noticed Koshiya along the alley behind the hospital, and she'd heard good things about the place, so we went by to check it out. We were lucky to squeeze into a table that just opened up while larger groups still waited outside, and the restaurant continued to be packed during our time there. The room is Japanese-utilitarian, with thick wood tables and texture-papered walls which wouldn't seem out of place on a Tokyo street corner. The crowd was young-professional, streaming in from the nearby office towers and fancy residences for a quick bite before a night on the town.
Being a katsu shop, just about everything was going to be breaded and fried, including the veggies (tempura style). There's the classic pork cutlet, jumbo prawns, fish filets, and various sorts of potato croquette. They offered a variety of fillings for the tonkatsu if a chunk of pork is too plain for you. The waiter recommended the cheese-tonkatsu (almost like a cordon-bleu, if you think about it), but we demurred. I decided to go with the ginger-scallion stuffed tonkatsu and prawn combo meal, and GF had the plain tonkatsu and prawn combo. The combo meal includes unlimited rice and miso soup, just to make sure you don't leave hungry, and an extra bowl of hot soup (more like hot miso-water, really) always goes down well with the GF.
While you're waiting for your meal, they offer you a small dish of toasted sesame seeds in a mini-suribachi (a.k.a. Japanese mortar and pestle) to grind up the seeds yourself to go with the strongly flavored, almost medicinal (tasted of dried orange rind to me), tonkatsu sauce. They also deliver up little bits of marinated kanbu and acidic pickles, along with a big bowl of shredded cabbage, all to help the oily mains from becoming overwhelming. Also ordered a veggie potato croquette, with bits of corn and cabbage in the standard creamy-potato cake. You just can't beat fresh-out-of-the-frier for something like this, which is all about the contrast between the crunchy panko breading and the soft creamy filling. Although fresh-fried does mean a serious danger of tongue-burns if you take a big injudicious bite. The croquettes were strongly enough salted to support the starch and make the flavor stand up on its own, which probably make them even worse for you. At least my blood pressure checked out just fine at the free check-up station in the hospital, so a bit of extra Na don't bother me.
The main dishes came quickly, arranged artfully on heavy Japanese-style porcelain-ware. The ginger-scallion tonkatsu was a pork cutlet pounded thin, rolled around the herb filling before being breaded, fried, and diagonally-sliced in attractive pieces almost like a sushi roll. A pepper-salt was provided as the dipping option. Was more used to the ginger-scallion mix as a dipping sauce for cold-cut chicken and I think it works better that way. The warmth of the meat doesn't cook the filling enough to concentrate the flavor but just warmed it up enough to take away the cool herbaceousness. But it was different and interesting, and the extra herbs do help to cut the oiliness of the tonkatsu quite a bit. The head-on but shelled whole prawns were breaded in a thick, eggy batter. Not as light as a good tempura and the prawn isn't as high-quality as at 吉園, but good for the price and it went perfectly with the tartar sauce, which I'm not usually a fan of. The rice was also quite good, almost Japanese-quality, and a judicious combination of the rice and shredded cabbage made it a balanced meal instead of just a fry-up.
A strong, bitter cold green tea accompanied the meal and a negligible after-dinner drink plus dessert to round it out. Pretty darn good meal for well under NTD1K.
晃士家炸豬排專賣店
台北市大安區仁愛路4段266巷15弄4號1樓
02-27022976