May 2008 marked the 5th year anniversary of Roppongi Hills. With it came a whole bunch of store renewals and expansions, including a massive new Adidas superstore (where I got to attend the opening party to see some celebs like our supermodel, Shiho. She was so cute!!) and a Tiffany's store just for men (is this even necessary? there's a regular Tiffany's around the block). One of the new restaurant openings was Motoyama Milk Bar, which I already featured in my previous post. Yummy. So let's talk about Yasaiya Mei now, shall we?
Final verdict: Disappointed.
We were all so excited for this place because it features organic vegetables and lunches especially targeting the working gal's wants and needs for a healthy diet. So we went as a group for lunch on their opening day, May 09. We were handed the menu and our first reaction was, "where's the rest of it? I think we're missing a page." There was the vegetable shabu shabu lunch for 2900 yen, the vegetable course for 4300 yen, and the vegetable curry for 1400 yen. That's it. It was an outrage. First of all, if you open shop in an office building, you have to offer a variety of lunch choices around the 800 to 1500 yen level. We can't spend near 30 bucks on lunch everyday. We'd go broke in a month. And second of all, there's not a single salad at the vegetable house. What? Are the salads on haitus or something? Aren't salads the first thing that pops to mind when you feel you need to recharge your veggies intake? So bizarre.
Anyway, so we all tried the vegetable curry (because we can't afford the other two). While it took them forever to serve us, I have to admit that the taste was good. It was nice. The presentation was lovely with all the various vegetables neatly stacked on the plate. But... why is this cold? The artistic vegetable creation atop the curry probably took too much time to construct, so by the time the waiters brought it to your table, the curry and rice had gone cold. What a shame. The curry was too mild for my taste as well. I think all the vegetable additions made it sweeter by accident. Bummer.
We all haven't been back to Yasaiya Mei since our first unfortunate visit. But I checked their website just now and it seems they've added 4 more items to the menu since May. And they started a take-out lunch box for 1000 yen. Good girl. But it's going to take a lot more than that to impress us. Seriously, all we want is an awesome salad.... until that day comes, I'm not going back.
There's a Yasaiya Mei is Omotesando and Gotanda as well, but I'm sure the story is the same there. I'm disappointed because this comes from the same house (the EatWalk Group) responsible for AW Kitchen Tokyo, which is a lovely pasta place in Nakameguro.
Vegetable House Yasaiya Mei
Minato-ku, Roppongi 6-10-1, Roppongi Hills Westwalk 5FOpen 11:00-23:00 M-Th, 11:00-26:00 F-S
Tel: 03.5775.2960
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