Adventures in Gyudon: We order all seven toppings at Japanese beef bowl chain Sukiya

Gyudon, or beef bowl, restaurants offer a plethora of toppings to add to your meal and it can be hard to choose just one. So why not choose them all?

Gyudon restaurants are pretty popular in Japan. They offer good-sized portions at low prices and they don’t skimp on the variety or taste. Each of the delicious bowls are pretty fantastic on their own, but they can also be ordered with plenty of toppings you can easily tweak your bowl to suit your palate.

▼ The original gyudon: marinated beef and onions on a bed of fluffy white rice

Sukiya, for example, offers seven different toppings for your beef bowl: negitama (welsh onions with raw egg), kimchi, three cheeses, ponzu mixed with grated daikon, takana mentai mayo (marinated cod roe with leaf mustard and mayo—trust us, it’s delicious), wasabi yama kake (wasabi with grated yam) and katsuobushi okura (dried bonito flakes like you’d find on okonomiyaki, with okra). As odd as some of these might sound, they have all been customer tested and approved, and have been on the menu for a long time.

So they would probably be good all together on the same gyudon, right?

If you decide to order the seven-topping challenge, be prepared to answer a bunch of questions about how you want the toppings brought out to you. Our intrepid writer asked for them all in individual dishes so that he could create his own gyudon masterpiece.

▼ Still don’t have everything in.

▼ Hooray, we did it!

▼ But, can we eat it all?

Going with a normal-sized beef bowl, the sheer volume of toppings threatens to overpower the rice, beef and onions. Just by looking at it, you can tell that the bowl is now about the same size as an extra-large portion, but since most of the toppings are vegetables, the dish isn’t as heavy as you might think.

▼ Where there is a gyudon bowl, there is someone to finish it.

▼ Waste not, want not…

As always, what matters most is the taste, and just as we thought, the seven-topping gyudon bowl is fantastic. The price isn’t so bad either, as the total cost was 1,190 yen (US$9.70).

It’s not something you’ll want to eat for every meal, and you’re bound to get a few odd looking when you order it, but if you’re looking for a way to jazz up your gyudon game, this seven-topping challenge might be for you!

You might also like:

How to make a mouth-watering Japanese beef bowl in just five minutes 【RocketKitchen】

[ Read in Japanese ]

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