Scaling the tower-don is a food experience you won’t soon forget.

Looking at Japanese restaurant menus, you’ll see the suffix “don” come up a lot. It’s short for “donburi,” or rice bowl, and it’s usually used as a suffix. Gyudon, for example, is a beef (gyu) bowl, and katsudon is a rice bowl with a pork cutlet (katsu) on top.

But it was a different kind of don that recently had us on way to a branch of restaurant chain Daikyo, as we were looking to try their tower-don.

Daikyo isn’t a particularly big chain. It only has 11 branches. None of them are in Tokyo, but almost all of them are in Chiba Prefecture, which borders the capital to the east. The locations are mostly in the suburbs, which can be hard to navigate without a car, but checking the map we found that the Oyumino branch in Chiba City’s Midori Ward is pretty close to Kamatori Station, and we got there in about a five-minute walk from the south exit after getting off the train.

From the exterior, Daikyo looks like any of a dozen other casual restaurant chains you’ll find by the side of the road in mid-size Japanese towns and suburbs. Its full name, Sushimendokoro Daikyo, lets you know its two specialties, sushi and noodles (men), and the menu has plenty of options for lovers of both.

But what really grabs your attention as you peruse the menu is the tower-don.

No, that’s a photo were the restaurant laid out all their different donburi just to show off how wide their selection is. The tower-don really is a gigantic three-tiered rice bowl, each level filled with different delicious ingredients.

There are two different versions to choose from, a tempura tower-don and a kaisen (seafood) tower-don. It’s a tough decision, especially since they’re equally priced at 4,500 yen (US$30), but it really is hard to say no to sashimi in Japan, and that’s what we ultimately opted for.

After putting in our order, we waited, wondering if the presentation really would be as insanely impactful as the menu photo.

And then the tower-don turned out to look even crazier.

Seeing the three bowls stacked atop each other, like some sort of food pagoda, is surreal. It almost feels like an AI-generated image that you’d get from a prompt of “big sushi bowls,” but this is a real thing that actually exists, and the cuts of fish were beautiful.

Gazing in appreciative awe, our eyes migrated from the top bowl to the bottom, and then we noticed something oddly familiar.

We knew we’d seen this kind of base somewhere before. It took us a moment, but then we remembered: it’s a stand commonly used for displaying models and anime figurines. Then we remembered that this stand has a feature, activated by pushing a button on the base, and when you do…

…it rotates!

This was a whole different sort of “revolving sushi” than the kind offered at conveyor belt sushi restaurants.

It was honestly a little mesmerizing, and it also give us a preview of all the different types of fish we were about to enjoy.

We figured trying to eat from the bowls as they were rotating would cause an awful mess, so after we’d recorded our videos we switched the base back off and unstacked the tower.

The bottom tier is a chirashi sushi bowl, with chopped tuna, salmon, squid, and egg over vinegared sushi rice. The tower-don’s middle section is a negitoro bowl, with minced fatty tuna, green onion, and sushi rice. The top tier isn’t technically a donburi, as there’s no rice, but it is filled with slices of sashimi of various types.

Looking at the disassembled tower-don, you’ll notice that the shape of the bowls is unorthodox. Because they need to be stacked on top of each other, the bowls aren’t totally hollow half-spheres. Instead, there’re sort of donut-shaped. Your knee-jerk reaction might be to see this as a way for the restaurant to trick you into thinking that the portions are more generous than they actually are. That’s not really Daikyo’s intent, though, because…

…the center sections are filled with food too! For the chirashi bowl, there’s a compartment of shrimp, and the negitoro bowl has a raw egg yolk concealed inside its core.

The sashimi bowl has its center bonus ingredients on open display: uni (sea urchin) and ikura (salmon roe).

All this quantity would be pointless without quality, but we’re happy to report that the many, many ingredients of the tower-don were all fantastic. The sashimi bowl had slices of buri (yellowtail), salmon, squid, scallops, and shrimp, which were all great, and the otoro (extra fatty tuna) was on an even more amazingly delicious level.

With the uni and ikura coming in their own little glass container, we decided to eat them with a spoon, which was decadently satisfying choice.

Moving on to the chirashi bowl, the flavors were subtler but more refreshing, especially with the excellent ratio of vinegar to rice in the seasoning.

The negitoro bowl was also everything you’d want it to be: rich and creamy without being oily.

Adding the egg yolk is optional, but it played very nicely with the other flavors, and also created a gorgeous contrast of colors.

30 minutes after sitting down, we had several empty bowls, a full stomach, and a happy heart.

As we mentioned above, in addition to the seafood tower-don we ordered, there’s also a tempura tower-don. However, their bottom and middle tiers are the same, with the difference coming at the top, where the tempura tower-don has a bowl of mixed tempura instead of assorted sashimi.

And if, somehow, you find yourself looking at the tower-don and thinking “Yeah, that looks nice, but I’d still like something bigger”…

…there’s also a seven-tier tower-don max, for 11,637 yen, but we think it’s going to be a while before we’re hungry enough to try it.

Restaurant information
Sushimendokoro Daikyo (Oyumino branch) / すしめん処大京（おゆみ野店）
Address: Chiba-ken, Chiba-shi, Midori-ku, Oyumino 2-6-2
千葉市緑区おゆみ野2-6-2
Open 11 a.m.-10 p.m.

Related: Daikyo location list
Photos ©SoraNews24
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
[ Read in Japanese ]