Shinjuku Ward Office has a restaurant that’s open to anyone, but have they kept up their quality and value since our last visit?

With Tokyo being as big as it is, it isn’t really practical to have all of its 14 million-plus residents use the same single city hall. Because of that, each ward of the city has its own ward office where you can take care of official paperwork and procedures, such as updating ID cards, registering marriages, and make health insurance payments.

Oh, and in the case of the ward office in downtown Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood, you can also get a really good lunch at a restaurant hardly anyone knows about.

You’ll find this restaurant on basement level 1 of the Shinjuku Ward Office’s Main Building, which is located next to some of Shinjuku’s most popular shopping and nightlife areas. Called Keyaki, it’s technically classified as the Ward Office’s “employee cafeteria,” but it’s open to the general public too, so you don’t need to be a resident of Shinjuku, or even a resident of Japan, in order to eat there.

With SoraNews24 HQ being just a few blocks away from the Shinjuku Ward Office, we stopped by to try Keyaki a few years ago, and came away very happy from an amazingly affordable curry rice lunch that had cost us just 460 yen (US$3). But with prices for pretty much everything rapidly rising in Japan, and inflation hitting restaurant dining especially hard, we figured it was time for a return visit to see if this under-the-radar restaurant is still a friendly-to-the-wallet option.

Stepping inside the entrance, we saw that Keyaki has upgraded to a new meal ticket vending machine, and that they now accept payment not only in cash, but also by prepaid rail cards like JR’s Suica. But we also noticed that the pork curry is no longer the 460-yen bargain it used to be, and now costs 600 yen.

▼ ゴロゴロ野菜のポークカレー = Pork curry with lots of vegetables

Another sad change is that while Keyaki used to offer free upgrades to extra-large portions of rice for its set meals, rice bowls, and curry rice, these now charge an additional 100 yen for the service, meaning that an extra-large curry rice, which used to be 460 yen, now costs 700 yen, a price increase of more than 50 percent.

▼ The extra-large rice button

Still, in today’s economy, a restaurant curry rice lunch for 600 yen is still a decent deal…provided, of course, that Keyaki had kept up its quality. So we bought a ticket for the curry rice and handed it to the staff. They dished up our order, and as soon as we saw it…

…we felt confident that this was going to be good.

This is exactly what we think of when we think of curry rice. It’s not trying to be clever or fancy in any way, shape, or form, and instead sticks to the beloved baseline of the dish, with carrots, potatoes, onions, and pork in a well-balanced roux with a flavorful spice but not so fiery that you can’t dig into it with unguarded gusto.

It’s pretty much the perfect home cooking-style curry, something that’s so committed to comforting the palate instead of challenging it that it’s ironically sometimes hard to find when eating out. It’s not just delicious, it’s downright reassuring in how well it does what it’s trying to do. This is basically the curry rice equivalent of a big, comfortable blanket, and after we happily scarfed down every last bite, we didn’t just feel full, we felt emotionally warm and fuzzy too.

So yeah, even though the price has risen to 600 yen, this is still a great, semi-secret spot to grab lunch on a weekday (Keyaki isn’t open night or weekends). And if we ever do somehow get tired of eating the Shinjuku Ward Office’s curry rice…

…they’ve got a whole bunch of noodle bowls and set meals in the 400-700-yen range, and we’ve got a hunch those are all probably pretty good too.

Restaurant information
Keyaki / けやき
Address: Tokyo-to, Shinjuku-ku, Kabukicho 1-4-1, Shinjuku Ward Office Main Building B1F
東京都新宿区歌舞伎町1-4-1 新宿区役所本庁舎 B1F
Hours: 10:30 a.m.-4:00 p.m. (food served 11 a.m.-3 p.m.)
Closed: Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays

Photos ©SoraNews24
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