Meat lovers can’t get enough! Hidehiko Ishizuka of “Honjamaka” recommends “My favorite restaurant chain” meat dishes

The theme this time is “meat dishes.

Hello, everyone. My name is Hidehiko Ishizuka, and every morning I call out “Kage-chan” to the lizard that has recently taken up residence by the shed at home.

Now, I would like to introduce you to another one of my favorite restaurant chains. I have a YouTube channel called “Ishi-chan Channel,” and in order to help more people, the content is centered on chain restaurants. This time, I would like to introduce a few of the restaurants that have been a part of the Ishi-chan Channel filming.

The first restaurant is Katsuya. Among the many menu items, I chose the “Tokkatsu-don” (special pork cutlet served on top of a bowl of rice). Bite-sized cutlets soaked in sauce are grazed on a vast pasture of white rice, overlapping each other. The whole thing is covered with an egg, but a hot spring egg sits in the center of the pasture. The slightly sweet sauce also whets the appetite, making it hard to resist shoveling it down.

Furthermore, at the restaurant’s recommendation, we had tonjiru (pork miso soup) added to the dish. Pork on the side of pork. It was a great shot.

The second restaurant is Gyukaku. This is the perfect place for meat lovers. At the time of our visit, there were three all-you-can-eat courses: 70-course, 90-course, and 100-course.

Looking at the menu, even the 70-course menu is full of star quality dishes, but I chose the 90-course for my pride. In addition to the aged kalbi and aged top loin steak, there is even “kalbi-specific rice,” which is white rice soaked in yakiniku sauce and studded with Korean seaweed.

The restaurant staff apologetically said, “The all-you-can-eat menu lasts for 70 minutes. The all-you-can-eat menu is 70 minutes long with a last order of 90 minutes.” I have never spent more than 30 minutes for a meal, so this was not a big problem for me.

I’m glad I was born in 1962!

The third restaurant is Yakiniku Kingu. As the name suggests, this restaurant is the king of yakiniku. They have several all-you-can-eat courses, but I ordered the “Kingu Course,” which is the middle course. There are 130 dishes including main and side dishes.

Kingu Kalbi, Aburi Sukiyaki Kalbi, and Ippon Lose (now called Dragon Harami) are the stars of the show, along with a supporting cast of stone-baked Garibata Rice. Naturally, galibata means garlic and butter. In my mind, the duo is comparable to Koji Kikkawa and Torayasu Hotei.

All of the meats on the menu are delicious, but the single loin marinated in a pot has a particular impact on me. When you pull the loin out of the jar with tongs, it is long. When laid on the net, it looks like a drone shot of the Bay Bridge.

Incidentally, this “Kingu Course” is cheap enough at 3718 yen (including tax) for 130 all-you-can-eat dishes, but those over 60 years old get a 500 yen discount for the senior rate. I’m glad I was born in 1962!

Last but not least is “Yakiniku Like”. The first thing that surprised me was the table setup. Like the library at my alma mater, Sakuragaoka High School in Yokohama, there is a partition between each person, so you can enjoy yakiniku by yourself as much as you like. In front of you is your own private net. Finally, our dream has come true.

The prices are reasonable, and the Shinbashi branch in Tokyo offers a “morning yakiniku” set that includes ribs, sausage, seaweed, wakame soup, raw egg or natto, and rice for only 580 yen (tax included). And the rice is refillable for free. It goes beyond “yakiniku-like” to “yakiniku-love.

There are many more of my favorite restaurant chains and nice restaurants that I could not introduce to you. If you are interested, please check them out on YouTube “Ishi-chan Channel”.

From the November 7, 2025 issue of “FRIDAY