It turns out there are ways to spruce up Japan’s simplest dish!
Tamagokake gohan is just about the easiest Japanese dish you could ever make. Simply crack an egg over a bowl of piping hot rice, give it a moment to let the heat rising of the grains flash cook it, and voila, it’s done (in Japan, eggs are generally considered safe to eat raw). You can accent it with your desired seasoning or sauce, but it’s pretty darn delicious as it is, and it’s the ultimate cheap, fast meal.
Unless you make it bougie, of course, like what they do at Tamago no Ohanashi, a tamagokake gohan (hereinafter referred to as TKG) specialty restaurant. You may be wondering, how can you possibly level up an egg cracked over rice? They manage it, and the result is simply art.
The restaurant is located on the first basement floor of a building about a five-minute walk from JR Kichijoji Station in Tokyo. It opened in January this year as a newly renovated restaurant and has been open for business daily since April.
You can choose your toppings (if any) and how many eggs you want. You also have the option of small, regular, or large rice, and no matter which size you pick, there’s no extra charge. Their rice servings are a bit on the small side, but you can also order seconds. You can even have your egg whites whipped up into a fluffy meringue for free! We’ve tried something similar before and it was delicious, so we were excited to try it again.
Tamago no Ohanashi also also has other rice dishes like Taco Rice, but we came for TKG, and that’s what we ordered. We got the Kyokujo Tamagokake Gohan Gozen (First-Rate Tamagokake Gohan Meal) for 1,300 yen (US$9.50). It gave us the option to refill our rice once, have up to two eggs, and choose up to three toppings. We picked spicy cod roe, domestically produced butter, and an onion-ginger paste. It also came with a white broth chicken soup, which is something that comes with every set meal.
When you order your TKG, you get to choose the type of egg you want at the counter. There were all kinds of egg brands and types, and they all looked like perfectly tasty eggs, so we had a hard time picking one. In the end, we decided on the Beni Premium, a type of egg produced in Ibaraki Prefecture, and we asked for the egg’s whites to be whipped into a meringue.
Soon enough, out came our fancy TKG!
It was beautiful! We’ve never seen such a pretty bowl of TKG. Considering it’s typically just an egg cracked over rice, no one really strives for presen…
