Saturday was Roppongi Art Night and so we went to check out a few of the attractions, like the giant CO2-sensitive inflatable robot and the exhibit devoted entirely to Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra. While we were there, we decided to have dinner in the shopping complex, and stumbled across a veggie-friendly restaurant we’d somehow missed on our other visits: Yasaiya Mei. This was a splurge by our standards, though much more so because we ordered a few drinks with our meal. The basic vegetarian shabu-shabu pot is ¥2,800 a person, and prices go up from there.
Neither of us had tried shabu-shabu yet, so we were both interested to check it out. Normally it has meat in it, but this restaurant used more of an à la carte style where the basic dish was vegetable-only and you could add meat or fish if you wanted. (This could be a common set-up for all I know, but I have no basis of comparison.) More importantly, you can choose vegetarian wheat broth instead of the usual dashi (or, in Yasaiya Mei’s case, beef), and it was tasty even by the omnivore’s standards. Later, when we ordered rice, the server offered to douse it in the leftover broth — also tasty.
When we ordered, the server whisked away the table runner to reveal the cooktop underneath. She set the broth on it to heat, then brought us a glass bowl brimming with vegetables: lettuce, carrots, at least three kinds of mushrooms, onions, scallions, tall bean sprouts, and probably other things that I’m forgetting. There were also two discs floating in the broth which we were told were rice cakes, and that they’re best when left to cook for a while. The server got us started by loading all of the mushrooms into the pot, then ladling us each some broth and a leaf of lettuce that she’d dipped in just for a few seconds. The rest was up to us; we gradually added things depending on how long we wanted them to cook and served them into our bowls a little at a time. It was a good meal, if a little light (hence the rice afterward). We also ordered sakura-flavored sorbet for dessert, especially appropriate given all the blooming trees at the foot of Mori Tower.
Yasaiya Mei is a stylish little restaurant with friendly staff and an English menu. It’s located on the 5th floor of the Roppongi Hills shopping complex near the office entrance to Mori Tower, shop space #44.
Websites are only available in Japanese:
Official site
Roppongi Hills restaurant guide listing
