Hey Hive!
If you've seen my foodie posts before, most of them tend to be about local food in Singapore. But tbh with inflation nowadays we don't eat out that often when we're not traveling so I've run out of content regarding Singaporean food places. Since I also post a lot of travel stuff, I thought I'd sharing more about the food we've tried in the countries we've visited!
We visit Japan a lot over the years, and I think we might've hit our quota for how often we go there. But every time we do, we always have a list of "must-eats" consisting of our favourite food places! One of them is this chain restaurant called Gyoza no Ohsho!
Gyoza no Ohsho is an illustrious restaurant chain brand founded over half a century ago pioneering the signature dish they're named after - Gyoza, which boasts sales of 600 million a year! They also pride themselves on their wealth of Chinese dishes that they have become the king of popular Chinese food chains continually loved by the Japanese.
Source: osho.co.jp
It might be a bit strange for us as Chinese people to like or prefer the Japanese version of Chinese dishes but tbh it's just so tasty! To me, food is food no matter where it's from, as long as it's good that's all that matters. After all, food unites us all and we're very fortunate to be able to share culinary knowledge across borders and have our own little adaptations.
Anyway, on our recent trip Gyoza no Ohsho was coincidentally one of our first finds from our list! We saw this outlet literally in the middle of some random street in Nagono under a train station. It was as if the universe was pushing us to eat here.
This outlet looked surprisingly fancy too, for being under a train station. Typical Gyoza no Osho outlets in Tokyo and Osaka are quite small and/or cramped with the usual vending machine you order from just like any of their "fast food" rice bowl chains like Matsuya or Sukiya.
But here there were so many regular tables and chairs instead of bar counters and stools. There were also wait staff to take your orders, and the overall vibe and aesthetic seemed a lot more elevated.
It's probably because there's a lot more space to make the shop bigger and more comfortable here, but I'm glad they went in that direction instead of cramming more bar tables to fit more customers. The place was so welcoming and inviting. We were shown to a booth in the back, which looked really comfortable.
Here's the menu featuring their handmade Gyoza of course, with special garlic from Aomori.
They have quite a few sets you can order alongside the gyoza, with different types of rice, noodles or vegetables.
You can also order just the noodle or rice dishes on its own.
They have quite a few different rice and noodle dishes as well, even egg rolls!
There were so many things on the menu we were spoilt for choice! Everything looked so good too!
In the end, we decided to go for one of the big sets and ordered an extra meat dish with veggies to try.
We definitely had to get Sean's favourite - mapo tofu! The Japanese mapo tofu is not that spicy and doesn't have a strong "ma", or numbing taste which is just right to our liking.
It's just as savoury as the Chinese mapo tofu if not even more, and the tofu is soft but not too soft that it'll come apart as you scoop it up. It has the bouncy consistency and complements the sauce perfectly.
As part of the set, we also got a plate of egg fried rice which was delicious on its own already. It wasn't too oily, had a slight peppery taste and mixed with the MSG and sauce was just savoury perfection. We've tried some egg fried rice from Chinese restaurants that are too plain to eat on its own, or too oily but this one was just right.
As a sort of "wildcard" dish or just to try something new, we decided to get this fried chicken dish with garlic and ginger coated with sauce. The peppers on top made it look a little spicy but it wasn't, and it was actually not bad. The chicken was crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside, and the garlic and ginger really added aromatic flavours to it.
Of course, I left the best for last - their signature Gyoza! This set comes with 6 gyoza but the menu has sets of up to 24 or 48 pieces! Since we ordered quite a bit already, we decided to hold off and see if we wanted more gyoza later on.
The bottom of the gyoza is a very crisp layer of their dough handmade with special flour from Hokkaido, while the filling of pork, ginger, chives and garlic is meaty and flavourful. You can tell they put a lot of effort and research into making every gyoza perfect. I like to dip my gyoza with a little bit of chili oil to give it a little spice. It is really good on its own though, and I could easily put away at least 10 of these if I just ate it without any other dishes.
Overall, this was a very delicious meal and I highly recommend trying Gyoza no Ohsho if you love dumplings! Some people would look down on it since it's a chain restaurant and while that may be true for some chains, in this case (or in the case for many Japanese chains) it's precisely because it's good that they've become successful enough to establish a franchise. Now they even have international outlets but I'm not sure how good they are compared to the Japanese ones so I can't comment much.
But I'd say if it's convenient, affordable and tasty, why not give it a shot?
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
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Check out my previous post in this series!
