Less than a minute walk from south exit, Chigusa represents the best of Japanese home-cooking cuisine, the kind of cooking that your mom - if she happens to be Japanese - would be doing if she is a competent cook. From the typical meat and potatoes stew (niku-jyaga) to fried-mackerel (saba-yaki) , the ingredients are always fresh, the taste light. Oil is sparingly used, even in the fried dishes. As a result dishes like fried chicken or menchi-katsu don't feel as heavy as the ones served by other restaurants. At Chigusa most people order the set menu which includes rice, miso-soup and pickled vegetables (tsukemono) with your dish.
Chigusa has been around for quite a while (25 years) and inside the narrow restaurant floats an air of nostalgia that is absent in the recent new wave of eat-and-go restaurants like Ootoya. The restaurant is run by a couple of old ladies who might look cranky and nagging (like any mother would be) but that makes the place even more attractive, especially if you are far away from home. With the AM radio constantly crackling over the lousy speakers, Chigusa is the place I head to when I want to eat a no-nonsense healthy meal.
