Ginza – Enjoy Delicious Chinese Creations at EXITMELSA’s Chinese Dining Mitora

Last update : 4 Jan 2018

Written by Kenji Nishiyama - Ginza de Lunch

One of Japan’s most famous female chefs, Miyuki Igarashi, opened this creative Chinese restaurant in Ginza’s EXITMELSA building in February 2017.
The restaurant offers an abundance of vegetable-based dishes overflowing with originality. Let’s get right in to the introduction!

The Great Value Lunch Course is Recommended

Lunch Course 3,800 yen (tax excl., 10% service fee applied separately).
The lunch course includes assorted appetizers, dim sum, shark fin soup, noodles or rice, and dessert.

Incidentally, if you were to order all the components of the lunch course separately, they would cost upward of 5,000 yen.

An Assortment of 6 Appetizers

There were 6 elaborate appetizers, including shrimp surimi wrapped in fava bean bread, smoked octopus, Shaoxing wine pickled firefly squid, and century egg tofu.
In particular, I thought that the smoked octopus had a strong fragrance to it. After tasting the other appetizers, I decided that it would be best to eat the octopus last.

Gomoku Shumai

Gomoku shumai came out as the dim sum course.
The shumai was so big that I couldn’t eat it all in one bite. The wrapping is fried tofu rather than the typical dumpling wrapper.
It was deliciously packed with the flavors of meat and vegetables!

Sakura Shrimp Pudding Sauce Over Shark Fin

A rich pudding-like soup is served over carefully cooked shark fin.
The crunchy texture of the shark fin was amazing.

Seafood Rice with Greens

You can choose your main course from a selection of about 10 items on the noodles and rice menu.
The seafood rice with greens that I chose was packed with ingredients like vegetables, squid, and octopus. It also had a great spicy seasoning to it.

Soup

Almond Jelly

You can also choose your dessert, so I chose their most popular one, almond jelly.
It’s an authentic version, made with ground apricot seeds.

I Also Recommend the “Piririn Noodles” Off the À La Carte Menu!

Below is my lunch from another day’s visit.

I was also intrigued by the “common orient clam noodles” on their signboard menu, but I wanted to try something spicy, so I ordered their “piririn noodles.”

The lunch a la carte dishes come with an appetizer.
This was a salad of Szechuan pickles and cabbage.

The piririn noodles are a slightly spicy noodle dish using house-made la yu chili oil and black vinegar.
Even among the spiciness, in the first bite you can still taste sweetness and the acidity of the tomato.

The noodles are thin, like soumen noodles, and they’re so slippery that they go down easy.
It also has gently simmered braised pork belly in it.

Chef Igarashi’s creative Chinese dishes are delicately seasoned, as you’d expect from a female chef.
They’re like a middle ground between Chinese and Japanese cuisine.
Her dishes are very original, but they also wonderfully bring out the deliciousness of each of the ingredients.
It was a lovely restaurant, and I’d love to visit again to try some more dishes!