Tokyo restaurant offers lunches for less than 1 U.S. cent…if you’re good enough at rock-paper-scissors

We head to a unique restaurant for a harami bowl and a janken match.

It wasn’t all that long ago that you could find lots of restaurants in Japan offering “one-coin” lunches, so called because the meals were priced at 500 yen (US$3.25) or less, with 500 yen being the largest denomination of coin in Japan. With prices rapidly rising, though, one-coin meals are getting harder and harder to find, something that’s making both our wallets and our stomachs very sad.

However, we recently discovered a restaurant in Tokyo where you can not only get a one-coin lunch, but you don’t even need a 500-yen coin, because the place sometimes charges as little as just one yen for lunch!

The restaurant is called BBQ Terrace Nakano, and as the name implies, it’s located in the Nakano neighborhood, about a five-minute walk from Nakano Station on the Chuo train and Tozai subway lines. After heading out the north exit, we strolled partway down the Nakano Sun Mall covered shopping arcade, hung a right and cut down one of the side streets until we got to Fureai Road, then turned left and kept walking for a bit more…

…until we were at the building that houses BBQ Terrace Nakano.

▼ Keep an eye out for this sign.

Now, if you’re wondering if there’s some sort of insidious catch to BBQ Terrace Nakano’s one-yen lunches, like they give you a slice of plain toast and call that a “lunch” before trying to upsell you on all sorts of different expensive side dishes, you can put your mind at ease. The one-yen price is a special offer on weekdays between 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m., and is applicable to the restaurant’s BBQ Harami (skirt steak) and BBQ Yakitori (grilled chicken) bowls, which give you the meat, rice, miso soup, and pickles, which are normally priced at 1,200 yen.

That said, there is a challenge you’ll have to complete in order to get these meals for just one yen: you’ll have to defeat the restaurant staff in a game of janken, a.k.a. rock-paper-scissors.

We opted for the harami bowl, and after we placed our order, we sat waiting with our stomach growling and our competitive juices gurgling. It turned out that we’d gotten a bit ahead of ourselves, though, since you do the rock-paper-scissors challenge at the end of your meal, right before paying. In hindsight, this is a smart way to structure the system, since it encourages customers to be accepting of possibly paying 1,200 yen for the meal, making the potential one-yen price feel like a 1,199-yen discount if you’re lucky enough to get it.

And honestly, even for 1,200 yen, this is a pretty attractive spread.

The slices of beef are nice and thick, topped with ito togarashi (shredded red chili pepper) and treated with a soy sauce-based sauce and egg yolk to make it even more moist and flavorful.

It really is an outstanding meal, so much so that we wondered if we’d feel a little guilty if we ended up paying just one yen for it.

But hey, BBQ Terrace Nakano had issued the challenge, and we were going to accept it! Once we were done eating, we headed up to the register, where waiting for us was BBQ Terrace Nakano’s owner himself, who personally takes on all comers in the rock-paper-scissors bouts.

Together, we recited the customary Japanese janken cadence (“Saisho we gu! Janken pa!”) and threw out our opening gambit, paper…

…only to see that the owner had had the same idea! Tying like this is called aiko in Japanese, and you reset by calling out “Aiko desho,” and while we switched tactics to rock…

…BBQ Terrace Nakano’s miscalculated and changed to scissors, giving us the win, and the one-yen price for our lunch!

▼ Though it’s technically the same gesture, at this point our janken rock had transitioned to being a victory fist pump.

▼ The single one-yen coin, worth less than 1 U.S. cent, which we paid for our lunch.

So if you’re feeling lucky, or just very confident in your rock-paper-scissors skill, you can have a great meal at a great price here…but you’ll also need to be quick. Initially, the plan was for BBQ Terrace Nakano’s weekday lunch janken promotion to run only until the end of May, and while the owner says he’s now thinking about extending it farther than that, it probably won’t be around forever.

Restaurant information
BBQ Terrace Nakano / BBQテラス中野
Address: Tokyo-to, Nakano-ku, Nakano 5-50-4, Rikamu Building 4th floor
東京都中野区中野5-50-4　リカムビル4階
Open 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.
Website

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