Ippinhi Nabe

This is a little restaurant upstairs on the 4^th or 5^th floor of a building in good old ikebukuro or as my girlfriend likes to call it, the place where all the Chinese people go so they can complain why japan can’t be more like china ;) I love ikebukuro after living in China for a year and a half cause it feels more like baby Shanghai in some ways. You hear Chinese and see crowds where ever you turn buying Chinese treats and shopping, so it’s always great coming to 池袋 (ikebukuro/​chidai in mandarin) so this little store is pretty popular and has a wide selection of Chinese food from all over China. I think that it’s hard to find good restaurants that do different types of Chinese cuisine well and I’ve went to japanese restaurants trying to make the Americanizedversion of Chinese /​japanized version of Chinese cuisine which is mostly canton style food that’s been changed to suit local taste, but this place has more selection of the different cuisines you’ll fine country wide. Beijing, shanghai, Hunan province, Guangdong province, Hong Kong, kunming and Lanzhou all have different types of food, so when people lump them all together like it’s all just one style of Chinese food and then they blanket statement say I like or hate Chinese food, it drives me nuts, when they’re so different. This restaurant is a good way to sample a few different types of cuisine I’ve had from my travels through a dozen or so cities in china. Good restaurant. Definitely made me feel like I was back in the china motherland. Haha