Kaisendon - Sashimi Pub Lunch at a Seafood Izakaya

How is your sushi vocabulary and experience? If you have tried a few sets of sushi and sashimi, try kaisendon. Kaisendon is sashimi on rice.

Don 丼 is short for donburi, food served on top of a bowl full of rice. Magurodon for example is tuna on rice, kaisendon is mixed seafood on rice. It could be tuna (maguro), scallops (hotate), sea urchin (uni), or salmon roe (ikura). Whatever "don" you order, all don are tasty ways of eating the excellent seafood served in Japan.

Kaisendon is especially popular for lunch. You can find it at many sushi shops (sushi-ya), but you can also have kaisendon for lunch at an izakaya, a Japanese pub. I had very good kaisendon with my friend at Isomaru Suisan, an izakaya specialised in seafood. Isomaru has many stores in the Tokyo area, many of them open 24 hours. Go there for a Japanese pub lunch.

Isomaru Suisan has many different kaisendon on the lunch menu and they are all very good value. You can have kaisendon with extra miso soup for 1000 yen. Or you could order a beer with your kaisendon - after all this is an izakaya.

http://www.isomaru.jp/lunch/

We went to a new branch of Isomaru Suisan in Asakusa, located in the Shinnakamisedori street. The donburi we ordered were both prepared in aburi style, a kind of seared sashimi still mostly raw. The salmon-aburi-don was flavored with mayonaise, ginger, and a little pickled daikon radish (takuan). The other kaisendon was called "three colors", the colors being tuna, salmon, and conger eel (anago).

We will definitely come back for lunch. For dinner we have already tried some grilled seafood here.
http://www.deepjapan.org/a/3711