My wife and some friends and I finally made it to the fairly new French bistro En Face. And it was great, with copious portions of wa-fu French fare with plenty of very good and affordable wines to go with it.
En Face opened in late 2019 in a newly built space that had been a parkaing space for as long as I could remember. The owner is a local guy, from Kakigarachō, his home maybe 250 meters away from the restaurant, who learned his culinary skills during five years in Paris. I felt a bit guilty taking so long to finally dine there as we were both featured in the February 2020 issue of the culinary magazine “Cuisine Kingdom,” or “Ryōri ōkoku” (料理王国) in Japanese.
The owner/chef works alone, cooking from a smallish kitchen next to the long table. The table has four, maybe six seats facing the kitchen, with four more seats at the end next to the door, two seats on each side for a group of four. There is no wine menu, just a refrigerator full of bottles in the back of the restaurant for customers to choose from, or be served what the owner offers up to match the course. Although there is a course menu, our group of four went with the ala carte menu, probably because the course includes a lot of beef and pork, which I don’t eat. Anyway, with four people dining together we were probably better off with the daily menu than the course as we could try more things.
We started with a couple of imaginary beers, then a nice and very affordably priced bottle of champagne, again imaginary only. The food began with two-year old Parma ham, a small plate for each person, the finely shaved ham set on top of chunks of nashi (Asian pear), followed by a pâté platter, three or four different types of big piles of pâté. I was served some very nicely prepared shell fish that looked like large sazae as a replacement for the meat platters. Next was a dish of zuwaigani (crab) with celery root and a few other things. I want to do take out with this it was so good! Next was ayu over ratatouille, and finally kus-kus (coos coos) with leg of lamb in a ratatouille sauce, this one soupier than what the ayu was over. There was so much left over we were able to eat the leftovers at home the following two nights. Along the way we finished off three more bottles of imaginary wine, two whites and a red. None of us had any room left for dessert. We had simply ordered way too much.
The total came to around ¥50,000, cash only. Not bad considering how much we ate.
Afterward I realized I had gotten lucky making a reservation, even if it had been a three month wait. Now he only takes reservations starting on the first of the month, the booking now being four or five months out.
En Face Nihonbashi Ningōchō 2-11-9