Coco Ichiban London
Here at OJT, we do love a good Japanese curry, so when CoCo Ichiban, one of the most common Japanese curry houses from Japan opened up in London, we had to go give it a go. It’s pretty conveniently located just around the corner from Leicester Square tube station so after a Saturday night film night, off we went.
The menu is pretty extensive with a long list of meat, seafood and veggie curries. You can choose what to have in the curry, how much rice to have (starts at 250g and you can go up in 100g increments or even go down to just 200g), the level of spice you want and add a huge variety of toppings. The curry above is a cheese and kimchi curry with spinach. That’s with the standard 250g of rice and it looked pretty good. There was a good amount of spinance and the cheese was nice and melted.
This was the aubergine and vegetable curry. Again, as you can see, it’s fairly generous on the toppings with a decent amount of veggies and aubergine. Like with the kimchee and cheese one, it looked pretty good!
Now onto my order. I went for the pork katsu curry with cheese and scrambled egg. I went with level 1 spice which is one level above the standard level. The flavour of the curry was really good; it tasted great! There was a bit of a kick; I thought it was just about right but if you really like heat, you probably want to crank it up a level or three. The cheese was nice and stringy but was also pretty mild. The egg was a good choice and I’d get it again. The katsu was nice and crispy but the pork itself was a little bit dry. Still, it was pretty damn tasty but next time, I might give the chicken katsu a go instead.
And here is the group shot of our after film dinner. I really enjoyed CoCo Ichiban and would definitely go back again. I hear it’s more expensive and the portions are smaller than in Japan but I guess that’s to be expected in London unfortunately. Still, as long as you don’t have to wait too long in the queue, it’s a simple, pretty delicious and quick meal around Leicester Square where you won’t go wrong!
Coco Ichiban, 17-18 Great Newport Street, WC2H 7JE
Cheers, JL
