Tempura Tatsumi - Tiny Tempura Bar at Palace Hotel Tokyo

Tempura Tatsumi in Palace Hotel Tokyo is a small tempura restaurant in a large hotel. It has only 6 seats and is said to be the most popular restaurant in this luxurious hotel in Marunouchi, Tokyo. A reservation should be made as soon as possible once our trip to Japan was confirmed. Very conveniently, online reservations without advance credit card formalities could be made.

Tempura Bar at Palace Hotel

Palace Hotel is a beautiful hotel at the north end of the Marunouchi area in Tokyo. It faces the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace. Yachiyo restaurant which we wrote about recently is at the other end of Marunouchi where the iconic Imperial Hotel (with a main building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) is located. The two magnificent hotels – Imperial and Palace at two ends of this side of the Imperial Palace. How appropriate!

There are a number of restaurants at the hotel including French restaurant Esterre and Sushi Kanesaka by Chef Shinji Kanesaka who also runs the Shinji restaurants in Singapore. The tempura restaurant is very small, an L-shaped counter that seats 6. As it was a full house, we could only take some carefully angled shots of the restaurant.

Tempura Tatsumi Menu

There are a number of choices in the Tempura Tatsumi menu for lunch. In the interest of time and cost, we picked one of the more basic options – the Ichou course priced at Yen 9,900 which includes tax but excludes a 15% service charge.

Tempura Lunch at Palace Hotel

The raw ingredients for lunch were displayed before the commencement of the meal. Not a lot, but the ingredients, particularly the seafood certainly looked fresh. Since all tempura items tend to look alike, I have grouped the pictures into vegetable and seafood categories.

Here are the pictures of the vegetable items. Japanese fruits and vegetables tend to have more taste than average. This was also the case at Tempura Tatsumi. The pieces of humble carrot and lotus root had deep flavours and tasted very good. The batter used was very thin and light, allowing the natural flavours to shine.

Similarly the seafood items – fish, shrimps and sea eel were simply cooked and their natural flavours did the rest. Whether dipped in the tempura sauce or one of the 5 types of salt provided, each was wonderful. We wished we had ordered a longer course for lunch.

Tempura Tatsumi Lunch : Drinks and Rice

Over the course of lunch we experimented with different drinks – sparkling water, Suntory beer and sake. The latter was particularly enjoyable as the range of sake served by glass or carafe was reasonably wide.

To end the meal there was a choice of three types of rice. We chose to have the tendon (rice topped with mixed tempura and sauce) and tencha (mixed tempura on rice drenched with Japanese tea).