After living in the neighborhood for over 2 years, I have never been to this restaurant. According to my friend who used to live around here, he recommended me to try their Japanese eel rice and deep-fried pork cutlet and egg rice. While awaiting for Typhoon signal 8 to be hoisted, I wandered around the Hung Hom area with my umbrella in search for this place. When I arrived around 8pm, it was full house but I only needed to wait for a few minutes because I was by myself and can sit anywhere inside this cozy little restaurant.

I can be pretty honest to say that this place is definitely not a comfortable place in terms of seating arrangement and environment. I was sweating continuously throughout the meal because of the lack of air conditioning. Based on my observation, the interior of the restaurant remained pretty much the same over the past 15 or even 20 years. However, all the surrounding factors give this place a "neighborhood diner" / "home cooking" atmosphere which I kind of enjoyed especially when dinning alone.

(1) Miso Soup
I ordered a set meal and it came with a msio soup. Just by the look of it, it was not very appetizing at all. It looked very watery. There were plenty of the ingredients such as seaweeds & beansprouts in the soup, and the miso flavor was surprisingly pretty well-balanced when compared with the many Japanese chain restaurants in Hong Kong which use extremely salty, powdery type miso mixture. I am not sure whether it was intentional or not to prepare the soup this way with a watery / diluted look, but I actually enjoyed it.

(2) Deep-Fried Pork Cutlet & Egg Rice (Katsudon)
Not bad at all. The sauce for such a rice dish is one of the most important ingredients and it was good quality sauce that was used for my Katsudon. Slightly sweet but a good match with the rest of the ingredients. The pork cutlet on the other hand, was a bit disappointing. The pork itself was rather tender but the batter was slightly too thick. In my opinion, the egg (scrambled?) acted as part of the sauce and it did a pretty good job here as well together with the onion and the actual sauce.

I will come back later for sure not only because I want to try other dishes but I also wanted to have the home cooking / neighborhood dining experiences. However, it will be on a cooler day when I return.

Likes:

* Sauce for the rice
* well-balanced miso flavor in the miso soup (even though it looked very watery)
* "home cooking" / "neighborhood diner" atmosphere

Dislikes:

* Uncomfortable seating environment
* Lack of air conditioning

Original Blog: http://jason-bonvivant.blogspot.com/2009/08/mikawaya.html