The Chinatown in Yokohama is one of the largest and the best in Japan, selling the famous Yokohama Chinatown Pork Buns (there are many shops selling this here), and also Chinese restaurants along the streets.
We selected Manchinro Honten, which is the grandest looking Chinese restaurant here in Chinatown at Yokohama. There are just too many Chinese restaurants here, so do take a stroll along the main street to find out which one suits your budget and taste.
Manchinro at Yokohama was started in 1893, and its main restaurant was burned down in a big fire. The rebuilt restaurant opened in 2002 and the restaurant poured in millions of dollars to rebuild it into an "imperial palace" environment.
Staffs here speaks Japanese, but they have a few Chinese staff here too. As it was lunch time, there were some set lunches available. We ordered the 2,500 yen per person set lunch, which turned out to be a good choice.
Quite a selection of sauces were provided on each table. Their most popular sauce was the Fragrant Spicy Crispy chilli which was similar to our Crystal Jade chilli sauce. It is so popular that they actually sell bottles of them at their shop next door.
The first dish was this Ootori Appetizer. It reminds us of this Chinese cold dish of pork with jelly.
The Beef thick soup with tomato was pretty good. Athough it's not the usual clear double boiled soup we are more familar, but this works well.
The Japanese loves their shrimps and prawns. So it is no surprise that the Wok-fried shrimps was nicely done with fresh shrimps which is both sweet and crunchy.
Instead of ordering seperate dim sums, Manchinro Honten offers 2 of their most popular dim sum in their lunch sets: Colourful Dim Sum (Pork Siew Mai and Leek Har Gow). The Siew Mai and Har Kow are not the usual Cantonese style ones, and more like our Singapore style of Siew Mai which are much bigger.
I think this Stewed chicken with pumpkin is a good comfort dish. The Japanese pumpkin is very sweet and not too mushy. And matches well with the boneless chicken chunks.
The night before, I was watching a Japanese TV program and they were showing stir fried prawns with spicy Sichuan sauce. So here is Manchinro's version of the Stir Fried Prawns with Sichuan spicy sauce (3,200 yen for 6 prawns). I was quite surprise to find that the Sichuan spicy sauce was actually very similar to our Chilli crab sauce. Almost 95% similar.
The lunch ended with the Fried Rice topped with pork and ducks sauce. I am not sure what the duck sauce was, but their chunks of roasted pork was good.
Dessert was this cute Almond Bean Curd with bayberry sauce. It is basically almond tofu with a slightly sour berry sauce.
I would also recommend their inhouse Special Manchinro Oolong Tea. I am no tea expert, but I believe their tea leaves were of an excellent grade.
On a separate note, we saw this restaurant at Yokohama of this very famous chef. Fans of Iron Chef Japan should know who this chef is.
Manchinro Honten
153, Yamashita-cho,
Naka-ku,
Yokohama-shi,
Kanagawa-ken,
231-0023
http://english.manchinro.com/