In the Showa era, there was a chef who was famous for his homemade mentaiko. The mentaiko was marinated in a carefully seasoned sauce based on the stock and sauce of the dish prepared that SUN. As a result, the flavor components are intricately intertwined, and the finished product after aging has a slightly different taste every time. Furthermore, at the perfect time, we carefully wrapped the kelp, which has been marinated in a seasoning sauce to enhance its flavor, around the mentaiko. The konbu-maki mentaiko, made with a lot of carefully selected ingredients and a lot of time, was exquisitely delicious and imbued with the soul of the craftsman.
The chef's mentaiko was highly praised for being delicious whether served raw, broiled, in ochazuke, or as rice balls. However, without being satisfied with the status quo, we have always wanted to provide delicious food that is unparalleled and make everyone happy.
During this time, he came up with the idea of developing a sauce that would go well with mentaiko. Using a soy sauce sauce that had been added to and protected for many years as a base, he combined various ingredients and seasonings through repeated trial and error. And after many years of hard work, he finally perfected his "mentai-ju sauce" for mentaiko, which would further enrich the mentaiko's flavor and bring out its maximum umami. The combination of rice, mentaiko, and mentaiko-ju sauce was outstanding, and it quickly became an extremely popular dish that people wanted to eat anytime, for breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, or midnight snack. However, since the chef retired, the flavor has been lost to the public.
In Fukuoka, there have long been many stores selling mentaiko as Original Goods, but no stores that served it as a meal. Wanting to preserve the deliciousness of that time for future generations and to let many people enjoy it, we have once again revived it in modern times as "Mentaiju®︎," in which mentaiko is placed in a tiered box and topped with "Mentaiju sauce" like the sauce used for grilled eel.
Our restaurant opened in 2010 as a specialty mentaiko restaurant in Nishinakasu, an area once bustling with traditional Japanese restaurants. Enjoy our "Mentaiju®" to your heart's content in a nostalgic interior that evokes the atmosphere of those days.
