The Shinjuku Basement Steakhouse Where One Steak Weighs 720 Grams

Most steakhouses sell you a steak. Gut's Grill sells you meat by the hundred grams, and then asks whether you want more.

It sits in the basement of the Shinjuku Mitsui Building, an office tower in west Tokyo. Forty-four seats, open since 1999. At lunch the room fills, and then the chairs the staff set out in the corridor fill too.

The house dish is the dangan — “bullet” — steak: skirt, seared on cast iron, 300 g for ¥1,800, with rice free up to 350 g. The other one is a slab of chuck roll cut seven centimeters thick and weighing 720 grams.

What you are actually ordering

If the word steakhouse makes you think of a wine list and a two-hour dinner, adjust. This is a canteen for the people working in the towers overhead. You order meat by weight, it arrives spitting on a hot iron plate with a mound of white rice beside it, you season it yourself from the caddy on the table, and you are back at your desk inside half an hour.

Harami — the cut in the house steak — is outside skirt: loose-grained, fatty, chewier than a fillet and far beefier. It is the cut Japanese grill culture is built on, and it is cheap enough that a shop can hand you 500 grams of it without the bill becoming an event.

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The morning is forty kilos of knife work

Doors open at 11:00. Hours before that, someone is cutting. Blocks of skirt come out of the vacuum packs, get portioned, and then the silverskin and the surplus fat come off. That is the day's supply for two dishes: the bullet steak and the cut steak.

The quantity is “a little under 40 kilos.” It takes about an hour.

This part alone hasn't changed in decades. Near enough the same amount, every morning.

Seven centimeters

The Magnum uses chuck eye roll. The sinew comes out, then it is cut into slabs about seven centimeters thick. Each one is over 720 grams.

The bullet steak

Komori-san, who has worked here for more than twenty years, says the bullet steak outsells everything else. Orders run from 200 g to 500 g.

Everything from 200 to 500 grams sells, but 300 is the one where you get up full, I think. Women mostly order 200. On weekends the people who come in alone are usually here for the 500.

Another 100 g costs ¥500, and there is no ceiling on it. Some customers, he says, work their way up to about a kilo.

The caddy on the table holds pepper, salt, soy sauce and mustard, plus three house sauces: black garlic, an aromatic-vegetable soy, and a chilli miso. The default combination is black garlic, mustard and soy.

Rice is free up to a 350 g medium bowl.

The numbers

Komori-san gives them on camera.

Weekdays do not move far from that. The day filmed was the peak of Japan's year-end office-party season.

11:00

Ten minutes before opening there are already people waiting. The door opens, four come in, and six orders land almost immediately.

Five bullet steaks go onto the iron at once. Sear, flip, lift, sauce, next.

Ask the customers why they come and the answers are short.

I want meat. I want to eat meat.

Because this is the best one.

Another put it down to the value for the volume. The free rice comes up again and again. By the middle of the lunch hour the room is full and the chairs out in the corridor are taken.

The egg on top

The dish the shop pushes is the premium hamburg steak, made with wagyu, and a fixture of the all-you-can-eat dinner course.

Komori-san's own pick is different: the grilled beef short rib with a fried egg on it.

It's the one that goes best with rice. And it's nothing like a fried egg out of a home frying pan — the white catches on the plate, and that burnt edge is the good part.

The Magnum, ¥3,980

Lunch ends at 15:00. Dinner starts at 17:00, and that is when the Magnum becomes available. No reservation needed, busy service or not.

It does take time: five minutes for the plate to come up to heat, then five minutes a side.

It's a bit under twenty minutes, so if you're going to order it, order it first.

Off the heat it goes to a board. The centre is still rare, so it is cut to whatever size the customer wants and goes back on the iron — left big and dramatic, or cut small enough to eat straight away.

Garlic butter goes on last.

The plate sits on your table, so doneness and thickness are yours to decide. Cut it differently and it eats differently.

The man on the grill

The grill station is run by Ngoc, who came from Vietnam. Five years in Japan, a stretch back home through the pandemic, then a return and a permanent job here. The spaghetti that turns up beside the steak — boiled, drained, tossed with garlic, parsley and oil — is his work too.

If you are going

Hours, closing days and prices change. Worth confirming before you go.

The part text can't carry

Everything above is the reporting. What it leaves out is the tempo.

Through the lunch rush there are four or five pieces of meat on the iron at any given moment. Sear, flip, lift, sauce, next — and the plates keep going out.

That is the 23:07 mark onward, and the Magnum coming off the iron at 30:04.

One note: at 31:21 the video moves on to a different shop — a Chinese diner out in Hachioji.