Review: Mumokuteki Cafe むもくてきカフェ

Last night I went out for dinner with my friend Ryotaro to Mumokuteki Cafe (無目的 'without purpose') in Nakagyo Ward, near Kawaramachi Station. The plan was originally to go for Italian food but once I arrived at our meeting place he told me he'd found somewhere doing organic food that I'd like. Personally I don't care at all what kind of chemicals you've slathered all over my vegetables, but in the context of restaurants in Japan the concepts of organic and vegetarian/vegan seem to go hand in hand quite often.

Slightly disappointed that I was now not going to be spending the next hour or so stuffing my face with pizza, I headed up the stairs. Mumokuteki also owns what I think is a second-hand clothes and goods shop, which is on the ground floor below the restaurant. The place itself is quite big, with a cafe section and a restaurant section. We were sitting in the cafe section which had very comfortable armchairs.

Initially I wasn't sure if there was meat on offer since the photos in the extensive menu looked very convincing. The food is actually vegan but most of the dinner sets include miso soup, which contains dashi (fish stock). I appreciated that this is clearly marked on the menu with a little picture of a fish next to the dish's name and an explanation. For the less hypocritical among us there are plenty of choices which don't include dashi, such as spaghetti, curry and burgers, and I expect if you were really keen on trying one of the sets you could ask to have it with no miso soup. I'm really not sure why dashi would be used in an otherwise vegan setting. However as far as I noticed it's not explicitly advertised as a vegan or vegetarian place and the focus seems to be more on organic vegetables and soy products.

Anyway, the food: after a lot of dithering I went for the miso katsu plate. It was a hard decision as there was so much choice and it all looked excellent! You can choose between brown rice, mixed grain rice or a combination of the two. I went for half and half but next time would choose mixed grain, which was a bit more flavourful for having salt and pepper on it. Besides the rice and the katsu, there were 3 vegetable side dishes, a bowl of miso soup and some tomatoes in a sort of oil and vinegar based sauce. Ryo went for the boiled tofu hamburger plate which is one of the dinner specials, and commented that you couldn't tell it was tofu because of the sauce. I was hoping I might get offered a taste but no such luck there...

The tofu katsu was absolutely brilliant. I haven't eaten meat in several years now but the texture seemed very meat-like and the breadcrumb coating was crispy and not at all soggy. I would have liked there to be a bit more of the miso sauce though as it provided most of the flavour. It came with quite a large quantity of salad. I wasn't really keen on the cold vegetable sides, which I felt were a bit bland except for one which tasted similar to kimchi. I'm a bit picky about vegetables and have never been terribly keen on cabbage though, so this might just be me. The sweet tomatoes were lovely, I could quite happily have eaten about 5 of those.

Since I don't often have the chance to eat vegan desserts I decided it would really be rude not to order one, and went for the cheesecake, made with tofu in lieu of cream cheese. It had a slightly different texture to dairy cheesecake - slightly wobbly, similar to Japanese pudding. I loved the texture and cinnamon flavour of the (sadly not buttery biscuit) base which I think was made with oats. I also tried some of Ryo's soy ice cream that came as part of the dinner special. This was the first time I'd ever tried non-dairy ice cream. It is different - slightly less solid, more icy and has a very subtle taste that is hard to put your finger on.

Overall verdict: 4/5 stars
You get a lot of delicious vegan food for the price (mains: 900-1200 yen, desserts: 500-900 yen). I would definitely come back again. In particular I was interested by the burgers, desserts and milkshakes which I wasn't quite hungry enough for this time. Excellent job Mumokuteki.