How do you make an Irish curry?
Here at one restaurant in Osaka, they put Guinness in the curry sauce.
Irish Curry and Pub (since 2008) is (edited 2024: was, it closed down at some point during 2023) a small spot in the basement of the Shinsaibashi Parco department store.
(Not to be confused with a different restaurant called Irish Curry in a different part of town. You'll know if you've found the one I'm talking about, because the logo is a cute spoon with a moustache on it.)
It's designed to look like "an 80s Irish bar". I'm going by the official website blurb on that one, because I wasn't anywhere near old enough to frequent Irish bars in the 1980s. But speaking as someone who's been in Japan for a while... it looks like they used just enough green and orange to keep the punters happy.
The menu has pub standards if you're not in the mood for curry, like tiny portions of 'fish and chips', but I'm pretty sure those were a later addition.
Why bother? Well, if you want a curry, you don't have that many options. There are 4 - plain, pork, shrimp, or fish - in regular or half size portions, and extra toppings for a few hundred yen each. For a place called Irish Curry, most of the menu is other things.
I went for a regular pork curry with extra cheese. And it looked beautiful!
It looks epic, right? 'Curry' and 'photogenic' are 2 words that don't usually go together.
Fair warning, the veggies you can see in the mix are not grilled onion. That's pickled cabbage. Not just sour, but almost tart. Maybe it's meant to be a nod to colcannon?
The pork was decent, thankfully. Generously thick slices of belly pork, perfectly cooked to the point they fell apart when I poked them with a fork. There wasn't anything else in with them... which is fine, for a pork curry. But what that means is the 'plain' curry must just be sauce. That's a shame.
You can absolutely taste the Guinness... but not that it's Guinness.
This is hard to explain.
The curry doesn't taste boozy, or like beer. You won't try a spoonful of it and go 'oh yeah, that's Guinness in there alright'. What you do notice is a meaningful difference in the flavour, but the kind you can't put your finger on straight away. It's on the tip of your tongue, haha!
As I was paying and leaving, the guy running the place told me that Guinness adds depth and richness to the curry sauce, and I think that's spot on. It feels like a more substantial plate of curry. I almost didn't finish it, which is weird because I wanted to. It was like trying to eat a thick slice of chocolate cake, and having to put the fork down for my own safety after a few mouthfuls.
This tastes far better than your average Japanese curry. I don't care if I offend any Coco Ichiban fans reading this, because it's true.
Verdict: 9/10. We should put Guinness in everything.