Family Restaurants in Japan

While I’m in Japan I often went to family restaurants to have lunch or snack. The top reason is the price! I can easily get a coupon for free drink bar (unlimited drinks) online.  Not all family restaurants have good drink bar though.   D loved matcha latte at Big Boy and Gusto, but we didn’t see matcha latte at Saizeria.

Saizeriya is a Japanese chain of Italian family-style restaurants.  I used to go there often when I was a student because the food there is very very cheap.  Pasta, gratin and pizza starts from 280 yen each.  Plus, they have drink bar (which is normally 190 yen).  Although their pizzas and pasta are with just few ingredients and don’t really look nice, students like us were happy with those foods.  We could kill time with just few hundreds yen after school 🙂 I saw many students at Saizeria when I went there have lunch the other day.  Food there is much cheaper than other family restaurants such as Coco’s and Gasto, It could be even cheaper than McDonald’s.

I went to Big Boy more than 5 times during this stay.  I’m actually quite fed up with their menu now :p.  D wanted to go there because of Matcha Latte at their drink bar.  At some Big Boy they gave us a toy for Hiro too, and it was nice.  They do “Kids Members Card” as well where you can chose one item from their selection as a gift to your kid after earning 5 points (1 visit = 1 point).

One thing I was surprised was that Gusto now has few different versions – normal Gusto, Ohashi-Gusto, and Steak Gusto.  Ohashi-Gusto serves all the foods with chopsticks (ohashi = chopsticks).  I loved their food menu than Big Boy.  They had matcha latte at their drink bar too. (the one near my house)  And I won a free vanilla pudding as they were doing “instant win” scratch for New Year. 🙂  Steak Gusto serves steak, and it’s cheap!  It comes with salad bar & drink bar, and you can enjoy it under 1000yen.  I should go there one more time before I go back to Perth.

Oh, another thing I noticed when I came back to Japan was that some Japanese fast food restaurants, such as Yoshino-ya, Nakau and Matsuya, now have drive-thro facility!  It’s just like McDonald’s and KFC.  People can take-away beef donburi etc through the drive-thro.  Many people are using it, actually.  Japanese people work hard, and just want to eat up one donburi in the car then head back to office, maybe!