Earlier this year, I traveled to Japan and went on a tear eating at as many curry restaurants as I could. I wanted to try all sorts of different places and styles, from the basic to the foreign to Japan.

One spot was Rice Curry Manten. Japanese curry in general is a very humble food, but what they serve at Manten is like a no-nonsense mechanic: It’s there to fill you up with few frills, and it’s dedicated to that job. It’s been around for decades, and site reviews praise it for its generous portions and affordable prices. While an oft-recurring joke is that Japanese food portions are miniscule compared to what you find in the US, this place is definitely what I’d call “America-worthy.” 

While the katsu curry seems to be the go-to, I instead opted for what I’d call a unique menu item: shumai curry. I’ve been going to dim sum all my life so I am very familiar with shumai (as well as how it tends to differ in Japanese cuisine), and I really wanted to see the approach this curry restaurant would take.

The answer: Make them huge and deep fry them. They were easily the biggest shumai I’d ever seen in any context, and I got plenty of pieces to boot. As for the main part of the dish (the rice and the curry), it was satisfactory. The rice was cooked well and the sauce was satisfyingly salty and savory. That said, because I was trying to eat my way through Japan, I did not opt for the largest servings, and in that sense, I may have not had the true Rice Curry Manten experience.

Prior to going, a friend told me about how they used to serve a kind of kitchen-sink meal, where they threw literally every topping onto a massive pile of curry rice. However, there was apparently so much wasted food from people giving up on finishing it that they stopped having it as an option. My only regret is not being able to try this for myself, or at least see someone else tackle the Manten monster.