CoCo Ichibanya is a restaurant located in Irvine California that specializes in curry dishes. It is actually a chain restaurant originated from Japan! The restaurant itself is located at the heart of Irvine business district and the restaurant is usually packed with customers lining up at its door. The restaurant itself is easy to find in the plaza that it is in. It is located directly at the corner of the plaza and can be spotted easily when coming out of the parking garage at the back.
CoCo Ichibanya does not take break in the afternoon and operates from lunch time to dinner. We got there around 1:30PM avoiding the busy hour, and we still had to wait for 5 minutes. When we got to the reception, we signed in by ourselves on the tablet to indicate number of people in the party, and whether we have any special request. After about 5 minutes, we were led to the bar table, which is still nice since we could see the chefs in the kitchen making curry.
So the curry at CoCo Ichibanya is more like Japanese style curry. Not Indian style or Thai curry. Thus the curry taste is more sweet rather than spicy. It does have spicy option however. The menu of the restaurant offers many different curry dishes, but we believe that the curry sauce is the same for all of them. The only difference is the meat or the vegetable that come with the dish.
CoCo Ichibanya also allow customers to customize the curry, and of course you can add spiciness to it as well. The maximum level of spiciness is 24! We are not a fan of spicy food. So this time we ordered a port cutlet curry with egg wrapping around rice, and a customized curry dish.
The dishes were served quite quickly and the rice was served in a big bowl plate with lot of curry sauce! The curry taste is quite rich and sweet, which we really like! The egg wrapping rice is very common in Japan, but we find the egg wrap to be a bit thing and we thought the rice is usually flavored with other spice.
Overall, we loved the taste of curry here at CoCo Ichibanya! It is the kind of East Asian curry that we like since its more sweet than spicy.
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