I'll be chasing that Curry House high for the rest of my life, I'm afraid.
And even then, I'll never forgive CocoIchi for leaving Rowland Heights, as I'm just okay with Midoh if anything.
So when I heard that we had a new Japanese curry restaurant in town, Curry Hero, I was pretty excited to try.
They're located where AYEE Rice Noodle Roll/Lo Mein, Ramen Yukino Ya, Wonton Forest, Sapporo Ya, and like a jillion other businesses that have come and go. This plaza, unfortunately, isn't the best for business, being in a really awkward, semi hard to get into, very busy road that has been cursed by the unending Fullerton Road construction (maybe, finally this year they'll be done? You can see through the other side now).
Regardless, there's a decent amount of parking in such a large plaza, but it does get busy and packed. People are pulling up to other restaurants in this plaza, since there were only 2 other customers there when we were dining in.
Service was polite and friendly. Food came out quickly enough and ordering was done through scanning a QR code.
For our dinner, we got the:
1) Potato Salad:
-Hearty helping of Japanese style potato salad.
-Good amount of potato chunks, cucumber, carrots, egg, and had a nice sour, cooling taste to it, went perfect with the savory taste of the curry.
-Not bad.
2) Hamburger Steak Curry:
-Japanese hamburger steak curry. Comes with a pre-sliced hamburger steak patty with a slight char to it. Juicy enough and it's about the size of my yaoi sized fist, so medium sized. Not huge, but not tiny.
-I wanted this quite spicy since I read a review at the other location that it wasn't super spicy, as many Japanese spicy isn't that spicy, but they didn't have their spicy curry in house so apparently they went next door to grab some chili oil sauce.
-I added three hearty spoonfuls and recreated a level 7-9 spiciness. It did a slow, churning burn easily. Generally something that I can handle, but with the mushiness of the rice, made it a bit more difficult.
-As for dish ratio, you're getting a good amount of rice, plenty of curry sauce, and a lesser amount of protein, but my brother got the sliced beef curry and got a little better of a protein ratio.
Though for his dish, he got the fukujinzuke, Japanese red pickles, but I did not, so it might depend on each dish.
Both entrees came with a standard miso soup. Came with a couple cubes of tofu. No seaweed. Not too salty. Decent.
Both of the rice for our dishes came out pretty mushy and the curry is a bit thicker than what we usually get from other Japanese curry restaurants, but it's not too bad flavor-wise. Savory, with slightly sweet undertones. Though, it's slightly missing the kick from other heavy hitters that are currently out there like CocoIchi or Go Go.
I don't mind coming back to try the omelet curry with a friend, maybe a different protein item, but with how full I got on just rice and curry, it's definitely shareable for me. Altogether this was around $50 for both of us.
Based on their other location, it doesn't look like their menu gets more expansive than what they offer already, but hopefully, I can be wrong.
Also not a fan of their AI slop food images, but that's another issue entirely. read more