A nice spacious, restaurant with comfort food in Ebisu

We go to this restaurant all the time. It got Tex-Mex food ... but with a Japanese twist. I notice that the restaurants here like to do that --- put their own twist on old favourites. Although, this restaurant does indeed change the original recipes to suit the local tastes, this particular restaurant is a gem amongst Japanesified western restaurants. It's spacious for one thing. And it's solidly built; the inside support beams will attest to the solid foundation of this building. The food is true remind-you-of-home comfort food. The outside doesn't look like much but it's going for the Old West abondoned look. The restaurant is called Zest and apparently, it has about half a dozen locations around Tokyo. The newest addition can be found in Hiroo, but that location only has burgers and none of the other Tex-Mex food items on the Ebisu menu. I haven't been to the other locations to test out their food or question their waitstaff, but I do frequent this one regularly.

I know that during the weeks, for lunch, they have English speaking waitstaff and the manager speaks English very well, but by his accent, I would guess him to be of Hispanic language origin. Most of the other staff are Japanese, but are super friendly. They are always willing to accommodate your special needs. If you order the beef steak jambalaya, they actually will cut up the egg (they like to put fried, sunny-side eggs on everything here) and mix it up in your rice jambalaya dish for you. Once we sat beside a rather large party for brunch on the weekend and we saw their spicy chicken wings being mixed up right there in front of them at their table. Since they ordered what seemed to be a rather large amount of wings, this table required 2 waitstaff to mix up the wings for them. They sang a song while they were mixing.

On most weekends that we've been by, the first floor has been rented for private parties, but the 3rd floor is open. On those days, the hostess will greet you at the front entrance, but direct you to the elevator within the garage so that you can get to the 3rd floor.

All floors are spacious. I never feel like I'm cramped between tables. And for all the tall people out there, the ceilings are also high. The lifts are small-ish as is the standard here in Japan.

I don't work for the place and the restaurant didn't pay me to write about them. I just love going because, except for the Japanese staff, and the location, it's mostly a western feel and reasonable lunch fare prices.