We walk by the Aji Japanese Canteen every time we walked from our hotel to the tourist areas and every time we did, there always was a nice crowd inside – which made me think it’s not bad! It’s located on the South bank of River Thames just after you cross the Waterloo bridge. One evening, we finally popped in as it was a cold and rainy evening… and they had free internet which we were looking for a place to sit down and use!
It’s a different concept in this restaurant, or what they call Canteen as the space is large, but it is a seat yourself like a food court. Then, you order from the menu an they servers will bring you your food. We each ordered our own dish, and the food came out really quickly. They didn’t mind us staying there longer than we needed to, or anyone doing that actually!
I ordered the Kara Age Don which was ginger flavoured crispy fried chicken, boiled eggs served in a bowl of rice with shredded cabbage, Japanese QP Mayonnaise and Shiso flavoured Sauce
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The other entree we ordered was a Soup Noodles, where you got to pick the kind of noodle you wanted, the type of soup, and the topping you’d like! So, this was fun as we got to personalize our noodle dish. We chose to have Ramen, which is a thin egg noodle, (one of our favourite types of noodles) with Shoyu soup which is a chicken broth that is kind of “soy sauce” flavoured. Then, we topped this bowl of ramen with Cha-Shu and garnished it with bean sprouts, shitake mushrooms and bamboo shoot.
Overall, this place is decent. It’s not the best, but it definitely hit the spot and it served our purpose of getting some nice noodle soup in our bellies, use the internet, and wait out the rain. This isn’t a location I would return to mainly because there are a lot of Japanese resturants that have opened up along the banks of River Thames.
AjiZen Japanese Canteen
Waterloo
Riverside Building County Hall
Waterloo, United Kingdom
(0871) 962 0035