スパイスガーデンーー池袋のお薦めランチスポット

When I teach at Essence English School on a Saturday, it's always a long day. My first class starts at 9 in the morning, and the last class continues until 9 in the evening! Fortunately, I can take a break in the afternoon for about three hours, and the question is what to do during that time.

Sometimes I have to work anyway. I'm co-producing TOEIC correspondence courses for ユーキャン, and that can keep me busy even when I'm not teaching. But occasionally I manage to get away from work. There are a number of movie theaters in the area, and if I'm lucky, I can find a film that I can watch during the three-hour window. Also, I enjoy visiting book stores, and ジュンク堂 is one of my favorites.

When I finished my second class yesterday afternoon, however, the first thing that came into my mind was that I was starving; I had been teaching more than five hours in a row then. So I decided to go to スパイスガーデン, an Indian curry restaurant, to fill my stomach. It's about a five-minute walk from Essence and comes highly recommended*1 from some of my colleagues.

This is what the place looks like from the outside.

I ordered 豚バラカレー with ナン. Look how big, nay, huge the ナン is!

It was very delicious, and I was quite satisfied. Despite the name of the restaurant, the curry wasn't too hot for my taste *2.

The chef was kind enough to photograph me with the meal on the table.

I can wholeheartedly recommend スパイスガーデン. It may be sort of expensive in the evening, but the lunch menu is reasonably priced, considering how great the food is.

If you are an Essence student, then you must be coming to 池袋 at least once a week, so why don't you try the place sometime? The map can be found here. If you come out of the Essence building, make a right turn and just keep walking 明治通り in the direction of 目白 or 新宿 (away from 池袋駅) for five to ten minutes, and you will find the restaurant on your right. There's another Indian restaurant along the way, so remember the image below. This is the one.

Incidentally, the building you see above, right next to the restaurant, is where Essence English School used to be when I joined it as a teacher in 1999.

Do you know any good restaurant with reasonable prices for lunch in 池袋? If you do, please leave a comment. Thanks in advance!

By the way, a colleague of mine, 神崎正哉さん, has just published a book about the Japanese cuisine and food culture in both English and Japanese, with his friend Daniel Warriner. It contains lively English conversations about Japanese food with an audio CD as well as interesting columns on a wide range of topics from 天ぷら through 懐石料理 to カルピス. It also includes lists of useful English expressions that you can use to improve your TOEIC score, although the book makes no mention of the test. It will be a great tool to learn English and have fun at the same time! It's called 『スティーブ、今夜スシバーにご案内しましょう』. I've just started reading it, and I'm enjoying it already!

スティーブ、今夜スシバーにご案内しましょう

*1:"comes highly recommended"（＝〜はお薦め）は1月のTOEIC Part 5で出題されました。）

*2:"Hot" can mean "spicy" in English.