Why you should experience Chao Chao Bamboo in Tokyo, Japan.
Chao Chao Bamboo is a convivial Southeast Asian kitchen where Jingumae's fashion culture, Thai street-food traditions, Vietnamese staples and an open-kitchen format extend one of Harajuku's longest-running Asian restaurant lineages into a larger neighborhood dining room.
Set along a lane off Meiji-dori near Omotesando and just steps from Laforet Harajuku, the restaurant occupies the ground floor at 6-7-12 Jingumae, only a few minutes from the original Chao Bamboo. Tables fill a broad, informal room modeled on the sociability of Southeast Asian street stalls, with an open kitchen keeping woks and preparation visible from the dining floor. The menu crosses Thailand and neighboring cuisines through gapao, green curry, tom yum noodles, laksa, pho, khao soi, spring rolls and wok-fried vegetables, giving groups ample room to build a shared meal across several culinary traditions. The result is a Jingumae restaurant where the street-food character established by Chao Bamboo gained a larger second home without losing the immediacy that made the original a Harajuku fixture.
What you should know about Chao Chao Bamboo.
Chao Chao Bamboo is best known for opening in 2009 as the second restaurant in a Harajuku Asian-food lineage that stretches back to the early 1990s through its elder sibling, Chao Bamboo. The original had operated for 29 years when reconstruction of its building forced a temporary closure in March 2021, placing the beginning of that first restaurant around 1992 and making the group an unusually longstanding participant in Jingumae dining. Chao Chao Bamboo remained open during the reconstruction, preserving the group's Harajuku presence until Chao Bamboo returned at its original address on September 28, 2022. The second restaurant developed a broader physical format than its compact predecessor, with 60 seats and an open kitchen supporting both individual meals and shared tables. A surviving 2014 menu shows how wide the repertoire had already become within five years of opening: fresh and fried spring rolls, shrimp toast, larb gai, water spinach, gapao, pho, Thai ramen, tom yum noodles, laksa, khao soi and Taiwanese danzai noodles all occupied the same kitchen. The contemporary operation remains part of Chiyoda Enterprise Co., Ltd., which now groups three neighboring Jingumae restaurants under the Chao Bamboo name: Chao Bamboo at 6-1-5, Chao Chao Bamboo at 6-7-12 and Chao Sun Bamboo at 6-9-11. That three-restaurant concentration gives the group an unusual footprint within a few blocks of Harajuku, more than three decades after the first Chao Bamboo began serving Southeast Asian food in the neighborhood.
Gapao provides the most direct route into the Thai side of the kitchen, bringing seasoned minced chicken and basil over rice before green curry shifts toward coconut richness, herbs and chile. Fresh spring rolls introduce cool vegetables and soft wrappers, with shrimp toast and Thai-style fried chicken cartilage supplying crisp, fried counterpoints suited to a shared table. Water spinach moves quickly through the wok with oyster sauce, and larb gai brings minced chicken into a sharper herb-driven preparation. Noodles widen the geographical range: pho reaches into Vietnam, laksa carries the meal toward the coconut-based noodle traditions of maritime Southeast Asia and khao soi returns to northern Thailand through curry broth and noodles. Tom yum noodles combine rice noodles with the sour-hot profile of the Thai soup, giving another route through the menu before rice dishes return to the table. Chao Chao Bamboo works best through accumulation, letting several people move among curries, salads, fried dishes, wok cooking and noodles across a menu broad enough to explain why the larger second restaurant became a durable companion to the original.
How to fold Chao Chao Bamboo into your trip.
Chao Chao Bamboo works as the meal destination within a Jingumae route connecting one of the world's substantial private ukiyo-e collections, the retail project that accelerated Harajuku's fashion ascent and a twenty-first-century complex built at the district's most consequential intersection.
Begin at Ota Memorial Museum of Art, whose foundation rests on 12,000 ukiyo-e works assembled by insurance executive Seizo Ota V across more than half a century of collecting. Ota died in 1977 at 83; his family first displayed the collection in the Toho Insurance headquarters in Ginza before opening the permanent Harajuku museum on January 13, 1980. Woodblock prints and nikuhitsu-ga paintings span ukiyo-e from its beginnings through its later development, with monthly rotations protecting light-sensitive works and repeatedly changing what appears in the galleries. Continue to Laforet Harajuku, opened in October 1978 as Mori Building's first retail development during the district's emergence as a center for youth fashion. Irie Miyake Architects & Engineers designed the six-story, two-basement, 15,594-square-meter building, Shimizu Corporation constructed it and Laforet Museum gave the project an event venue alongside its fashion floors; the commercial experience later fed into Mori Building projects including Ark Hills, Roppongi Hills and Omotesando Hills. Conclude at Tokyu Plaza Harajuku Harakado, opened on April 17, 2024 at Jingumae Crossing through a joint development by Tokyu Land and Tokyo Metro. Nomura's Michio Matsuzaki directed its environmental and interior design, Nikken Sekkei's Yusuke Mitsui supervised design work and Solso's Taichi Saito handled planting; 75 shops originally stretched from the basement to the rooftop terrace inside a project conceived around the creative history of Harajuku. Chao Chao Bamboo closes the progression several minutes away with another piece of Jingumae continuity, carrying an Asian restaurant lineage begun around 1992 into the larger second location opened in 2009.
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