Why you should experience Meyau in Tokyo, Japan.
Meyau is a distinctive Thai curry restaurant where Shinanomachi's university-quarter character, Thai spice pastes, coconut milk and Japanese ingredients preserve one of Tokyo's formative encounters with Thai curry.
Set along Gaien-Higashi-dori near Shinanomachi Station and just steps from Keio University Hospital, the basement restaurant channels attention toward bowls whose recipes have remained closely associated with the business since its 1983 debut. Three principal curries move through different levels of chile heat, coconut richness and spice, giving the compact menu a clear progression from the gentler green preparation toward the celebrated extra-hot Meyau Curry. Thai paintings, ceramics and decorative objects extend the connection with the country where the founder first encountered the cooking he wanted to recreate in Japan. The result is a characterful Shinanomachi restaurant where focused recipes and four decades of continuity make Thai curry part of the neighborhood's culinary history.
What you should know about Meyau.
Meyau is best known for beginning in 1983 after its backpacker founder encountered Thai curry during travels in Thailand and returned to Japan determined to recreate the flavors he had discovered in the northern Thai village that supplied the restaurant's name. The original Shinanomachi shop emerged when Thai cooking remained uncommon in Tokyo, becoming an early specialist devoted specifically to Thai-style curry and developing a following around recipes combining Thai spices with Japanese ingredients. A second Meyau opened in Waseda in 1989, beginning a complicated wider lineage that eventually placed restaurants carrying the name in several Japanese cities even as the Shinanomachi original continued independently. Founder Ryuji Kurechi's daughter Marie Inoue later inherited the Shinanomachi business, carrying her father's cooking into a second generation and retaining the three curry styles associated with the restaurant. The connection with neighboring Keio University became another enduring chapter, with students, graduates and hospital workers building Meyau into a familiar part of campus life. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the restaurant delivered meals to Keio University Hospital personnel working under stringent medical restrictions, extending a relationship formed through decades of proximity into direct support for the hospital community. More than forty years after opening, the family continues serving the Thai curry that Inoue describes as her father's recreation of the food he encountered during his travels, preserving an early chapter in Tokyo's adoption of Thai cooking through the same Shinanomachi restaurant.
Meyau Curry drives the experience through a thin, red broth whose initial coconut richness gives way to sustained chile heat, allowing the spice to intensify across successive spoonfuls before the solid ingredients interrupt its momentum. A whole bone-in chicken leg contributes yielding meat and savory juices to that broth, with a large potato absorbing the curry and boiled egg softening its sharper edges as the bowl develops. Red Thai Curry shifts the same cooking tradition toward a different balance of spice, then Green Thai Curry brings coconut, pork, daikon and bamboo shoots into a gentler preparation whose vegetable sweetness changes how the heat registers. Thai-style beef tendon noodles can follow beside the curry, moving from chile and coconut toward a broth-based preparation that gives the meal a softer final register. Meyau makes controlled changes in chile, coconut, meat, vegetables and broth the organizing principle of the meal, revealing how a compact set of recipes sustained since the restaurant's early years can produce markedly different experiences from closely related Thai foundations.
How to fold Meyau into your trip.
Meyau works as the meal destination within a Shinanomachi route connecting Japan's early modern garden design, Meiji-era commemorative art and the country's Olympic history.
Begin along Meiji Jingu Gaien Ginkgo Avenue, completed in 1923 under landscape architect Yoshinobu Orishimo, who selected 146 trees from 1,600 seedlings grown from ginkgo nuts collected at Shinjuku Gyoen and arranged them by height to manipulate perspective toward the picture gallery beyond. Continue to Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery, completed in 1926 around a design selected from 156 competition entries and housing 80 large paintings, divided evenly between Japanese and Western techniques, documenting episodes from the lives of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken. Conclude at Japan Olympic Museum, opened by the Japanese Olympic Committee on September 14, 2019 inside Japan Sport Olympic Square as a center for Olympic history, athlete participation, research and education. Meyau closes the route in Shinanomachi through a different form of international exchange, returning to the Thai flavors encountered by a Japanese backpacker and preserved by his family in Tokyo since 1983.
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