Blacows

BLACOWS is well known for thier very meaty hamburgers. If you are a big fan of hambergers but feel that you haven’t come across any good ones in Tokyo yet, you may want to try their hamburgers now.
They put a lot of enthusiasm into their patty meat, using the brand beef called «Yazawa Meat». That is what they have to offer and the meat is actually quite popular among many of those beef lovers out there in Tokyo. Pricing is a bit of a reservation for me, but the quality is guaranteed. I had a cheese burger here but thought I probably should’ve had a BLT burger so that I would’ve enjoyed the better balance of meat and vegetables.

Came here for lunch and enjoyed an awesome burger to fulfill my American craving for back home familiarity. The restaurant space is great whether you’re dining alone or with a group. I decided on a less traditional burger — the bacon and egg burger. Because being in Japan, I thought ordering the burger alone wouldn’t be enough so I added the «set» option that is a side salad and drink, AND a side of lettuce & grilled onions (well, because the waiter said it didn’t come with the burger I chose). Honestly, the burgers and fries were more than enough, and I was hungry too!
Of course you must know by now that the burgers here are made with 100% Kuroge Wagyu beef that is hand carved and hand ground in-​house. I would rate the size of the burger a large. The waiter instructed me to enjoy the burger with a fork & knife, or use a wax paper wrapper provided table side. The burger came with a small side of steak fries but hey, who comes to a serious burger joint for fries anyways.
Nice up tempo music playing makes me wanna dance the happy dance with the burger in my hands. Give this place a visit.

My first review on Unilocal since arriving in Japan in September and it’s for a burger place LOL! :)
I ate here with 3 of my friends on the night of Christmas Eve as a last minute thing because we didn’t reserve a dinner at any fancy restaurant hehe, but this place definitely has a kind of less casual feel to it. It wasn’t too crowded and we were seated quickly! The lighting is slightly dim and the place has an overall nice, cool vibe to it; super comfy.
Food here is definitely on the pricier side, but totally worth it! The burgers are 100% black wagyu beef! I ordered the Avocado Cheese Burger and it was delicious!!! Every burger comes with a tiny pickle and a few fries (like actually so few) and prices range from around ¥1300 to ¥1800 if I remember correctly. My mouth got kinda itchy bc I think I’m sometimes allergic to avocado but that’s totally my bad LOL. The burgers are a little too big to eat with your hands so my friends and I all ate it with forks and knives.
Overall everyone enjoyed their burgers and service was friendly and great! The beef definitely tastes special, so if you ever wanna treat yourself to a little something special or if you just have a little extra money to blow, then try out Blascows!

I’ve eaten a lot of good food in Tokyo the past two weeks. It truly is one of the great food destinations in the world. But what I would have never thought was one of the best things I ate would be HAMBURGER. Unbelievable indeed.
Blacows named after the Black Cows used for their 100% Black Waygu beef patties. Located in the upscale neighborhood of Ebisu where if they had a TV show called «House Wives of Japan», this is where they would be located.
The ambience of the restaurant is a casual burger joint with a clean look. There’s a bunch of mounted cow skulls on the wall just in case you forgot this is a burger joint. They offer a lot of options of burger but we ordered:
Bacon, Cheese, Avocado Burger: this was my wife’s choice. She loved the burger and even thought about ordering another after.
Big Blacow: this burger had everything. Egg, Bacon, Cheese, Lettuce, Onion, Tomato, and their house sauce. Every ingredient was top notch. The Black Waygu Beef was delicious. This burger is so massive that it has to be eaten like two open faced burgers. I’ve never had a burger more satisfying and full of flavor.
The service was pleasant and average for Tokyo. Not the best service but good enough.
I have to say it’s the best burger I’ve ever had. If there’s any better God must have saved it for Himself.

STOPS SERVING AT 9. So I have no idea if it’s good. I’m assuming it is from the other reviews and am being nice.

This place is basically your average burger place and nothing really to freak-​out and rave about lol The burger IS PRICEY if you want something more than just meat and bread… Lol and the quality of the meat… I guess makes up for the pricy-​ness of the burger. If you’re in or near the neighborhood give it try but if you’re not… there are other burger places equally as good… so don’t trip or feel you’re missing out on something great lol

Don’t listen to the haters! This is an EXCELLENT burger. It’s not expensive. It’s a restaurant-​priced burger and it’s a black cow wagyu (A5 grade kuroge-​wagyu) beef patty, c’mon. With a Maison Kayser bun. The tomatoey-​BBQ sauce was excellent. Note that the party is done medium well. It’s still juicy and delicious though. I will attribute any differences to Japanese style and I think any discerning burger lover is able to love burgers done in different styles ;)
Comes with potato wedges, not my fave but that’s just me. Eat your burger with the genius brown paper wrapper provided at your table.

A very fine hamburger, although there are plenty of better places to get your burger fix in Tokyo — two of them are also in Ebisu (Gotham Grill and Burger Mania).
Delivery is available but overpriced.

All in all the burger was really good. I might come back, but I wouldn’t go out of my way for this place. The Decour is very nice, but I found it a little funny that I had to step over the toilet to walk into the bathroom because it’s so small.
I would like to place a little higher but I think it’s a bit overpriced. Finally it soured my experience that the guy taking the orders was a bit of a snob. It’s something I haven’t really experienced too much and other restaurants.

Exploring the area by Ebisu station, decided to give this place a try, another stop on my burger tour of Japan. Ordered a bacon cheeseburger thinking bacon is bacon no matter where you go; little did I know this was the farthest thing from the truth. Burger arrives & what’s supposed to be bacon on top of the patty is this soft, limp, fatty looking thing. Thus began my education on japanese bacon: apparently this is normal bacon here, more like soft Canadian bacon. Undeterred but surprised, simply removed the strange bacon & resumed eating. Bun was shiny but good; meat was not dry & liked the barbecue sauce funny enough. Had to knock off 2 stars for the strange bacon & the price, approx. $ 15 USD. Lesson learned: don’t order bacon here.

Back in 2009 when Blacows first started they offered great lunch deals beginning at 1,000yen that included a salad. Fast forward 5 years and no longer do they have a great lunch value menu and gone are the days of the 1,000yen price point. It seems the menu pricing is the same for lunch and dinner with the exception of getting a drink and salad for an additional 400yen.
A plain burger with fries and a baby pickle rang in at 1,296yen. I mean Tokyo had some fabulous 1,000yen lunch spots like Hungry Heaven and The Great Burger that offer so much more for so much less. Ebisu just has so many other value lunch choices and this may have been the reason Blacows seemed a bit more empty then days gone by.
The plain burger with the special sauce was very tasty and the bread so perfectly crispy on the outside and chewy in the middle but was it worth the 1,296yen? Nah… I won’t be back.

The burgers and fries are great. Best burger I’ve probably ever had. Some people complain about the the price being 1600yen but that’s only about $ 15usd. I’ve paid more for worse in the states and still had to tip for terrible service.
Also worth mentioning is that the Japanese seem to take everything more serious. With all the abuses going on at meat/​dairy farms I am more likely to trust a Japanese cow over a US cow.
It’s a different approach to burgers in the US where you get mystery meat, burnt so called ‘crispy’ bacon and crispy (previously frozen fries).

The burger was good but I was expecting better from what many consider Japan’s best burger. There are many burger places in SF that crush this burger (Chez Maman, Slow Club, Nopa, Wayfare Tavern). The meat was moist but kind of bland. They don’t let you order it medium rare and it was medium well. The bacon wasn’t crispy cut kind of chewy. The fries weren’t crispy. I wouldn’t recommend this place to any burger lovers.

DELICIOUS BURGERS SOLD HERE.
Bf and I both got the bacon avocado cheeseburgers and it is oh-​so delicious! You see the cooks making the patties by hand behind the counter, so you already know that burger you’re about to eat is as fresh as it can get!
It came out really fast, and I was ready to inhale! the fries they serve are wedge fries, and it was seasoned just wonderfully! Burger was juicy, seasoned, delicious.
Their bacon is more flimsy and fatty compared to the US, so I wasn’t really a fan. It’s like you bite into it, and the whole slice comes out with your bite. not cool.
The burger was 16 yen each, but I would say it’s definitely worth it!

A really well tasting Wagyu cheese burger with bacon. Tender and juicy patty even though it was well done. Good «fries».

1715 on a Thursday Evening…
Bacon Cheeseburger, but not any beef patty, Japan’s famous Wagu (Kobe Beef) patty. You know, where they massage the cows, play classical music and feed them wine… if I could bypass the whole slaughter part, I know what I’d wanna come back as in my next life (guess I’d really have to buckle down and learn Japanese eh).
This burger introduced ingredients not normally found on a burger, well at least none I’m familiar with; however, the tartar sauce and diced sautéed onions esthetically caused me to circle around my burger in a «confused, prepared to tap-​out» sorta approach, you know, size it up… but after manhandling it, that taste of relief ensued as the burger basically melted in my mouth, first time experiencing such a delicate, yet manly beef patty. However, too much was going on with it, causing the burger itself to loose it’s balance (the fricken thing was falling apart yo!) :(
Fries…delicious, just wish they would give you more than 7… yes, I counted, 7 (but they were decent sized potato wedges, well-​salted, well-​cooked, crispy on the outside and heaven on the inside! Burger and Fries: ~1,500 yen (with tax) (yep, a $ 15.00 burger… not the most expensive burger I’ve eaten in Japan, but definitely the best tasting)
Beer…Regular sized beer that was equivalent to a «state-​side» small beer, good nonetheless…~700 yen (with tax)
Atmosphere: Really nice establishment, staff were friendly, understood English (a bit, or at least they were just good at smiling and nodding north to south).
Overall: 9.6 out of 10. If my burger didn’t fall apart from pure juicy deliciousness, and if there was a pinch more (big lumberjack finger pinch) salt, it would definitely get a 9.9 (I rarely give out 10’s)
Well worth the trip if you’re in the Tokyo Area!

This is definitely one of the top burger restaurants in Tokyo.
There have been quite a few burger restaurants opening up the last few years, and many of them are ok, with very few of them rising way beyond the «standard». The burger here was one of the first that I felt went above the usual fare. Closer to a burger that I would find at a decent burger joint back in the States, it definitely made my list of places I would come back to without a second thought.

My wife and I are on the hunt for the best burgers in Japan. We’ve had quite a few, including:
Blacow’s:
Brozures’:
E.A.T:
If you Google «The best hamburger in Tokyo», any list you see will undoubtedly have Blacows in it. By many accounts, this is the best burger that Tokyo has to offer.
The beef used by Blacows will be very unfamiliar to Americans. Essentially, Wagyu (和牛) literally means Japanese cow and refers to several breeds of Japanese cattle which are genetically predisposed to intense marbling and produces a high percentage of fat compared to American breeds. This means more marbling than Angus (American) beef, but less … «fatty fat». Besides this, Wagyu beef is also comparatively higher quality and more expensive. There are 4 types of Wagyu beef: the famous Kobe, Mishima, Matsusaka, Ōmi, and Sanda beef.
BBQ sauce on Japanese burgers seems to be standard fare. Americans will find this extremely strange, but just like curry and many other things, the Japanese have taken something from a different culture, improved it, and made it entirely their own.
Compared to American BBQ sauce, Japanese BBQ sauce is much less sweet, much less tangy, and very understated. You hardly taste it at all. It’s subtle. It serves mostly to give a burger moistness and a very slight sweet /​smoky undertone. I like Japanese BBQ much more than American BBQ sauce.
The bacon is a fattier Canadian style hammy bacon rather than the crispy (or chewy) fatty, piggy, salty bacon we’re used to in the USA. Japanese bacon limps rather than crunches or chews. It’s Canadian bacon in taste and texture, but just a bit fattier. Most Americans would not like this style of bacon on their burger (I don’t like it at all), but here in Japan (and in Latin America) it’s everywhere, unfortunately.
The fries appeared to be fresh cut, but still, not much to write home about. A bit lackluster, unfortunately. The onion rings are sprinkled with spice, but they’re still somewhat boring and not worth the calories.
Honorable mention for the bun. Unlike in the USA, you can really taste the sesame seeds. They have a wonderful toasted sesame seed flavor. Additionally, the bun crust is delicious. It has a lovely sheen from being basted with egg-​white. The bun here is not empty calories. It really is an integral part of the burger.
High quality burgers in Japan are definitely formulaic. They are impressive burgers. Delicious, great-​looking, obviously made with care and pride. Yet they still lack a certain … beefy hamburger quality that we’re used to in the USA. Not that we’d be disappointed! They are gourmet, for sure! And it would be fair to say higher quality than American burgers. Yet they aren’t the same, and I find that I miss the raw beefiness of a good ol’ fashioned American burger. Perhaps it would be fair to say that these burgers are over-​engineered.
We’ve had many, many, many burgers in Tokyo. Blacows was definitely one of the best, but not *the* best. I prefer the burger at E.A.T. diner or Fellows, for example. Still, if you go here, you can’t go wrong. It is a magnificent burger!