Address - No Opening hours - Open from 6:00 until 11:00 Booking is mandatory Food must be ordered in sets from 2500 to 4000 yen Map - See directions Telephone - 3371-3750 Menu - In Japanese CC - Amex

At long last, the truth about Pao. The tent has nothing to do with the yurts of Mongolia: it comes from Northern Afghanistan. What I find most amusing is the fact that apparently all these reviews, articles, and guides have been quoting each other for years without anybody ever visiting the restaurant. Otherwise they would have not have been all so consistent in describing the tent as a Mongolian yurt.

First annoying factor: Booking is mandatory
Second annoying factor: food must be ordered in sets from 2500 to 4000 yen

Pao is worth visiting though if nothing else to take a look at the tent (which incidentally is invisible from the outside: a building has been built around it). It is a gorgeous piece of work with a great atmosphere. The name of the restaurant itself, Pao, means (besides many other things) tent in Chinese. This multicultural approach seems to be the mindset of the folks there: sitting in an Afghani tent, you listen to Kurdish, Indian, Pashtun, and Afghani music while eating food from the same peoples. The guys do not seem to be in it for the money: there were just eight of us, but the owners, who are young hippie-looking Japanese, sent away everybody who came to their door saying the place was full.
Food is good, at times very good, always interesting; but here we come to the huge, irreparable, tragic problem with Pao: portions are diminutive, little more than snacks, so much that four of us, me included, went straight from Pao to another restaurant to eat something. A 3000 yen meal includes just some excellent salad, two skewers of meat, one samosa, and a chapati with some meat and vegetables in it. So, while too interesting to be given right away a reject slip, Pao is not a restaurant I can light-heartedly recommend. What you get is good, but you pay dearly for it.

Directions
Assuming you are arriving with the Chuo Line from Shinjuku, get out of Higashi Nakano Station from the left exit on the Nakano end of the platform, go straight, after 100m cross the main street, walk 100 m more and you will find Pao on your left.