In Ueno
Address Taito-ku, Ueno 6-8-19 Ueno Matsushima Bldg B1 Fl. Opening hours 12:00 PM to 5 AM. Closed on Sundays Map - Yes Telephone - 5807-1761 Menu - In Japanese, Chinese and Korean CC - No

In Okubo
Address Shinjuku-ku, Hyakunincho 1-7-10 Hosono Bldg 2Fl Opening hours 12:00 PM to 3 AM. Closed on Sundays Map - Yes Telephone - 5338-6918 Menu - In Japanese, Chinese and Korean CC - No

My old friend Masami is a jack of many trades.
Not being afraid of hard work, over the years he has turned himself in a sort of Renaissance man with different and diverging interests.
A computer power user at home as much with motherboards as with Adobe Illustrator, a Trados technical translator, a very expert cook, but first of all a true anarchist, to make ends meet at the moment he is cooking ramen in a shop in Ueno, where he heard from his Chinese boss about a nearby restaurant that serves dog meat.
Since I am curious by nature, I decided to go there in the instant he told me. And since going to eat dog with my only true love was out of question (she is a real lady), I had to content myself with Masami's company.
Had I known it's not a Chinese restaurant, as I had thought, but a Korean restaurant, I probably wouln't have gone: the absence of Korean restaurants in this site is no coincidence.
But I did, and that's good, because it isn't simply a Korean restaurant, but rather a Korean-Chinese one, that is one of the Ethnic Korean minority in China.
I am pleased to say Senriko turned out to be very nice and original regardless of dog meat. I must have been the first white devil they had seen in a while, because some customers just couldn't hide their surprise. The cute waitress was nonetheless impeccably polite and helpful.
The way you eat here is unusual and deserves a couple of words: the lion's share of the menu is made of meat (beef, pork, mutton or chicken as you like).
The base order unit is the skewer, prices being around 250 - 350 yen each.
To grill the stuff, you get your own "konro", a conical terracotta oven full of hot wood coals, over which there's a two tiered thing. The lower one is to cook the skewered meat, the upper one to keep it warm while you eat something else.
You receive also two small dishes containing each a different powdery spice to dip your skewers in, one yellow and one red. Against all my expectations, they weren't hot at all. And the dog?
It was the only disappointing moment of the evening. You can have just the skin, which we were told is the part men usually like, just the meat as all good girls do, or both, as experimenters of good pedigree like me prefer. Either one looked and tasted like pork, was rather leathery and absolutely uninteresting.
The rest of the meal was good, but less of an adventure and more Chinese than Korean: we had some excellent Wan Tan soup, fried rice, khimchi and some fried vegetables. All in all, a pleasant variation on the Yakiniku theme that won't disappoint the carnivores.
It goes without saying that although people here are friendly, English is of no use whatsoever: you must know Korean, Chinese or Japanese.