It likely will take two, maybe three, visits before Shin Yamamoto recognizes you as a familiar face. By the fourth stop, he probably will remember your name if you shared it. Five times, and he will know what dish you like; by the 10th time, he will offer you something special or wonder why you haven’t tried this “good one.”
“Here, you might like this?” slyly asks the general manager at Gohan-Ya, a tiny space in the strip mall just off the exit in West Vail, a blip so unassuming and plain you’d be tempted to suspect the casual, reasonably priced spot — owner Kazue Osaki also runs the sushi bar Osaki’s in Vail Village — is another chain link like the Subway next door.
Yamamoto pushes a large black plastic bowl toward you with a grin so big you might try fried spiders if he handed them over with that friendly smile, but instead he is offering sesame chicken, grease-free and spicy, no cloying sticky- sweetness, but clean flavors. The sauce looks thick but turns out to be slippery and also sharply sour, the meat quickly fried and crackly skinned, with a few flash-fried vegetables on the side that have retained their bright color and crunch.
It’s almost good enough to take you off your favorites, but if you’re like the other regulars — most of them obviously locals with whom Yamamoto jokes and inquires of kids’ soccer games and town meetings and was anyone hurt in that accident? — there are Gohan-Ya dishes that you must have. The yakiniku, for one, for the ginger that makes the spicy soy sauce sing, and also the dreamy shrimp tempura, because the kitchen here knows how to get in and out of the oil fast.
And it’s the quickness with which one can get in and out of Gohan-Ya (the name means “house,” or “ya,” of “light cuisine,” which is the “gohan”) that clearly draws folks to the 3-year-old eatery. Truckers leap out of their still-humming cabs just off the interstate to pick up steaming bowls of yaki-udon and gyoza and mountain bikers roll in sweaty and starving to draw from an ice-cold Pellegrino and talk over their ride with Yamamoto as they snag a just-packaged container of sushi rolls and a fresh seaweed salad.
Expecting to take your food with you is a good idea, because Gohan-Ya sports only a handful of slightly banged-up tables that fill up quickly during mealtimes (order at the counter and wait for the food to be delivered). And for a resort town, this is a delightfully low-key setup. The main design item here would be T-shirts with the word “Vail” in Japanese stapled to the walls.
But there’s Yamamoto’s grin, and that’s all the decoration you need.
Gohan-Ya
Asian lunch and dinner. Dining room hours are 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Saturday. 2121 N. Frontage Road W., Vail, 970-476-7570
