The only thing on the menu is a set meal of raw egg on rice for 890 yen. The small, hard-shelled red eggs are so good that when you crack them onto your plate, the plump yolk dances. The eggs and rice are all-you-can-eat, and one person can easily eat two or three eggs. Some big eaters can even eat double digits.

The "Tamago Kake Gohan Teishoku" (egg on rice set meal) is an all-you-can-eat meal of eggs and rice. For groups, a mountain of eggs is served.

In addition to miso soup, fried chicken, and kombu tsukudani, you can also purchase additional items such as shichimi paste and Korean nori seaweed. Benten no Sato is located in the mountains of Nishi Betsuin-cho, Kameoka City, Kyoto Prefecture, near the border with Osaka Prefecture. On weekends, the restaurant is so crowded that there are long queues of tourists.

Manager Takahashi chats with Mr. Aso (left), who works at a direct sale store that wholesales eggs from Mizuho Farm. Many customers who try the egg-on-rice and like it so much that they end up buying eggs at the direct sale store next door (Nishi Betsuincho, Kameoka City, Kyoto Prefecture).

Their pride is of course the eggs. The restaurant is adjacent to the Nishi Betsuin store of the egg-laying chicken farm Mizuho Farm (Kyoto Prefecture), and serves "folic acid eggs" produced at the same farm, which are high in folic acid. "They don't have a fishy smell, and the yolk has a strong richness and sweetness, so they're perfect for raw egg on rice," says store manager Kimiko Takashima (59 years old).

Atsushi Aso (58 years old), manager of the direct sales store, explains, "We sell fresh eggs that were laid the day before. We choose small eggs with a low ratio of whites so that customers can fully enjoy the taste of the yolk."

Apart from eggs, the store also focuses on local ingredients. For soy sauce, they use Takeoka Shoyu (Shoyu) (Honbai-cho, Kameoka City), and for miso soup, they use black soybean miso from Katayama Shoten (Ooi-cho, Kameoka City). They also prioritize rice produced in Kameoka.

In fact, the store was closed for about a year. The man who ran the store passed away, and it closed in August 2022. In response to requests to reopen, Mizuho Farm was looking for a takeover, and Zensho (Nishikyo-ku, Kyoto City), which aims to solve local issues through food, responded, and it reopened in July 2023. Manager Takashima, who lives in the neighboring town of Higashi Betsuin, emphasizes, "I want to make this a store that people from far away can visit, and that will lead to the revitalization of the Betsuin area."

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【Benten no Sato】 8 Kamiji Mitarai, Nishibetsuin-cho, Kameoka-shi, Kyoto. Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 11am to 2pm. Business days may change depending on public holidays. For inquiries, please contact the adjacent Mizuho Farm Direct Sales Center, Nishibetsuin Store, on 0771 (27) 7118.