Kani Koura Honten 甲羅本店 横須賀

Actually it's just called Koura Honten but I threw the crab (kani) in there since this is a place that is all about crab.

Large restaurant with parking

Kani Koura is easily reachable by a short car ride. A large parking lot provides plenty of free parking. The lot also serves Family Garden, Kalbi House, and Nigiri-icho Sushi. In typical Japanese efficiency, there are sometimes three parking attendants in the lot helping you find a spot. They do their job quite well. See the blog map for exact location.

starter salad w/crab

Kani Koura specializes in set meals in which just about all plates include crab. The set meals come in all sizes and price points. I would classify it as a slightly upscale restaurant, but one where you can still wear your comfortable jeans and where they provide good friendly service. This is Japanese style crab mind you - not American style. You're not going to get all you can eat crab legs here. What you'll get is many small but well presented plates. I've never left hungry though - as the number of plates is good and the variety of dishes keeps it interesting.

Kanji sidebar for 甲羅本店:

Starting with with Hon-ten 本店 - We've seen this before in Banzai Honten. Honten means "main store" or flagship store. Ten 店　by itself means store and hon 本 by itself has many meanings such as book, main, or real. When you're looking for wasabi paste out in town you'll see 本わさび or hon-wasabi, meaning it's the real stuff and not the horseradish imitation.
On the front end you have kou 甲which means armor. It kind of looks like a shield right? And it makes sense that it is part of the kanji for crab shell. In Learning and Remembering the Kanji (RTK) you'll also remember this as "roots" when it's an element of another kanji. It shows up in Kanji like "push" 押 which you see on doors just about everyday, "headland" 岬 which you could see if you live down by Misaki 三岬, and "insert" 挿 which you'll often see on vending machines or parking meters for where you insert your coins.
扌is the hand radical but in RTK you'll learn it as the "finger" primitive. It shows up in many, many, Kanji. So for completeness lets look at push, insert, and headland.

"Push" is made up of "finger" and "roots." A story to remember this might be "After you use your finger to put the root into the ground, you'll need to push the dirt back around it."

"Insert" is made up of "finger," "thousand"　千, and "root." So a story for this could be "After planting a thousand of these roots by hand, I wish I had a machine which would insert them for me.

Headlands start at the root of all mountains 山.

This one is more complex ...."ra" 羅 appears at the end of "koura" and by itself means gauze. It's made up of the kanji elements eye, thread, and turkey. Can you come up with your own story to make "gauze"?

End sidebar.

The only problem we've ever had here was the arrival of some raw crab for one of the courses - of which we are not too fond. One time they understood that we did not like it and happily brought it back to the kitchen to steam it. On another visit though we did not have the American to Japanese understanding and the raw crab remained on our table. Not the end of the world though since part of the course was a candle fueled grill to cook up some crab legs. So we simply cooked it up on the grill.

The set meals range in cost from under $20 to around $100. Although the menu is not in English, the photos of the set meals are good enough to see what you are getting.

Kani Koura is a chain restaurant with quite a few locations. Here is a link to the Yokosuka restaurant where you can see some additional photos, menu, and hours.