Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo (10 page)

The brain of a Tokyoite,
even a short-term visitor, is an twisted mass of three types of noodles: ramen, soba, and udon.

Ramen freaks congregate online to debate noodle texture, toppings, the calibration of fat and salt and seasonings. There is plenty of one-upsmanship in ramen but little in the way of tedious debates about authenticity (at least, not in English). If someone is making a Thai green curry ramen—and someone is—ramen
otaku
will try it and blog about it.

Soba appeals to aesthetes. Ramen is food of the people, as much so in Japan as in any college dorm, and a ramen shop charges more than $10 at its peril. Soba is haute cuisine, and the ultimate soba dish, zaru soba
,
is precisely the opposite of green curry ramen. It’s a tangle of noodles served on a wicker basket. That’s it. Maybe some dipping sauce, if the nuttiness of the hand-milled buckwheat isn’t enough for you philistines. Soba people don’t blog; they communicate through contemplative furrowed brows.

And udon? I don’t have a stereotype about udon fans, because udon, at least in Tokyo, is the underappreciated Third Noodle. Ramen is popular throughout Japan, and soba is native to the Kantō region, the Tokyo area.

The chubby, chewy udon noodle hails from Kagawa prefecture on the island of Shikoku, the smallest and least populous of Japan’s four main islands. Udon is hugely popular everywhere—don’t get me wrong—but it doesn’t provoke the same idolatry and veneration in Tokyo, just satisfied slurping and chewing.

On its home turf, in Shikoku, however, the Japan Times reports:

Created by a local designer, Udon No is a character devised as having woken up one morning to find its head filled with udon noodles instead of a brain. It was adopted as the “official ambassador” of an udon producers’ association in Takamatsu, the prefectural capital.

“I am the same (as the character) in that the only thing in my brain is udon,” said Shigeki Omine, chairman of the association.

Shigeki-san, you and I should hang. Udon is Iris’s and my favorite of the three noodles, and I think in part it’s because of its accessibility. Udon has regional specialties and variations, to be sure (and the Udon Museum in Kyoto is devoted to them), but you don't need to learn anything about them to enjoy a simple, comforting, and inexpensive bowl of udon.

On our first trip to Japan, Iris and I visited the Fushimi Inari Taisha, the Kyoto shrine known for its thousands of red wooden gates (
torii
) marching up and down a hill. These gates appeared in the movie
Memoirs of a Geisha
and on the cover of countless guidebooks. In person, they’re not the least bit disappointing, because the reality dispels any suspicion that someone Photoshopped in most of the gates. You can hike for an hour, literally, through tunnels of torii, and around gate 6237 or so, when hunger begins gnawing, you come upon an udon shack. If the witch from Hansel and Gretel moved to Japan, she’d totally build an udon shack.

The menu is simple: udon in broth, udon in broth with fried tofu...actually, that’s all I remember, because udon in broth with fried tofu,
kitsune udon,
is what we were after. The Japanese contend that foxes (
kitsune
) are really into fried tofu. The tofu isn’t crispy; it’s
aburaage,
the same soft, chewy tofu pockets used to house rice in inarizushi.

If you’re making kitsune udon at home, you buy frozen tofu pockets and simmer them in soy sauce and mirin before laying them atop a steaming bowl of udon in a broth made from dashi, soy sauce, and mirin. Garnish with a few scallions, if you like, and that’s the dish.

So Iris and I shared a bowl of kitsune udon. Because she was six, many noodles ended up on the floor. (What was my excuse, then?) The tofu acts as a sponge, absorbing broth, mingling the broth with its simmer sauce, and injecting it back into your mouth as you chew. It’s similar to the effect of biting into a morel mushroom.

Fortified with udon, we trekked back down the mountain, pausing to stick our fingers into a stream running alongside a steep staircase and to take many touristy photos.

That was our temple udon experience, but udon in Tokyo serves much the same function. You’ve been lost among seductive streets and alleys for too long, and it’s time for lunch. What to eat? Udon. It will be cheap, good, and unchallenging. In fact, my single favorite dish of our entire Tokyo summer was served at an udon chain restaurant.

Hanamaru Udon is a popular noodle chain with many locations throughout Japan, including one on Nakano-dōri near our apartment. It was, I suspect, the inspiration for the Wagamama noodle shops in England. The Nakano location is at the bottom of a steep, narrow staircase and through a door into a pleasant mess hall with a counter up front and long communal tables.

The menu features a bunch of classic udon dishes like kitsune, on-tama (with a soft-boiled egg), and Iris’s favorite,
kake udon
, which is noodles in broth and nothing else, the Japanese equivalent of buttered noodles with Parmesan from the kid’s menu. Fast-food udon is as cheap as American fast food and immeasurably tastier: Iris’s small kake udon cost less than $1.50. When she ordered it, the cook picked up a bowl, added hot noodles, and then filled it with broth from the spigot of a large dispenser. (In the dining area was a dispenser for complimentary
genmaicha
tea and another that emitted ice and water simultaneously through the same orifice, which Iris and I could not stop playing with.)

Every noodle bowl at Hanamaru is available in three sizes; the large is sized for sharing or sumo wrestlers. That said, I frequently saw Guinness-worthy feats of eating in Tokyo. This is a stereotype more closely associated with America, I know, and it’s true that food in Tokyo was served in less gargantuan proportions than back home. It was fascinating but not unusual, however, when the grandmotherly woman across from me one afternoon at Hanamaru Udon ordered a huge combination meal with a big noodle bowl, a serving of curry rice, and a few pieces of tempura—a lunch I could not have finished at gunpoint. She ate everything patiently and neatly. It was kind of beautiful.

Now, the greatest dish of summer: spicy
sudachi
udon.

Japan grows a Destiny’s Child-like trio of small, yummy citrus fruits:
yuzu, kabosu,
and sudachi. Yuzu is the only one widely (and not that widely) known outside of Japan. All are sour and taste like successive pulsating flavor waves of lime, lemon, and mandarin orange. Sudachi are adorably tiny and round, like key limes.

Spicy sudachi udon is a bowl of cold udon topped with grated daikon, sliced negi, minced spicy green chile (cooked by steaming or boiling, I think), and a halved sudachi for liberal squeezing. Nothing I ate in the course of a month in Tokyo tasted more Japanese or was a more perfect antidote to Tokyo’s appalling summer weather. As much as I love hot udon (with fried tofu, or curry, or pork and miso, or stir-fried with chicken and cabbage and fish flakes), thick noodles achieve their chewiest inner perfection when served cold.

I ate this dish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, though not on the same day. I loved it so much, I did my best to recreate it at home. Here is the only recipe in this book:

SPICY KEY LIME UDON

Adapted from Hanamaru Udon

Serves 2

Mentsuyu
is a sauce base used in a variety of noodle dishes. You can make it at home, but since you’re probably going to a Japanese grocery anyway for other ingredients, you can buy it premade, in the soy sauce or dried noodle aisle. It’s usually sold in a milk carton. If you want to make mentsuyu, I recommend the recipe at
japanesecooking101.com
, but any recipe you find online should be fine. If you like less spice, remove the seeds and ribs from the jalapeño before mincing.

1 Anaheim chile

1 jalapeño chile

Salt

2 blocks frozen udon (1 pound total)

1/4 cup grated daikon

1/2 cup sliced negi (or 1/4 cup sliced scallions)

6 tablespoons mentsuyu

2 key limes, halved

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil.
   
2. While water is heating, roast the chiles under the broiler, 5 minutes per side, or carefully over a gas flame, until the skins blacken. Let the chiles cool on a plate for ten minutes, and then discard the stem, seeds, and ribs, and skin of the Anaheim chile; discard the stem and skin of the jalapeño. Mince the chiles and combine, seasoning lightly with salt.
   
3. Add the blocks of frozen udon to the boiling water (no need to thaw the udon before boiling), return to a boil, and boil 1 minute, stirring frequently to loosen the noodle mass. Drain and rinse well with cold water.
   
4. Divide the noodles between two large soup bowls. Top each bowl with half the daikon, chile mixture, and negi, arranging the toppings in three distinct mounds. Pour 3 tablespoons mentsuyu into each bowl. Serve with key limes; squeeze the lime halves over the noodles and stir everything together well before eating.
   

Eventually I worked up the courage to join the salarymen (and occasional woman) for breakfast at the nonchain noodle stand across from Nakano Station. The noodle stand has a yellow awning reading
INAKA SOBA UDON
. I’m not sure whether Inaka (“country-style”) is the name of the place or just a description of the fare.

The noodle place can accommodate six diners, standing room only. You wait for a spot to open up at the counter, poke your head under the
noren,
and order fast. It’s not a place you walk into; you’re literally standing on the street while you eat. I scouted the joint for several days, trying to read snippets of the menu as I walked past, because I didn’t want to be the stammering foreigner holding up the line, or, worse, the self-important foodie who wants to discuss every aspect of the menu while everyone else is just trying to get to work.

Now that I’ve had my breakfast, I can tell you how it’s done. You will be shocked to learn that Inaka Soba Udon serves two dishes: soba and udon. You call out your noodle of choice, which is quickly refreshed in hot water and tossed into a pottery bowl, where it gets a ladle of noodle broth—heavy on the soy sauce—and a handful of sliced negi.

The trick is in the toppings. The menu at Inaka is just a list of potential additions to your noodle bowl. I took a quick look left and right, saw a kakiage (vegetable tempura cake) luxuriating in a neighboring bowl, and requested one for my soba, plus a raw egg. The serving process takes about ten seconds and is presided over by an old woman who I assume is the owner; she didn’t cook while I was there, but she takes the money and makes sure everything runs smoothly. You hand over the cash while the cook makes your noodles; that way you can run for the train as soon as you finish. My soup was 420 yen, about $5. Other popular toppings are kitsune and
chikuwa
, a sausagelike tube of fish paste which is tastier than it sounds.

My soba arrived steaming hot and fragrant. I haven’t figured out how to eat Japanese noodles anything like a native. When I slurp, it makes the wrong kind of noise, and I’m always biting off noodles and letting them drop back into the bowl, which is a no-no. Furthermore, I looked down the counter and noticed I was the only one accumulating a palette of broth droplets in a six-inch radius around my bowl, which the owner occasionally wiped away with a towel. The kakiage became reassuringly saturated with broth, and I broke my egg yolk and stirred the egg into the soup. My favorite part of the meal was lifting the bowl to my mouth and drinking the broth, rich from egg and tempura grease and noodle starch. It was sturdy enough to fortify me for several hours of intense writing.

That’s not a joke. Really! This was the first morning I didn’t find myself dreaming of Mister Donut around 9:30. I ate my soup as fast as I could but it wasn’t fast enough. The guy at the end of the counter who came in after me and, I was pleased to note, ordered the same thing I did, finished his soup before me and ordered a second bowl. The portions at Inaka are country-style. A second bowl would have killed me, but then, I was just walking a block to the Starbucks, not dashing for the Chūō Rapid and a day of meetings and pie charts and, uh, whatever it is businesspeople do.

For more hands-on udon experience, all three of us signed up for an udon-making class with Elizabeth Andoh. Actually, “hands-on” is a misnomer, because udon dough is too stiff to knead with your hands. Home udon-making, it turns out, has something in common with traditional winemaking.

Andoh is the Julia Child or Diana Kennedy of Japanese food. Originally a New Yorker, she married an executive at the Takashimaya department store decades ago and found her calling writing cookbooks and teaching classes about the food of her adopted home. She reminds me a lot of my mother and other members of my very New York Jewish family: never at a loss for words, convinced that there is a right way to do something, and why would you bother with any other way?

The udon class was for kids and parents, and the kids who showed up included a studious Canadian teenager, a boy Iris’s age from the Philippines, and a couple of lively American boys. We nibbled on rice crackers and udon toppings (the kids were especially interested in tasting chikuwa, the fish sausage, which doesn’t taste like much but slices into cool rings that you can slip onto fingertips like olives). Andoh walked us through making homemade dashi with kelp and bonito flakes, and then the kids stirred together whole wheat flour, water, and salt for udon dough.

The dough went into Ziploc bags and the kids stomped it into submission with stocking feet. If you’re looking for a way to bring together children of various ages and cultures, put them to work stomping on something. Alternatively, slip them parental smartphones during a break. Iris and the Filipino kid took turns playing a game called Jetpack Joyride, and each seemed surprised that the other was familiar with the game.

Iris was put in charge of grating daikon, and she went at it with gusto, shaving down a thick radish stalk into smooth
oroshi
on a flat, circular grater. The kids rolled out and sliced their noodle dough, and we ate cold udon and hot udon. Kid-made udon noodles are especially chubby and rustic, varying in thickness and length, somewhere between noodles and spätzle. The whole wheat flour married well with the sauce, which was our homemade dashi plus soy sauce, sake, and mirin. Each kid and adult selected a chopstick rest from Andoh’s massive collection (Iris took a sumo wrestler; I went with a chile pepper) and applied their choice of toppings: sesame seeds, negi, daikon, chikuwa. I chose some of everything.