Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo (12 page)

Japan isn’t meat-crazed in the
same way as the USA, but when the Japanese want meat, they want it as marbled as the Parthenon. The most popular topping for ramen is pork belly, streaked with fat, rolled up like pancetta and braised for hours in pork broth until fall-apart tender, then sliced into a perfect round.

One day, Iris and I took the train to Kichijōji, a hip neighborhood in western Tokyo, in search of lunch at Satou Steakhouse. Because Satou serves high-quality meat at reasonable prices, there’s often a line, and when we arrived, sure enough, there was a line. Standing in line is something of a national sport in Japan, and people do it with fortitude and a smile. This line, furthermore, was in a lively shopping arcade and adjacent to many other meat-oriented restaurants, which seemed like a good business plan. Iris read
Anne of Green Gables
while we queued.

One of the most frustrating aspects of being linguistically challenged is never knowing when you’re in the wrong line. We were in the wrong line. These folks were waiting to get their hands on menchikatsu, an artisan-quality version of the panko-breaded hamburger patty popular at convenience stores. Luckily, it only took us fifteen minutes to figure this out. There was almost no line at the restaurant, up a steep flight more ladder than staircase. The lunch menu had only three options, all of them steak.

Every seat at the steakhouse has a view of the griddle, where intense cooks fret over each piece of meat, seasoning it well with salt and pepper and occasionally covering the steak with a copper lid. I hesitate to even bring this up, but if you’ve been to Benihana, subtract the knife-juggling theatrics and you understand the basic idea of a Japanese
teppanyaki
steakhouse. The cooks cut your steak into chopstick-friendly cubes and serve it alongside a big pile of sauteed bean sprouts, moistened with the meat juices. Iris wasn’t interested in the bean sprouts, which was great, because I couldn’t stop eating them.

The steak, from seasoning to flavor to presentation to portion size, was perfect. Rather than aiming for a deeply charred crust, the cooks at Satou concentrate on juiciness and texture throughout.

And they do it with cuts of meat not worth eating in America. Iris and I were eating round steak, which in the U.S. is always lean, tough, and meant for the grinder at best. Here, though, the meat is so thoroughly marbled, even these lesser steaks become great.

“If I were a vegetarian, this piece of steak would make me start eating meat,” said Iris, poking at a particularly rare chunk with her chopstick.

On another day, we walked through Harajuku and onto Omotesandō-dōri, a high-fashion shopping street lined with shops I’d never heard of, selling clothes that wouldn’t fit me, at prices I couldn’t afford.

We turned onto a residential street near the Omotesando Hills shopping mall and stepped into a tonkatsu restaurant called Maisen. The menu promised pork tender enough to cut with chopsticks, which struck me as a polite way to say, “Fork-tender? Nice try, Americans.”

Tonkatsu restaurants, even cheap fast-food ones, offer a choice of
hire
(“fillet”) or
rosu
(“roast”) pork. Hire is leaner; rosu is fattier. At fancier tonkatsu places, like this one, there is also a choice of various heirloom and otherwise fancy pork breeds, such as kurobuta, Spanish Iberico, or Tokyo-X, a breed developed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Livestock Experiment Station, which is a real thing. Iris and I just ordered the basic rosu. Like all tonkatsu, it’s sliced into strips and presented on a small metal rack so the underside doesn’t get soggy. The first thing we did, naturally, was try to cut the meat with chopsticks. We succeeded. The pork was juicy, the coating well-seasoned and fried to crispness.

The tonkatsu came with pickles, miso soup, rice, house-made tonkatsu sauce, and a mound of thinly shredded cabbage—not napa cabbage but the same sturdy green cabbage sold at every American supermarket. These are all common accompaniments to tonkatsu, but the cabbage is considered mandatory, and a waiter came around frequently with a pair of tongs and a giant platter of cabbage, ready to replenish our stock, and seemed slightly disappointed that nobody had finished their cruciferous Everest. Cabbage Replenisher would be a great Japanese Halloween costume; everyone would recognize it immediately. (“Cabbage replenisher” is also super-fun to sing in a guttural death metal voice.)

If you enjoy pork and have never made tonkatsu, I encourage you to give it a try. It’s easy to make at home and doesn’t require deep-frying. Tonkatsu shallow-fried in half an inch of oil is just as good. A dinner of tonkatsu, short-grain rice, store-bought Japanese pickles, and shredded cabbage is a very Tokyo thing.

It’s disappointing but inevitable that
one serving of
chanko nabe
(“knob-eh”) will not turn you into a sumo wrestler. At least, it didn’t work for me.

Ryōgoku is Tokyo’s sumo district. The country’s foremost sumo stadium is here, its appetite for wrestling talent fed by neighboring sumo training stables—a term I did not make up and which seems unfair to sumo wrestlers, who are stronger than draft horses.

We were in Ryōgoku to meet our friends Wade (dad) and Joseph (four-year-old) at the Edo-Tokyo Museum, an imposing modern structure that looks sort of like an AT-AT from
The Empire Strikes Back.
At any moment, the building could spring to life and tromp westward, modern Tokyo trampled by historic Tokyo. Since the history of Tokyo is substantially the history of things falling down and catching fire, this wouldn’t be so surprising. Iris and I admired a ten-foot-tall replica of the Twelve Stories, an early skyscraper built in Asakusa in 1890. It was an instant hit among locals and a symbol of the neighborhood until it died young like a movie idol, toppled by the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923.

The Edo-Tokyo Museum thoughtfully provides small, hands-on metal models of the Twelve Stories and other structures for its visually impaired patrons. Less thoughtfully, the museum uses the phrase, referring to 1941, “The Pacific War broke out that fall.” Gosh, how’d that happen?

After getting our fill of Tokyo history, we headed down the street to fill up sumo-style. Chanko nabe, like all hot pot dishes, is cooked on the tabletop and eaten communally, with diners transferring choice bits from the hot pot to their own small bowls. The genuine sumo version is a humble chicken and vegetable stew. The use of chicken is part nutrition and part superstition: chickens walk on two feet, and a wrestler knocked off his feet loses the sumo match.

At the eight-story chanko house across from Ryōgoku Station, it’s a little more upscale. You’ll find pork belly, shrimp, scallops, meatballs, fish balls, shiitake mushrooms, and two kinds of tofu in the nabe. We ordered hot pot for two, guessing correctly that this would serve three adults and two children.

It was a 90-degree day, and eating a steaming hot pot on such a day sounds like following a sign reading
WELCOME TO HELL—VISIT OUR NEW BASEMENT!
On the fourth floor of an air-conditioned restaurant, however, with a view of the SkyTree and the Sobu line trains streaming in and out of Ryōgoku Station, chanko is fine any day. The pot arrived with all the ingredients inside except for the pork meatballs, which came in the form of seasoned raw ground pork in an abalone shell. With a spoon, our waiter formed a small ball and dropped it into the shōyu- and dashi-based broth, which was beginning to bubble. He let Iris make the final meatball, which she immediately became attached to, warning the rest of us to keep our chopsticks off her meatball.

The best part of chanko nabe is near the end, when the best bits are long gone and the pot contains an intense stock, heavily reduced and a little greasy, having extracted flavor from everything that came before. At this point, it’s common to add rice or noodles to the pot, but I prefer to just sip the broth from my bowl. “If you’re a real sumo wrestler, are you allowed to just pick up the nabe and slurp the soup right out of it?” I asked.

“If you’re a sumo wrestler, you can do whatever you want,” replied Iris. “And if someone doesn’t like it, squash goes the person.”

Later, we came home and turned on the TV. There was a sumo tournament going on in Nagoya, and it played in sports bars across Japan and in our apartment in Nakano. Iris had never seen sumo before, and now she’s hooked. I warned her that sumo matches usually last only seconds. She was skeptical. In the very first match we watched, one wrestler charged at the other and fell over. The match was over in
less than half a second.
Actually, what sport could be more perfect for the attention span of a young child?

These days, a lot of sumo wrestlers are Eastern European bruisers, and at one point we watched an Estonian face off against a Bulgarian. “I’m rooting for the big chubby guy,” I told Iris.

“Which one is that?” she asked, then realized she’d been had. We quickly agreed that I would root for the Estonian on the basis of my sliver of Estonian heritage, and she would root for the Bulgarian on the basis that she likes that Bulgarian-style yogurt. It turned out later that the Bulgarian wrestler is actually sponsored by the yogurt brand, and he parades around solemnly in a ceremonial skirt with the Bulgaria Yogurt logo between matches.

I don’t remember who won, but I do remember explaining to Iris that if a wrestler’s belt falls off, he automatically loses the match.

“I
really
want to see that happen,” said Iris.

I
really
don’t.

At one point in the history of Japanese food in America, sukiyaki filled the role that sushi plays today as the one Japanese dish that everyone has heard of and which we assume Japanese people eat all the time.

In 1963, Kyu Sakamoto recorded a ballad called, in Japanese, “I Walk Looking Up.” He’s looking up so people won’t see his tears. The physics are debatable, but the melody was universal, and the song became the first Billboard number one hit in a foreign language.

The song, however, wasn’t released in the U.S. under its original Japanese title. It was given the Ellis Island treatment, renamed “Sukiyaki” under the assumption that if listeners were familiar with any Japanese word in 1963, it would be this one.

Today, sukiyaki still has a regrettable food–era whiff to it, at least in the U.S., where open-minded eaters gathered for sukiyaki parties before the era of homemade sushi rolls. In Japan, however, sukiyaki is a beloved special-occasion dish. Good sukiyaki restaurants are fancy and expensive. The dish is meant to celebrate the best-quality ingredients, especially beef, and good beef is not cheap. It’s easy to spend over $100 per person for sukiyaki, and most restaurants let you choose among multiple grades of beef. The lowest grade will likely be more marbled than anything you’ve seen before. It’s the meat equivalent of the drink sizes at Starbucks: our lowest grade is A+, sir.

Before I say another positive word about sukiyaki, however, I should tell you about what Iris calls the Sukiyaki Disaster.

It was 2010, and Iris and I were in Kyoto. After exploring the geisha district and trying and failing to find the famous stepping stones across the Kamo River, we were ready for something to eat, so we walked into this impossibly skinny alleyway parallel to the river and lined with restaurants and other nightlife. We were confronted immediately by a plastic sukiyaki and
shabu-shabu
display. Shabu-shabu is sukiyaki’s ascetic cousin, beef and vegetables cooked in a nearly flavorless broth and dipped in ponzu or another flavorful dipping sauce. The traditional dipping sauce for sukiyaki is...well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Sukiyaki?” asked the woman at the counter. “Fifth floor.” We went up in a tiny elevator, which let us out into a tatami room overlooking the river. Perfect. We ordered sukiyaki, and the waitress asked if we wanted egg. Sure, I said. The dipping sauce for sukiyaki, you see, is a beaten raw egg. I quite enjoy my sukiyaki this way; you pluck a boiling hot chunk of meat or cabbage or tofu from the bubbling sauce, dunk it briefly in egg, and instantly the food is cool enough to eat and gains the slippery texture of barely-cooked egg. It’s like making a runny omelet in miniature with each bite. Japan has no fear of raw eggs, and rice bowl meals are often topped with sweet
donburi
sauce, which is like scrambled eggs seasoned with soy sauce and mirin and pulled from the heat early enough that even a French person would call it undercooked. Once you mix the egg with hot rice, however, wow. I’d better get back to the story.

I expected the waitress to present us each a bowl of egg and let us do the rest. Instead, she cooked all the meat, extracted it from the pot, and divided it between our two bowls of egg, so we each had a pile of delicious beef, completely soaked in raw egg. Iris looked at me as if she’d just seen her favorite stuffed animal set on fire. Now I know what Kyu Sakamoto was crying about. So I gobbled up the sukiyaki, paid the bill, and we went next door to a terrific bar specializing in yakitori. While we ate grilled chicken wings, skewered thigh meat with negi, and shishitō peppers, I promised Iris that we wouldn’t go to any more sukiyaki restaurants on that trip. I promised myself that I’d find us a non-catastrophic sukiyaki experience if we ever returned to Japan.

Fast-forward to 2012, to Asakusa Imahan, a 110-year-old sukiyaki restaurant near the restaurant supply district of Kappabashi-dōri. We shucked our shoes and sat in the first floor tatami room. As we got comfortable, our waitress turned our shoes 180 degrees so they’d be in the right orientation to put back on when we left. We ate three tiny, geometrically engineered appetizers, including a perfect cube of kabocha squash-flavored fish cake and an octopus “salad” consisting of one tiny piece of octopus brushed with a plum dressing. Then the waitress uncovered and lit the burner in the center of the table and set a shallow cast-iron pan on top. She poured a thin layer of sauce from a pitcher. Sukiyaki is all about the sauce, a mixture of soy sauce, mirin, sake, and sugar. It is frankly sweet. Usually I’m a tiresome person who complains about overly sweet food, but where soy sauce is involved, I make an exception, because soy sauce and sugar were born to hang.

The waitress set down a platter of thin-sliced Wagyu beef, so marbled that it was nearly white. She asked if we wanted egg. This time I was prepared: only for me, thanks. Then she cooked us each a slice of beef. It was tender enough to cut with your tongue against the roof of your mouth. While we sighed over the meat, she began adding other ingredients to the pan: napa cabbage, tofu, wheat gluten (
fu
), fresh shiitake mushrooms,
shirataki
noodles, chrysanthemum leaves (
shungiku
), and, of course, negi. Suggested tourist slogan:
Tokyo: We put negi in it.

Then we were left to cook the rest of the meat and vegetables ourselves. I think we nailed it. (Actually, it’s impossible to do it wrong.) Like chanko nabe and all Japanese hot pots, sukiyaki gets better as the meal goes on, because the sauce becomes more concentrated and soaks up more flavor from the ingredients cooking in it. At home, Iris and I like to finish off a sukiyaki dinner by ladling the last of the broth into sake cups and toasting with it. If we’d tried this at the restaurant, I imagine it would have produced the world’s most uncomfortable nervous laughter, plus the inevitable splash of brown, oily sauce would have required an immediate change of clothes and a long bath.

Which is fine, actually, because Japan is one of the premier places in the world for a bath.