Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo (14 page)

If the waiter offers to prepare your okonomiyaki for you, take him up on the offer! It’s harder than it looks.

—Robb Satterwhite,
What’s What in Japanese
Restaurants

Our waiter did not offer.
But that was OK. I wanted to go out for okonomiyaki because I figured it would present the trip’s final bout of cultural disorientation, and okonomiyaki did not disappoint.

The okonomiyaki restaurant we chose was inexplicably called Penguin Village (in Japanese,
Penginmura
). The exterior featured a gaudy mural of a winking penguin holding a spatula, welcoming to shore a boat full of dead animals captained by another (live) penguin. Inside, the guy running the place was a tall, hunky Japanese surfer dude who looked like Patrick Swayze in
Point Break
, and the decor consisted of tributes to Japanese professional wrestlers. Japanese professional wrestling combines Hulk Hogan antics with Mexican wrestling masks and, as you might imagine, makes American professional wrestling look like chess.

Okonomiyaki, meanwhile, is to American pancakes what Japanese wrestling is to American wrestling. The basic batter contains flour and water, grated nagaimo (that big slimy yam again), eggs, and diced cabbage. You then augment this base by ordering little bits and nibbles a la carte to be added to the batter. We could not figure out the ordering system, but we listed off ingredients we liked and ended up with two pancakes’ worth of batter teeming with squid, octopus, sliced negi, and pickled ginger. The waiter dropped off a big bowl of unmixed pancake fixings and a couple of spatulas and assumed we would know how to do the rest. Every time we did something wrong, he sucked in his breath (a very common sound in Japan, at least in my presence) and intervened. Every time we did something right, he gave the thumbs-up and a Fonzie-like grunt of approval.

Now that I’ve cooked two okonomiyaki and am certified by the Vera Okonomiyaki Napoletana Association, I can tell you how it’s done. If your okonomiyaki has a large featured ingredient like strips of pork belly, set it aside to go on top; don’t mix it in. Stir everything else together really well. Pour some oil onto the griddle and smooth it out into a thin film with a spatula. Dump the batter onto the griddle and shape it into a pancake about 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick. If you have pork strips, lay them over the top now like you’re making bacon-wrapped meatloaf.

Now wait. And wait. And wait. If little bits of egg seep out around the edge of your pancake, coax them back in. It takes at least five minutes to cook the first side of an okonomiyaki. Maybe ten. Maybe thirty. If you’re not hungry enough to drink a tureen of raw batter, it’s not ready. Finally, when it’s brown on the bottom, slide two spatulas underneath and flip with confidence. Now wait again. When the center is set and the meat is crispy, cut it into wedges and serve with okonomiyaki sauce, mayo, nori, and fish flakes. If you haven’t had okonomiyaki sauce, it’s a lot like takoyaki sauce. Sorry, just kidding around. It’s a lot like tonkatsu sauce.

Iris, who would never eat visible cabbage, raw or cooked, loved everything about Penguin Village and ate four big pancake slices stuffed to the gills with creatures without gills. I wouldn’t say okonomiyaki is one of the best things I ate in Japan, but it is a singular experience. If you’ve never had okonomiyaki, you’ve never had anything
like
okonomiyaki. It is also dirt-cheap. We went overboard with ordering, and dinner for three was still $15.

Later, an older man came in and stepped behind the counter. He seemed to be Tokyo Swayze’s boss. According to Laurie’s imagination, the old boss had told Swayze, “I’m leaving you in charge for one hour. Don’t worry, it’s early. Nobody will come in, and if they do, who cares? They cook all their own food anyway.” Then in walk three Americans who’ve never been to an okonomiyaki place before.

As far as I know,
sending someone a free flounder is not a traditional gesture of hospitality in Japan, but that didn’t stop the guy two tables over from us at our local izakaya. To explain why a guy sent over a fish at a bar, I need to back up and explain what an izakaya is and why they are so great.

When Iris and I got back from our first trip to Japan, naturally we spent hours telling Laurie about all the places we ate. “There was that bar near the river with the grilled chicken tail,” I said.

“And that bar we went to on our last night where I got that ham croquette,” added Iris.

We reminisced about several other bars until Laurie said, “Wait, did you really go to a bunch of bars or is this a joke?”

We really went to a bunch of bars. An izakaya is not exactly a bar by American standards; you might say it’s the Japanese translation of “gastropub,” except that izakaya have been around a lot longer than gastropubs, and the word “gastropub” sounds like a disease, anyway.

In short, an izakaya is a loud, convivial joint serving drinks and a wide assortment of food to go with them. Izakaya are the exception to the rule that the best Japanese restaurants specialize in one type of dish. It’s common for an izakaya menu to run a hundred items long.

Take our local izakaya, just down our street, across from Life Supermarket. I will mention the name of the place once, in case you want to look for it: Dainichikarashuzō. Of course, it’s written in kanji on the sign, and I’m sorry to report that izakaya are among the toughest restaurants to navigate without Japanese language ability. The menu often consists of a series of painted wooden signs hung on the wall, like the specials you always want to order at a Chinese restaurant.

You can avoid the language barrier by eating at a chain izakaya such as Tsubohachi, which has a picture menu. At any izakaya, however, pointing to the food at neighboring tables is as much of a tradition as sending them a fish, which I’m getting to in a minute.

We’d walked past this place dozens of times already on the way to and from the train station, and it’s notable for two things: (1) a comprehensive window display of fish heads and shellfish, including items I’d never seen before, such as pen shell, which looks like a foot-long mussel (“Hey, baby, want to know why they call me Pen Shell?”), and (2) a delicious marine aroma every time the door opens, despite the fact that the place contains dozens of species of fish carcasses. Also, we noticed their morning deliveries from Tsukiji fish market.

So we went to dinner there. I’d been doing pretty well reading Japanese signs and menus and packaging. I felt ready to tackle this izakaya. Well, being able to read the name of an udon shop did not qualify me to distinguish various fish and shellfish species, most of which I wouldn’t have recognized if they were written in English. I got so flustered by the menu that I forgot the two most important words in an izakaya:
toriaezu bīru.
“Beer for now.”

While I struggled with the menu, a handsome middle-aged guy from a nearby table came over to help. “You like sashimi? Cooked fish? Sushi?” he asked. His English was excellent. He was originally from Okinawa, he said, and a member of Rotary International. I know nothing about the Rotarians except that it’s a service organization; helping befuddled foreigners order food in bars must fall within its definition of charitable service. Our service-oriented neighbor helped us order pressed sweetfish sushi, kisu fish tempura, and butter-sauteed scallops. Dredging up a vague Oishinbo memory, I also ordered broiled sweetfish, a seasonal delicacy said to taste vaguely of melon.

While we started in on our sushi, our waitress—the kind of harried diner waitress who would call customers “hon” in an American restaurant—delivered a huge, beautiful steamed flounder with soy sauce, mirin, and chunks of creamy tofu. “From that guy,” she said, indicating the Rotarian samaritan. We retaliated with a large bottle of beer for him and his friend (the friend came over to thank us, with much bowing). What would happen at your neighborhood bar if a couple of confused foreigners came in with a child and didn’t even know how to order a drink? Would someone send them a free fish? I should add that it’s not exactly common to bring children to an izakaya, but it’s not frowned upon, either; also, not every izakaya is equally welcoming. Some, I have heard, are more clubby and are skeptical of nonregulars, whatever their nationality. But I didn’t encounter any places like that.

Oh, how was the food? So much of the seafood we eat in the U.S., even in Seattle, is previously frozen, slightly past its prime, or both. All of the seafood at our local izakaya was jump-up-and-bite-you fresh. This was most obvious in the flounder and the scallops. A mild fish, steamed, lightly seasoned, and served with tofu does not sound like a recipe for memorable eating, but it was. The butter-sauteed scallops, meanwhile, would have been at home at a New England seaside shack. They were served with a lettuce and tomato salad and a dollop of mayo. The shellfish were cooked and seasoned perfectly. I’ve never had a better scallop.

What makes this particular izakaya special is that it’s not special. No one would go to Nakano just to eat at this restaurant, because it’s surely no better than a fish izakaya in any other neighborhood. These no-name Tokyo holes in the wall could easily go head-to-head with America’s top seafood restaurants.

For a deeper dive into izakaya, I met up with Mark Robinson, author of the book
Izakaya,
which looks deceptively like a cookbook, in that it’s full of recipes and photos of food. Do not underestimate
Izakaya.
This book, which profiles eight typical Tokyo izakaya, has sucked me in over and over. You will get closer to an izakaya night by reading Mark’s book than by visiting any so-called izakaya outside of Japan.

Mark asked me to meet him on Monja Street, on the island of Tsukishima in southeastern Tokyo.
Monjayaki
is Tokyo’s homegrown answer to okonomiyaki—a rival pancake, thinner and harder to corral with a spatula
—
and Monja Street has the highest concentration of monjayaki restaurants in town. We weren’t going to any of them. “I hate monja,” said Mark. “It’s just a big mucusy pancake.” With that, we strolled past the Monjayaki Society office, where you can buy a t-shirt featuring a picture of a big mucusy pancake. (I meant to try monjayaki later, because I enjoy eating any food people look down on, but didn’t get around to it.)

We walked several blocks down Monja Street, passing about thirty-seven monja restaurants, and finally reached Kishidaya. “I wanted to put this place in the book,” said Mark, poking his head underneath the noren and holding up two fingers. “They turned me down. And the hostess is really cute.”

Kishidaya is like a mess hall inside, with four long parallel tables and little space in between. The place was packed with happy diners and drinkers, and Mark helped me order a sake. Mark is a handsome half-Japanese guy in his forties, used to easy conversations with cute hostesses.

Japan has a reputation for presenting immigrants with a sturdy glass ceiling; I’ve had former residents tell me that even after years of living in Japan, they felt like there was always something going on behind their back. You can easily find such tales of woe online:
Japan seemed so great when I visited, and when I moved there, the very polite claws came out.
I asked Mark, who has lived in Tokyo for over twenty years, whether he ever felt this way. “I like being an outsider,” he replied. He works as an interpreter for NHK television and gets frustrated by the things that can’t be said in official discourse in Japan, things everyone knows are true but would be embarrassing to admit. But outsiders can say whatever they want. A couple of times during the evening, someone asked Mark how long he’d been in Japan, and he clearly enjoyed saying, “Twenty-five years,” and also relished surprising people with his fluent Japanese. (I also loved it when someone asked me how long I’d been in Japan. It let me pretend that I spoke better and comported myself with more cultural panache than the average tourist.)

Once the food started arriving, we turned to less weighty topics, like the variety of dishes set in front of us. Unlike our Nakano local, this place wasn’t a fish specialist (although they served plenty of good fish), and the food Mark ordered veered toward salty and pickled drinking fare. We had
nuta,
a sweet miso-dressed salad of assorted vegetables including
udo,
the chewy white stem of a mountain plant that should always be referred to by its English name, Japanese spikenard.

Like people everywhere, the Japanese are thrilled when you profess to enjoy their more unusual foods, and my friends Akira and Emi appreciated it when I told them I’d been out for udo and
mozuku
. The latter is a slimy dish of vinegared seaweed which goes especially well with sake. The trick of eating mozuku is to lift just part of the mass of tiny fronds with your chopsticks without picking up the whole thing. Nobody who saw me eating mozuku would ask how long I’d been in Japan, since the answer was obvious: twelve seconds.

We ate stem ginger, clutching it by the green stalks and dipping the tender rhizomes in miso paste, and
rakkyō,
the Japanese answer to pickled onions, another item to mention if you’re trying to portray yourself as an adventurous eater. There was
ohitashi,
blanched spinach marinated in dashi and soy sauce and topped with shaved bonito flakes.

“Is that the famous izakaya tomato?” I asked, pointing to a sign on the wall that simply said “tomato” in katakana. I’d learned about the izakaya tomato from Mark’s book; a summer treat, it’s just a ripe tomato sliced into wedges and served with salt or mayo or both.

“Yep,” said Mark. “Want one?” I’m not usually a big fan of raw tomato, even the good stuff, but when you’re sapped by Tokyo’s crushing summer humidity, there’s nothing better.

As we polished off the tomato, and a beef and tofu stir-fry, and some grilled sardines, I was prepared to say good night and pop back into the subway for the long ride back to Nakano when Mark said, “Are you up for one more place?”

Of course, although I’d finished an entire (small) bottle of sake and my brain felt like a big mucusy pancake. We took a short ride on the Oedo line and surfaced near a sashimi-oriented izakaya called Uoshin. The upstairs counter snaked through the room so everyone could have a seat at the bar, and tucked into nooks at various parts of the arrangement were white-coated chefs, each with a knife and a wooden board full of freshly sliced sashimi. We ordered a few selections from the board, and then Mark, who is apparently one of those wiry guys with a boundless appetite, starting calling for cooked food:
gesoyaki
(grilled squid tentacles, one of my favorites), tamagoyaki (seasoned rolled omelet), and yellowtail teriyaki, all of which were exceptionally good, especially the meaty broiled yellowtail with its sweet and salty glaze.

That accomplished, Mark made conversation with the two ladies sitting next to us. The younger woman was a local, and her older friend was from out of town, and together they pored over a guide to temples and shrines. I couldn’t follow the conversation, but at some point it became clear that the women were saying something to me.

“They’re apologizing for the war,” explained Mark.

Apology accepted...? The younger woman asked how I was enjoying Japan. I’m the kind of guy who uses the phrase “best thing ever” several times a day, which is not a very Japanese thing to do; presenting an even keel is important, and muted praise is recognized as perhaps more serious than hyperbolic exclamations. (When it comes to expressing abhorrence with a few apparently innocuous words along the lines of, “That’s not my favorite,” Japanese is unbeatable.)

Noticing a familiar shrine on the cover of their guidebook, however, I thought,
Ah, here is something I can talk about.
“
Fushimi Inari Taisha, desu ne?”
Isn’t that the Inari shrine in Kyoto, where Iris and I visited the udon shack
?

They didn’t know offhand, so they looked it up. Yes, I was right.
So they forced me to keep the guidebook.
I’d violated a key rule of life in Japan: never indicate that you like anything that belongs to someone else, or they will try to give it to you. Once Iris was playing with a friend at a playground and fell in a mud puddle; the friend’s mom raced home and returned with a selection of her own daughter’s clean clothes, even though we would probably never see them again and would have no way to return the clothes. Laurie managed to wave the gift off, although I’m not sure how.

My bragging about slurping down udo and mozuku must have made an impression on my friend Akira, because a few days later he invited me out for Okinawan food at a restaurant across from Ueno station. Okinawa is a series of tropical islands extending off the tip of Kyushu. It’s the host to assorted U.S. military bases, which has had a certain effect on the food. (Everywhere the U.S. Army comes ashore, Spam lands with it.) Tokyo has it bad for Okinawan food and culture, which I think has a lot to do with hardworking people wishing they were on island time. If you can’t make it all the way to Hawaii, Okinawa will do. One weekend, Nakano was overtaken by an Okinawan cultural festival with much dancing and drumming. Akira, who is not Okinawan, is a member of an Okinawan dance troupe. And then there was dinner.

Okinawan food is completely different from...well, I was about to say “mainland food,” as if any part of Japan could be considered mainland. Anyone who finds Japanese food challenging will be alternately reassured and driven to drink by Okinawan food, which is good, because we drank a lot. “What are you drinking?” I asked.

“Beer,” replied Akira. “Always beer.”

We ordered many highlights of Okinawan cuisine, including its best-known dish,
goya champuru,
bitter melon stir-fried with pork and tofu. Bitter melon is bitter the way Peeps are sweet: overpoweringly so. I like it. We ate
umi budō,
or “sea grapes,” which look like those fancy little “champagne grapes” but are actually a seaweed; the translucent orbs pop in your mouth like caviar. Okinawa consumes sea vegetables to a degree that makes the rest of Japan look seaweed-phobic. In addition to the sea grapes, we had more mozuku, this time fried up as tempura, a shaggy mass of greenery in a light crust.