Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo (5 page)

Not everybody finds the convenience store onigiri packaging to be a triumph. “The seaweed isn’t just supposed to be crunchy,” says Futaki in Oishinbo: The Joy of Rice. “It tastes best when the seaweed gets moist and comes together as one with the rice.” Yamaoka agrees. Jerk.  Luckily, you’ll find a few moist-nori rice balls right next to the crispy ones.

Once we were living in Nakano, not a day went by without a trip to a
kombini,
which is Japanese for “convenience store.” Not just 7-Eleven, but also FamilyMart, Lawson, Mini Stop, and Daily Yamazaki. Iris kept referring to the last as “Dried-out Yamaoka,” which never got less funny.

There is no secret to what makes kombini so great. The stores look just like American convenience stores inside and out, but the products for sale reflect a national obsession with quality. Mostly I’m talking about food, but at one point I bought a $1 Campus-brand notebook at 7-Eleven, and it has proven durable and well-designed, probably my favorite notebook. Another popular brand of notebook in Japan is named for the phrase “living art” in French: VIFART. If you think this is funny, you are my kind of person.

The hot case at a kombini features tonkatsu, fried chicken,
menchikatsu
(a breaded hamburger patty), Chinese pork buns, potato croquettes, and seafood items such as breaded squid legs or oysters. In a bit of international solidarity, you’ll see corn dogs, often labeled “Amerikandoggu.”

One day for lunch I stopped at 7-Eleven and brought home a pouch of “Gold Label” beef curry, steamed rice,
inarizushi
(sushi rice in a pouch of sweetened fried tofu), cold noodle salad, and a banana. Putting together lunch for the whole family from an American 7-Eleven would be as appetizing as scavenging among seaside medical waste, but this was fun to shop for and fun to eat.

Instant ramen is as popular in Japan as it is in college dorms worldwide, and while the selection of flavors is wider than at an American grocery, it serves a predictable ecological niche as the food of last resort for those with no money or no time. (Frozen ramen, on the other hand, can be very good; if you have access to a Japanese supermarket, look for Myojo Chukazanmai brand.) That’s how I saw it, at least, until stumbling on the ramen topping section in the 7-Eleven refrigerator case, where you can buy shrink-wrapped packets of popular fresh ramen toppings such as braised pork belly and fermented bamboo shoots. With a quick stop at a convenience store, you can turn instant ramen into a serious meal. The pork belly is rolled and tied, braised, chilled, and then sliced into thick circular slices like Italian pancetta. This is one of the best things you can do with pork, and I don’t say that lightly.

Every kombini, just like an American convenience store, has a section of salty beer snacks. Here, though, they’re worth eating with or without beer. We got hooked on a cracker called Cheeza, which looks like a small wedge of Swiss cheese, complete with holes. Cheeza comes in various flavors, and the package is labeled with the percentage of cheese found in the product, like the cocoa percentage on a fancy chocolate bar. The least-cheesy Cheeza is over 50 percent cheese and has a great sturdy crunch. If you’ve spent decades eating American candy and snacks, in Japan you will constantly be saying, “Hey, this really tastes like...!” Another tasty cheese-based snack consists of dried cubes of pure cheese with toasted almonds. The beer snacks section also offers lots of fish-based snacks: tiny dried anchovies with slivered almonds, dried squid, and other things with tentacles.

Occasionally, I’d stop and browse the magazine section, especially food magazines like Orange Page, Today’s Food, and a men’s cooking magazine with lots of meat recipes. Japanese-language food magazines are so well illustrated that you could make a good stab at cooking the recipes without being able to read a word of Japanese.

There
is
one thing wrong with Tokyo 7-Eleven: no Slurpees.

For outrageous high-end food shopping, the opposite of a kombini, the place to go is a
depachika,
the basement food section of a department store. Tokyo has dozens of large department stores, and every one has a depachika.

A depachika is like nothing else. It is the endless bounty of a hawker’s bazaar, but with Japanese civility. It is Japanese food and foreign food, sweet and savory. The best depachika have more than a hundred specialized stands and cannot be understood on a single visit. I felt as though I had a handle on Life Supermarket the first time I shopped there, but I never felt entirely comfortable in a depachika. They are the food equivalent of Borges’s “The Library of Babel”: if it’s edible, someone is probably selling it, but how do you find it? How do you resist the cakes and spices and Chinese delis and bento boxes you’ll pass on the way?

At the Isetan depachika, in Shinjuku, French pastry god Pierre Hermé sells his signature cakes and macarons. Not to be outdone, Franco-Japanese pastry god Sadaharu Aoki sells his own nearby. Tokyo is the best place in the world to eat French pastry. The quality and selection are as good as or better than in Paris, and the snootiness factor is zero.

I wandered by a collection of things on sticks: yakitori at one stand,
kushiage
at another. Kushiage are panko-breaded and fried foods on sticks. At any depachika, you can buy kushiage either golden and cooked, or pale and raw to fry at home. Neither option is terribly appetizing: the fried stuff is losing crispness by the second, and who wants to deep-fry in a poorly ventilated Tokyo apartment in the summer? But the overall effect of the display is mesmerizing: look at all the different foods they’ve put on sticks! Pork, peppers, mushrooms, squash, taro, and two dozen other little cubes.

At Isetan I found a stand selling little Chinese spring rolls in a variety of flavors, and nothing else. Another stand, at another depachika, sold only
nikuman,
the Japanese version of those fluffy steamed Chinese pork buns. I lost track of how many depachika I visited, but every time, especially at Takashimaya department store in Nihonbashi, I found myself staring down the pickle section.

The pickle (
tsukemono
) section at a depachika is like a scene from a fresh vegetable market in Latin America that has been attacked by Bunnicula. While the pickles at Life Supermarket are secreted away in retortable tubs and blister packs and shrink-wrap, here in the Takashimaya basement they come out for sunbathing and free sampling: fragrant (OK, stinky) rice-bran
nukazuke,
amber sake-lees
Narazuke,
tiny blue pickled eggplants, red pickled ginger, pink pickled ginger, cucumbers pickled in the briny byproduct of producing umeboshi, salty pickled apricots. The umeboshi themselves, in at least half a dozen varieties, are found at a nearby stand. Desiccated daikon stretch across the counter like sleeping snakes.

If all of this sounds unfamiliar, most of it was unfamiliar to me, too, even after copious free sampling and dozens of meals with little piles of pickles served alongside. Japan has the second most sophisticated pickling culture in the world (after Korea), and many of its vegetables are pickled into submission, pickled until they look nothing like the vine-ripened point of origin. Even after I took a pickle class from Tokyo-based cookbook author Elizabeth Andoh, the pickle counter remained a confounding microcosm of the depachika, which was in turn a microcosm of the blissfully overwhelming sprawl of Tokyo itself.

At the risk of offending
everyone in every country, I think there are only two great breakfasts in the world.

The first is leftover pizza, reheated as follows. Place the slice, topping-side down, in a nonstick pan over medium heat. When it’s sizzling and the cheese and toppings are a little brown and crusty, flip the slice and continue cooking until hot. Trust me. I learned this method from a guy known only as Tommy who was presumably smoking something known as Mary Jane when he invented it.

The second is Japanese breakfast. The key parts of this complete breakfast are rice, pickles, and miso soup, and that trio on its own is a perfectly satisfying breakfast. At a hotel or restaurant, however, you’ll always get grilled fish and often a cooked vegetable dish, tofu, and eggs. A full-on Japanese breakfast at a nice hotel or inn often comprises seven or more courses but never feels overwhelming; it is simultaneously lavish and restrained. Unlike the traditional English fry-up, which I also admire, I can devour a Japanese breakfast and feel ready to meet the day, rather than the pillow.

Rice at breakfast is usually served with nori in plastic packets. You unwrap the plastic, place the strip of nori on top of your rice bowl, use your chopsticks to fold it around a ball of rice (like an impromptu mini-onigiri), dip it lightly in soy sauce, and, if you’ve made it this far, eat it. Wrangling crisp nori into position with chopsticks is beyond Ordinary Wizarding Level skill, and this morning feat of mechanical engineering challenges even locals. In Oishinbo: Japanese Cuisine, Yamaoka castigates his hapless editor, Tomii, for saturating his nori in soy sauce before applying it to his rice: “You shouldn’t waste the efforts of the people who work hard to put the nori inside the little wrappers so it stays crisp.”

Nori, incidentally, is also part of the traditional breakfast in Wales, where it is made into laverbread, nori paste breaded in oatmeal and fried. Same seaweed, different coast.

Fish at breakfast is sometimes
himono
(semi-dried fish, intensely flavored and chewy, the Japanese equivalent of a breakfast of kippered herring or smoked salmon) and sometimes a small fillet of rich, well-salted broiled fish. Japanese cooks are expert at cutting and preparing fish with nothing but salt and high heat to produce deep flavor and a variety of textures: a little crispy over here, melting and juicy there. Some of this is technique and some is the result of a turbocharged supply chain that scoops small, flavorful fish out of the ocean and deposits them on breakfast tables with only the briefest pause at Tsukiji fish market and a salt cure in the kitchen.

By now, I’ve finished my fish and am drinking miso soup. Where you find a bowl of rice,
miso shiru
is likely lurking somewhere nearby. It is most often just like the soup you’ve had at the beginning of a sushi meal in the West, with wakame seaweed and bits of tofu, but Iris and I were always excited when our soup bowls were filled with the shells of tiny
shijimi
clams. Clams and miso are one of those predestined culinary combos—what clams and chorizo are to Spain, clams and miso are to Japan. Shijimi clams are fingernail-sized, and they are eaten for the briny essence they release into the broth, not for what Mario Batali has called “the little bit of snot” in the shell. Miso-clam broth is among the most complex soup bases you’ll ever taste, but it comes together in minutes, not the hours of simmering and skimming involved in making European stocks. As Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat explain in their book
Japanese Hot Pots,
this is because so many fermented Japanese ingredients are, in a sense, already “cooked” through beneficial bacterial and fungal actions.

Japanese food has a reputation for crossing the line from subtlety into blandness, but a good miso-clam soup is an umami bomb that begins with dashi made from
kombu
(kelp) and
katsuobushi
(bonito flakes) or
niboshi
(a school of tiny dried sardines), adds rich miso pressed through a strainer for smoothness, and is then enriched with the salty clam essence.

If miso soup is one of the most approachable, familiar, and reassuring breakfast dishes for the Western palate,
nattō
is certainly the least. Like tofu and miso, nattō is a fermented soybean product. The small, whole beans are sold in single-serving styrofoam tubs; it looks innocuous enough when you open the package, but when you stir it up, a viscous, stringy web fights back. The more you stir, the more slimy and obstreperous the mass becomes. To nattō lovers, this is a feature. Once you’ve coaxed out enough stringy, matted bacterial residue to make you happy, eat the nattō with rice and soy sauce, and maybe even a raw egg for added creaminess.

Nattō remains one of the Japanese staple foods least known in the West. I don’t expect this to change in the next few centuries. Did I mention nattō also smells funky? I’m unusual, I think, in finding nattō neither delicious nor terrifying. To me it tastes a little like coffee. I don’t actively seek it out, but it doesn’t send me into the fetal position like
junsai
, which we’ll meet soon.

Eggs appear at breakfast in a variety of forms, often as
tamagoyaki.
You’ve met this sweetened omelet at your local sushi place, where it’s considered beginner sushi. In Tokyo, good tamagoyaki is an object of lust. Cut into thick blocks and served at room temperature, a creamy monolith of tamagoyaki is somehow the antithesis of American breakfast eggs. It can be made at home in a special square or rectangular frying pan, but it’s also for sale in supermarkets, at depachika, and at Tsukiji fish market. Most people who aren’t sushi chefs buy it. My tamagoyaki-making skills are nonexistent, but I sometimes flavor beaten eggs with soy sauce, dashi, and mirin and make an omelet to eat with rice and nori.

I’ve enjoyed a full-service Japanese breakfast at a nice little urban hotel but also at Denny’s. Tokyo Denny’s is a total head trip. It looks like an American Denny’s circa 1982, complete with a cigarette machine and plenty of smokers. The menu, however, is written in Japanese and specializes in
yōshoku
.

Yōshoku is the Japanese take on Western foods; much of it was created during the Meiji period (1868–1912), when, after centuries of isolation, Japan began importing goods and ideas from the outside world, including food. Yōshoku dishes such as
hambaagu
(salisbury steak in brown sauce), curry rice, potato croquettes, and “spaghetti
naporitan”
are now much-loved comfort food. They’re also so unlike the dishes that inspired them that they tend to be really hard for Westerners to appreciate.

When I asked Tokyoites about their favorite food, the answer was almost always something in the yōshoku canon. My friend Emi, for example, told me her favorite food is
omuraisu
, fried rice wrapped in an omelet and topped with ketchup, a dish found on the kid’s menu at Denny’s.

At breakfast, however, the menu bifurcates into Japanese and American breakfast. There are no Grand Slams, but the French toast and pancakes aren’t bad; Iris is partial to the Koala Pancake, a short stack of pancakes topped with two Cocoa Puff eyes and a vanilla ice cream nose. Many of the Western breakfast dishes come with a green salad. The Japanese breakfast set with fish, rice, nattō, miso soup, and pickles is quite good and priced well under $10. Yoshinoya, the largest beef-bowl chain, also serves a traditional breakfast set and charges even less—about $5. Like Denny’s, Yoshinoya is open 24 hours, and in the morning the clientele is old guys drinking coffee or tea. The ambience is more like an American diner than most American diners.

At home, we generally had a Western breakfast: fruit, yogurt, cereal, bacon, toast, and tea. One day we were out of milk, and Laurie ran out early to the Mini Stop convenience store for a pint of milk for her Daily Club black tea, which she found at Life Supermarket. (The tea was shelved in two sections, one for green tea and one for everything else.) She returned with a pint carton, poured some milk into her tea, and did a spit-take. It wasn’t milk; it was drinkable Bulgarian-style yogurt. “It says Bulgaria in big letters right on the carton,” I pointed out helpfully. Laurie held the carton out toward me and made a face as sour as drinkable yogurt. What it actually said on the carton was:
ブルガリア
. (
Iris and I can read some Japanese. Laurie can’t.)

White bread in Japan is a steroidal megaloaf called
shokupan.
Brioche-like and great for toasting, shokupan is sold in bags of four, six, or eight perfectly square slices, without heels. Where do the heels go? Out back with the imperfect vegetables?

I bought shokupan several times before figuring out why the four-, six-, and eight-slice sacks all sold for the same price. It’s the same loaf, cut into thicker or thinner slices. Eight-slice shokupan is similar in thickness to Wonder bread. Six-slice shokupan is like what we buy in Seattle as Texas Toast (the fresh kind, not the frozen garlic bread). A piece of four-slice shokupan is like a Stephen King paperback. It would make a slot toaster cry out in pain. Iris and I liked the six-slice bread best and usually ate it toasted with melted butter and a sprinkle of sea salt.

Next time I have breakfast at an American Denny’s, there’s going to be an international incident. What do you mean you don’t serve miso soup and Uji green tea? This is Denny’s, isn’t it? Fine, I’ll just have some coffee and a pack of Marlboros.