Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo

by Matthew Amster-Burton

Texture is the last frontier for Westerners learning to appreciate Chinese food. Cross it, and you’re really inside. But the way there is a wild journey that will bring you face to face with your own prejudices, your childhood fears, perhaps even some Freudian paranoias.

“Daijōbu desu,” which is pronounced “dye-jobe-dess” and is perhaps the single most useful phrase in Japanese after “sumimasen,” (“I’m sorry.”) Daijōbu desu means I’m OK, it’s OK, that’s fine, don’t worry about it.

I wandered around the alley a little more and then out among the skyscrapers and department stores of Shinjuku, thinking about the words of William Gibson. “Shinjuku at night is one of the most deliriously beautiful places in the world,” he wrote, “and somehow the silliest of all beautiful places—and the combination is sheer delight.”

Laurie got her wish at a yakitori place in Nakano that ended up becoming one of our favorite restaurants. It’s a chain restaurant whose actual name is Akiyoshi,

“Negima onegai shimasu,” she’d say, putting her finger to her lower lip the same way I do when deciding what to order. Negima is the single most popular yakitori skewer, chunks of chicken thigh meat interspersed with lengths of sliced negi.

chūhai to drink. Short for “shōchū highball,” chūhai is cheap vodka-like liquor with club soda and often lemon or other fruit flavoring.

Yaki onigiri are plain, triangular rice balls (no fillings or nori wrapper) cooked on a hot charcoal grill and brushed with soy sauce or miso. The sauce on the outside caramelizes as the rice becomes charred and crispy and gives off an aroma of popcorn. The interior of the ball heats up and drinks in just a hint of sauce. It is a riot of flavor and texture made with two completely ordinary ingredients.

Tokyo has a bizarre street address system, so arcane that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was designed during the Edo period to confuse foreign invaders. Each district is divided into neighborhoods, and each neighborhood is divided into multiblock parcels called chome (cho-meh). Within each chome, the blocks are numbered, and on each block, the buildings are numbered. But they’re not necessarily numbered in order: building #1 might be between #17 and #24. This means any street address in Tokyo is an incomprehensible string of numbers (building/block/chome). Nobody other than the post office actually navigates by street address; people use landmarks and mobile phones.

The Jiyūgaoka neighborhood, for example, can only be described as cute, or, to use the favorite word of every Japanese schoolgirl, kawaii! You step out of the train station and into a village of high-end shopping, French bakeries, and international food. Pedestrians mill at train crossings, waiting to let a small commuter train pass, then stream across. On the other side of the tracks is a small strip of park blocks, a bit like Brooklyn or my hometown of Portland, Oregon. And this is way out in the suburbs.

Often translated as “washcloth” or “handkerchief,” a tenugui is a multipurpose piece of cloth used as a headband, or for brow-mopping on a summer day, or (most often) for drying your hands, because hand-drying implements in public bathrooms are rare.

Visitors to Japan are sometimes surprised to find that tempura, the ubiquitous deep-fried side dish in Japanese-American restaurants, can carry a whole restaurant—even a palatial one like the seven-story Aoi Marushin in Asakusa.

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.

men’s and women’s bathrooms (男 and 女),

Probably I’m harping on this point, but if Mago-chan were transplanted to Seattle, it would land instantly on everybody’s ten-best list. In Tokyo, it is merely a neighborhood dumpling restaurant that earns average marks on the online review sites. 1 This restaurant has relocated to nearby Kōenji.

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.

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.

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.

The takoyaki cost all of 500 yen, and the price includes a wooden serving boat that you can take home and reuse as a bath toy if you haven’t gotten too much sauce on it. A Gindaco takoyaki is a brilliant morsel: full of flavor from the negi and ginger, crispy on the outside and juicy within. Takoyaki also stay mouth-searingly hot inside for longer than you can stand to wait, so be careful.

Odaiba Takoyaki Museum. As you enter the takoyaki museum, you’re greeted by a giant model takoyaki boat piloted by a cute takoyaki with arms and legs. Human legs, not octopus legs. The takoyaki museum is not a museum; it’s a food court populated entirely by takoyaki restaurants from all over Japan.

Second, the takoyaki museum has the greatest gift shop in the world. Whenever I take Iris to a tourist attraction, I’m always looking ahead for an excuse to bypass the gift shop. “If we skip the gift shop, we’ll have time for ice cream.” That sort of thing. I would skip ice cream to shop at the takoyaki museum gift shop, which is almost entirely octopus-themed. They sell not only cute plush stuffed octopuses, but also cute plush stuffed takoyaki.

Our favorite French pastry shop is run by a Japanese chef, Terai Norihiko, who studied in France and Belgium and opened a small shop called Aigre-Douce, in the Mejiro neighborhood. Aigre-Douce is a pastry museum, the kind of place where everything looks too beautiful to eat. On her first couple of visits, Iris chose a gooey caramel brownie concoction, but she and Laurie soon sparred over the affections of Wallace, a round two-layer cake with lime cream atop chocolate, separated by a paper-thin square chocolate wafer.

Sweets Forest, a dessert theme park in the trendy Jiyūgaoka neighborhood in southwest Tokyo. Sweets Forest has no French restraint; it’s worth visiting not so much for the sweets but because it is an only-in-Tokyo experience. The place is done up like a fairy-tale forest punctuated with dessert counters and seating areas.

You can wander the streets south of Sensō-ji temple for hours, darting in and out of the gaudy tourist arcade called Nakamise-dōri, get delightfully lost, load up on souvenirs, and stop off for conveyor belt sushi or tempura (an Asakusa specialty) or an izakaya meal whenever you like. Asakusa is in the old part of Tokyo, the low city (shitamachi), and it’s full of faithfully reconstructed historical buildings—reconstructed because Asakusa was destroyed in both 1923 and 1945.

Places make the best lovers. —Peter Rees, London city planner, quoted in Craig Taylor’s Londoners

I’m not sure if I believe me, either. Kurazushi (along with its nearly identical competitors Sushirō and Kappazushi) is a conveyor belt sushi chain. As at any kaitenzushi restaurant, plates go by on a conveyor belt. Everybody ignores them, however, in favor of the iPad mounted at each seat. The iPad runs an app that turns it into a touchscreen menu. You browse through the categories of food (fish, shellfish, specials, tempura, desserts) and tap the photo of the item you’d like to order. There are well over a hundred options. A minute or two later, your screen dings and displays a notification, and the sushi you ordered comes zooming along on a special express lane conveyor belt and stops directly in front of you. Iris, Laurie, and I all agreed: this is the greatest thing that can possibly happen in a restaurant. Way better than the waiter bringing you an engagement ring. They don’t even have waiters at Kurazushi. Want tea? Powdered tea, cups, and a hot water dispenser are right in front of you. Beer? Walk over to the refrigerator, pull out a chilled glass, and dispense your own draft beer from the adjacent tap.