The meat section is mostly devoted to presliced meats for hot pots and quick-cooked dishes, with a thin steak or chop here and there. In addition to commodity meat, you’ll find Wagyu beef and kurobuta pork. The quality of the meat in an average Tokyo supermarket is higher than at most specialty butchers in the U.S.
Time to fess up. Life Supermarket is not the best supermarket in the world; every supermarket in Tokyo is the best supermarket in the world. I haven’t even gotten to the prepared food (two different yakitori sections, reheatable fried foods that stay crunchy, and lots of appealing salads and cooked vegetables).
The main floor of Life sells housewares and school supplies. I like these fancy mechanical pencils that are exorbitantly priced and hard to find in Seattle; Life sells them for $5. (I told my friend Emi how pleased I was to find my favorite Uni-Ball pencils there, but I pronounced it “OO-nee ball,” which sent her into hysterics. I’d unwittingly said “sea urchin ball.”)
The cashiers at Life operate hefty automated cash registers. If you pay with paper money, the cashier inserts the bill into a vertical slot, and any bills in change come out an adjacent slot. The bills are hot to the touch when they emerge from the register, which is oddly satisfying, like it’s fresh-baked cash.
To better understand what makes Japan one of the world’s greatest places to eat, we should go to 7-Eleven.
7-Eleven is owned by a Japanese company, which is why you sometimes see Hi-Chew for sale at American locations. Tokyo boasts more 7-Elevens (over 1700) than any other city in the world. I realize this sounds like bragging about owning the world’s largest collection of dust bunnies, but only if you haven’t been to a Tokyo 7-Eleven.
On the last day of our first trip to Tokyo, Iris and I wandered around Asakusa, up the gaudy souvenir arcade of Nakamise-dōri, darting in and out of the tiny side streets that feed into it like capillaries. At some point we ended up with our faces pressed against a plate glass window watching an old man make soba. He rolled out the buckwheat noodle dough on a floured table, folded it, and sliced it into noodles with a knife hooked up to a manual rig that supported the weight of the knife while leaving the precision slicing work to the chef. I suggested to Iris that we stop in for a lunch of zaru soba, cold buckwheat noodles served in a wicker box. Yes, it looks like you dropped your lunch in a Pier One Imports.
Iris, who inherited my obsessive punctuality and crippling fear of missing a bus, train, or plane, said no, we should stop at 7-Eleven for a bento box and eat it while waiting for the airport train.
Right now I’m sitting three blocks from an American 7-Eleven, so for journalistic accuracy I stopped in to see what I could turn up in the way of a hot, nourishing lunch for under $5. Answer: two taquitos, a Buffalo Chicken Roller, and a Slurpee. Other options included microwaveable beef-and-bean burritos and Lunchable-type deli packs. The lunch philosophy at an American 7-Eleven is We’ll serve whatever can be compressed into a cylinder and displayed near the cash register on the hot dog warmer. The taquitos were bad in a satisfying junk-foody way. The Buffalo Chicken Roller was just plain bad, a tube of compressed chicken coated with lurid red Buffalo seasoning powder.
Meanwhile, at a Tokyo 7-Eleven, someone right now is choosing from a variety of bento boxes and rice bowls, delivered that morning and featuring grilled fish, sushi, mapo tofu, tonkatsu, and a dozen other choices. The lunch philosophy at Japanese 7-Eleven? Actual food.
On the day we missed out on fresh soba, Iris had a tonkatsu bento, and I chose a couple of rice balls (onigiri), one filled with pickled plum and the other with spicy fish roe. For less than $1.50, convenience store onigiri encapsulate everything that is great about Japanese food and packaging. Let’s start in the middle and work outward, like we’re building an onion. The core of an onigiri features a flavorful and usually salty filling. This could be an umeboshi (pickled apricot, but usually translated as pickled plum), as sour as a Sour Patch Kid; flaked salmon; or cod or mullet roe.
Next is the rice, packed lightly by machine into a perfect triangle. Japanese rice is unusual among staple rices in Asia because it’s good at room temperature or a little colder. Sushi or onigiri made with long-grain rice would be a chalky, crumbly disaster. Oishinbo argues that Japan is the only country in Asia that makes rice balls because of the unique properties of Japanese rice. I doubt this. Medium- and short-grain rices are also popular in parts of southern China, and presumably wherever those rices exist, people squish them into a ball to eat later, kind of like I used to do with a fistful of crustless white bread. (Come on, I can’t be the only one.)
Next comes a layer of cellophane, followed by a layer of nori and another layer of cellophane. The nori is preserved in a transparent shell for the same reason Han Solo was encased in carbonite: to ensure that he would remain crispy until just before eating. (At least, I assume that’s what Jabba the Hutt had in mind.) You pull a red strip on the onigiri packaging, both layers of cellophane part, and a ready-to-eat rice ball tumbles into your hand, encased in crispy seaweed.
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-ch
eesy 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.
Japanese Breakfast
朝ご飯
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 appr
oachable, 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.
Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo Page 5