Mister Donut is where I felt most keenly the otherworldly charm of Tokyo customer service. Every time we went to their Nakano location, around the corner from the entrance to Nakano Broadway, the staff treated us like Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and Blue Ivy. The body language, the facial expressions, the mechanics of the transaction—all of it said, You are our favorite customers, and we’re so lucky to have you in our humble doughnut shop. This service ethic wasn’t unique to Mister Donut by any means, and it had nothing to do with the fact that we were obvious foreigners. We encountered the same level of service at department stores, bakeries, fast food restaurants, bookstores, and the post office. It never seemed fake or obsequious. If Tokyo’s service employees are faking it, they’re doing it so well that they’re probably fooling themselves, too. Bad service in Tokyo is shockingly rare, and being able to walk into any shop and be treated like a human made me realize how painful it is when you can’t depend on such treatment. Don’t get me wrong; it’s equally painful to hear people complain about bad service online.
Japan is obsessed with French pastry. Yes, I know everyone who has access to French pastry is obsessed with it, but in Tokyo they’ve taken it to another level. When a patissier becomes sufficiently famous in Paris, they open a shop in Tokyo; the department store food halls feature Pierre Herme, Henri Charpentier, and Sadaharu Aoki, who was born in Tokyo but became famous for his Japanese-influenced pastries in Paris before opening shops in his hometown. And don’t forget the famous Monsieur Donut, which I just made up.
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. “Wallace is a one-woman man,” said Laurie.
Iris giggled in the way eight-year-olds do at anything that smacks of romance. We never figured out why they named a cake Wallace. I blame IKEA. I’ve always been more interested in chocolate than fruit desserts, but for some reason, perhaps because it was summer and the fruit desserts looked so good and I was not quite myself the whole month, I gravitated toward the blackberry and raspberry items, like a cup of raspberry puree with chantilly cream and a layer of sponge cake.
One of the joys of eating French pastry in Tokyo is availing yourself of French dessert artistry with a Japanese standard of customer service. When you ask for a cake to go on a hot day, they’ll ask how soon you intend to eat it, and then pack it for travel with tiny ice packs taped to the inside of the box for temperature control and protection against bumps and bruises. We collected a bunch of these ice packs and occasionally brought them out of the freezer to apply to our foreheads when we got home from running sweaty errands.
The opposite of Aigre-Douce is 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. Iris immediately chose an ice cream counter called (really) Mix n’ Mixream, which was like Cold Stone Creamery only good, and asked the guy to bash sponge cake, coconut, and other assorted solids into her ice cream.
Meanwhile, I went to a place specializing in sponge cake roulades in dozens of flavors. (Sponge cake, pudding, and flan are especially popular in Tokyo and keep showing up in contexts expected and otherwise.) I selected two tiny cakes, one black sesame and one whose flavor I never quite figured out, but soybeans were definitely involved. Banners at Sweets Forest announced a Princess Jiyūgaoka Sweets pageant that Iris desperately wanted to enter, although I think the contest was for desserts, not people. Then, while Laurie ate a strawberry sundae from Berry Berry (everything on the menu is strawberry), Iris led me to a gachapon machine. Gachapon are vending machines that sell cheap toys in plastic capsules; sadly, the merchandise is usually as crappy as you’d find in any other country, but this time Iris scored a keychain adorned with the figurine of an anime character with the greatest name ever: Easter Chopperman.
One of the best desserts we had in Tokyo, however, was at Denny’s. One hot afternoon in Asakusa, Iris and I split the Devil’s Sundae, a towering assemblage of chocolate and vanilla ice cream, a slug of jellied chocolate pudding, Cocoa Puffs, banana slices, chocolate syrup, and whipped cream. This is not, by a long shot, the most absurd sundae you can get in Tokyo. We saw ads for a SkyTree sundae, 63.4 centimeters tall (exactly 1/1000th the height of the real SkyTree) and topped with a crown of whipped cream taller than some children.
Tokyo supermarkets, like American ones, have a well-stocked yogurt section. Unlike in America, however, the popularity of yogurt extends to the candy section. I’ve long been a fan of Hi-Chew, the Japanese fruit chews, for their resilient texture and uncannily accurate fruit flavors: sour cherry, apple, grape, pickled plum, and especially mango, which is closer to the flavor of an actual tropical mango than most imported mangoes.
Only in Tokyo, however, have I seen yogurt Hi-Chew, whose pure white candy cubes taste exactly like good plain yogurt. Bulgaria brand yogurt, makers of the drinkable yogurt that ruined Laurie’s tea, offers a competing candy which is more like yogurt-flavored Mentos. Bulgaria: the fermentedmaker! We brought home several packages of yogurt Hi-Chew; only one remains, and I’m looking at it lustfully right now.
Finally, let’s talk about those Kit Kat bars. There is no flavor that cannot be embodied in Kit Kat form and sold in Japanese stores. Green tea. Black tea. Miso. Cherry blossom. Soy sauce. Toasted soybean powder (kinako). Chile. Orange. Melon. Only a few are available at any given time, and right now, evil geniuses at Nestlé are coming up with new flavors. I’d like to suggest okonomiyaki flavor, which would consist of a bag of assorted flavors (ginger, squid, mountain yam, egg) that could be combined in the proportions of your choice, just like a real okonomiyaki. Sauce and Kewpie mayo optional.
We bought a SkyTree orange Kit Kat, which was a regular orange Kit Kat in a preposterously long box, and the Yubari melon Kit Kat, which tasted exactly like melon, was sold in a fancy gift box, and cost $200. Two-thirds of that is true.
Note: On their respective corporate websites, you can find the compete illustrated history of Hi-Chew and Mister Donut, including every flavor/style ever offered and the date of its debut, going back to the 1970s. See http://www.morinaga.co.jp/hi-chew/history/index.html and http://www.misterdonut.jp/museum/donut/y2013.html.
Warning: This is more addictive than any YouTube channel.
Additional warning: These sites are in Japanese, but like other websites you may be familiar with, if you can’t read the language, you’ll have plenty of fun clicking around and looking at the pictures.
Eel
うなぎ
Just east of the green banner marking the entrance to Pretty Good #1 Alley in Nakano, an old man drives a spike into the head of an eel every morning at 9 a.m. He then inserts the tip of his specialized eel knife behind the collarbone and, with the musical rattle of metal on bone, butterflies the fish and removes its backbone.
This is his first eel of the day. He cuts the fillet into four-inch strips and threads them onto skewers. Once the prep is done, he fires up the grill with binchotan, an expensive type of clean-burning hardwood charcoal. In Tokyo, “fanning the flames” isn’t just an expression. It’s an actual cooking method, and you can walk past the eel stand any time of the afternoon and get hit with a blast of heat and the aroma of charcoal-grilled eel.
Summer is the time to eat eel in Japan. Even Yoshinoya, the beef-bowl chain, offers an eel bowl special, which sounds as promising as a McDonald’s sea urchin special. On the Day of the Ox, in late July or early August, people all
over Japan line up to eat eel. If you eat eel on this sweltering day, it is said, you will be fortified with the stamina to survive the rest of the disgusting Japanese summer. Why eel and not, say, ox? I bet it’s a penis thing.
Eel, at least the freshwater eel called unagi, was not having a great summer when we were there. True, any summer in which someone drives a spike into your head is pretty lousy, but unagi has been on the Seafood Watch red list for years, and in 2012 prices skyrocketed, indicating dwindling supply. This is bad. Eels have a complex lifecycle that makes them vulnerable to overfishing. Also, they are kind of dumb and easy to scoop out of rivers in mass quantities. Worse yet, they’re ugly; it’s harder to drum up sympathy for a slimy, snakelike fish than for a majestic whale. Finally, when prepared well, eels are among the most delicious of all fish. They offer the earthiness of catfish; a firm but yielding texture; slippery, edible skin; and the delightful crunch of tiny pin bones. It is hard to make eel sound tasty to someone who hasn’t tried it, but isn’t the same true of oysters, beef tongue, or plenty of smelly and gooey tropical fruits?
So why did I eat it? It was there, it was delicious, and everyone else was eating it. Do I care about sustainability issues? Yes. Did I care enough that I was able to resist the temptation to eat this delicious, endangered fish? No.
Iris and I went to the eel restaurant in early July, just the two of us. We ordered the only thing on the menu, unaju, barbecued eel fillet on rice in a lacquer box. There was a young guy working alongside the old man, and he wanted to make sure we understood that each serving was 1800 yen, or about $23. (See? Expensive.) The old man waved his hand at this and said something like, “Let them order their food in peace.” He reheated two skewers of eel fillets over the fire, brushed them with sauce, and then removed the bamboo skewers by twisting each one smartly before sliding it out. The younger guy placed the eel meat atop our rice and then pulled out the world’s coolest cooking utensil. My jaw literally dropped. I looked over at Iris. Her mouth was hanging open, too. The world’s coolest cooking utensil is a sauce ladle. The cup at the end of the handle is a cube with three thin spouts emerging from the side, better to dispense sauce thinly over a wide area. It’s a tiny watering can for sauce—in this case, sweet eel sauce, made from eel bone broth enriched with soy sauce, sugar, and mirin.
Iris and I finished every bite of our eel and rice, paid our $46, and then ran home to tell Laurie about the amazing sauce ladle. Later, I found the ladle for sale at the big DIY store Tokyu Hands (suggested motto: “Get Handsy!”), earning several minutes of hero worship from Iris.
In the days leading up to the Day of the Ox, our local eel place posted a sign inviting people to preorder their eel or, presumably, risk spending the remainder of the summer in a lugubrious pallor. I thought about preordering but decided it would overtax my fragile language abilities, so instead I just sent a cute kid to go buy our eel on the day itself.
Iris headed down the street, her takoyaki coin purse swinging around her neck. She was gone for a long time. Finally, she returned with a beautifully wrapped package. “I made some new friends at the eel place,” she reported. Apparently, eight-year-old American girls don’t come in to buy eel every day. The package contained two eel skewers and two tiny red-capped bottles of eel sauce. I heated the fillets in the toaster oven. Removing the skewers was not nearly as easy as the eel guy had made it look, but eventually I gave it the right dose of elbow grease and placed the eel over rice. Iris poured the sauce into the world’s coolest cooking utensil and sauced our unadon, which is what you call eel on rice when it’s not served in a fancy box. It was the perfect lunch, and I can report conclusively that my stamina never flagged for the rest of the summer, except on days of muggy, 88-degree heat—that is, every day.
After the Day of the Ox, every time we walked past the eel place, anyone working there waved and shouted, “Iris!” I realize this is the kind of hey-look-at-us story that sends real travel writers into a lugubrious pallor, but come on, it was great.
In Oishinbo: Izakaya Pub Food, an American reporter wants to impress his boss with his knowledge of Japanese cuisine, so Yamaoka and Kurita take the visiting foreigners to a skewer restaurant in Nakano.
“You must make great yakitori,” says the American boss.
The chef looks stricken. “We don’t do yakitori,” he replies, indicating an anatomical wall chart of the Japanese eel, Anguilla japonica. The chef then grills up ten different skewers of eel, including the spine, the liver, the fin, and the guts. (How you get fish guts to stay on a skewer, I do not know.)
Before the trip, I went onto Flickr to look at pictures of Nakano, and I recognized a frame from this Oishinbo book stuck on the window of a building. That’s odd, I thought. Maybe they sell manga. Or maybe some Oishinbo fan went crazy with wheat paste and started posting bills.
It took far too long for me to come to the following realizations:
The building didn’t look like a comic shop.
In fact, it looked more like a restaurant.
This prompted two questions:
Wait, could the place in the book be based on an actual restaurant?
Am I looking at the ten-skewers-of-eel restaurant?
I found the answers on Tabelog.com, Japan’s answer to Yelp: yes and (fist pump) yes! The restaurant is called Kawajirō, and it’s a seven-minute walk from our apartment, in a tiny Mediterranean-style public square just east of the entrance to Nakano Broadway mall.
Kawajirō is a tiny restaurant, one of the most popular places in Nakano, and the most highly rated on Tabelog. It’s the only restaurant in Nakano where we ever saw people line up. The first time we tried to go there, we failed. We showed up around 6 p.m. and got in line. By 7:30, the line hadn’t moved at all, and so we left and got tempura instead.
Between 6:00 and 7:30, however…
There is a soba noodle shop whose kitchen opens onto the same courtyard as the front door of Kawajirō. The soba chef, tall, bald, and wrinkled, glowered in the doorway, staring at the line of people waiting to get into his rival. His stare was so intense, it was like he was just trying to make us burst into flames. I never saw anybody go into the soba place.
Meanwhile, an old man rode up on a bicycle. People in Tokyo use their bicycles to lug all sorts of parcels: multiple children, groceries, home improvement supplies, and so on. This guy had something on the back of his bike covered by a large sheet of burlap. A saw hung precariously off the side of the bike. The man hopped off his bike and pulled aside the burlap to reveal a large chunk of ice. He sawed off a large brick and carried it into another restaurant, then returned, secured his load, and rode off. In retrospect, I can’t believe we didn’t go to that restaurant. If Portland hipsters aren’t making artisan ice deliveries yet, what is wrong with them?
The following night, we lined up thirty minutes before Kawajirō opened. The soba chef was there again, doing his thing. Possibly he died years ago, penniless, and his angry ghost shows up every night looking for revenge.
Finally, we stepped through the bead curtain for the first seating at the bar. (The place is all bar except for one table crammed into the back, and what seemed to be a private upstairs room.) I was nervous about how to order, since I have no idea what the parts of the eel are called in Japanese, but everyone was ordering the set menu, with six assorted skewers, and we did the same. The extremely handsome chef stood at the front of the restaurant tending the grill. He wore a summery but tailored blue button-down and seemed impossible to ruffle, like President Obama. Whenever he needed to salt the food, he held a fistful of loaded-up skewers over the floor and scattered them with sea salt, and as he finished each batch of skewers, he dipped them in sauce and dealt them out to diners like cards.
We ate spiral-wrapped eel meat. We ate guts. We ate liver, which is somehow different from guts. We (mostly Iris) ate two bowls of crispy fried eel backbones. We ate eel meat wrapped around burdock root and eel fin wrapped around garlic chives. We ate smoked eel that tasted
like Jewish deli food. I ate better than anyone, because I was the only member of the family willing to try the offal. All of it was precisely like Oishinbo, down to the eel anatomy chart on the wall. It was like stepping into a book, Neverending Story–style, and isn’t a Luck Dragon just a big furry eel?
At the end of the meal, we handed over some cash, and the woman behind the counter pulled down a DuckTales cookie can and fished around in it for our change.
Later that night, as we were falling asleep...
Iris: Those were some good eel bones.
Me: You said it.
Iris: That was a funny “cash register.”
Me: You’re doing air quotes again, aren’t you?
On the River
浅草
When you go to Asakusa you feel that you have shaken off tomorrow’s work.
—Saitō Ryokū
Asakusa has always been one of the easiest Tokyo neighborhoods to love and one that has fascinated Western tourists. Edward Seidensticker’s idiosyncratic (that is, cranky) history, Tokyo from Edo to Shōwa, is essentially a five hundred–page lament about how Asakusa isn’t what it used to be before the fire of 1923.
Don’t believe a word of it. Asakusa’s striking Kaminarimon (“thunder”) Gate still deserves to be the gateway to Tokyo for any visitor. 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.
Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo Page 16