Eating Japanese Culinary Time Warp Cuisine

by David Farley on

I just flew 7,000 miles to eat a Salisbury steak with a side of ketchup-laced spaghetti. Well, okay, that’s not the only reason I’m in Tokyo, but have to admit when I first learned about yoshoku cuisine my anticipation to try it trumped all the tiny ramen restaurants I’d go to and even the Tsukiji fish market for just-pulled-from-the-sea fresh sushi.

Yoshoku cuisine is, after all, like eating in a timewarp, like stepping back into another dimension in time and space. After all, Americans relegated Salisbury steak to the TV dinner decades ago, not to be found outside of bottom shelf of the freezer section in suburban grocery stores. So why, you ask, would a westerner go to Japan and eschew the garden of Japanese culinary delights for this westernized Japanese cuisine?

Besides the fact that it’s historically frozen food and that most of it is actually quite good, let’s go back about 150 years. Japan had been closed off for centuries. But what is known as the Meiji Restoration – when the emperor opened up the country and westerners, mostly Americans, British, and Dutch – changed all that. According to the story, the Japanese, undernourished at the time, were amazed at how big and tall the westerners were, so they started eating like them too. And since then, yoshoku – which means “western cuisine,” by the way, and that name hardly does it justice – has really barely changed.

But as I sat in Homitei, a yoshoku restaurant that opened in the 1930s, my Tokyo-based friend and yoshoku dining companion, Dave Conklin (who gives bike tours of Tsukiji fish market and has an advanced degree in Japanese history) told me it was more than that. “The Americans and British had colonial attitudes to eating the local cuisine – meaning they wouldn’t eat it,” he told me, as I cut into my “steak” and he chipped away at a crab salad doused with mayonnaise. “So they set up restaurants, usually in hotels, that served Western food. And Japanese were cooking this stuff for the westerners.” Eventually, the Japanese adopted many of the dishes but put their own Japanese spin on them. And, like where we were eating now, opened their own yoshoku restaurants, not for Westerners but for Japanese.

Conklin added that in the 1920s a local artist created plastic food of western dishes so the Japanese would know what the food looked like before ordering it. “Ironically,” he added, “today so many restaurants here now display plastic food of Japanese dishes so westerners and other non-Japanese tourists will know what Japanese food looks like.”

Interestingly, I spoke to two high-profile westerner chefs working in Tokyo — David Myers who just opened an eponymous restaurant in the Ginza district and Nadine Waechter, the executive chef at the Park Hyatt Tokyo — and neither had ever even heard of yoshoku cuisine. The young Japanese I spoke to about yoshoku, though were very enthusiastic. My friend Koji beamed with surprise when I mentioned it, his mouth salivating at the thought of ketchup-kissed stir-fried spaghetti.

But it’s not all TV dinners. In addition to the Salisbury steak drenched in gravy I’m eating (called hambagoo here), there’s also menchi katsu, a deep fried panko-encrusted hamburger; Neapolitan spaghetti which is stir fried and drenched in ketchup (there’s really nothing Neapolitan about it); there are various croquettes and there’s also curry rice, to name a few.

The following day I ate at Taimeiken, which opened in 1931, in the Nihonbashi district to try one of the most famous yoshoku dishes: omurice, which is exactly what it (almost) sounds: an omelet filled with rice sitting next to a puddle of ketchup. There was a line out the door and the place was packed with young people, silverware in hands, enjoying this Japanese comfort food, dishes in front of them that are both familiar and odd to me at the same time. This is, after all, what makes travel fun in the increasingly homogenized 21st century: to feel like we’ve landed on a different planet and found a quasi-parallel society living on it, but as if somewhat different historical events and forces have shaped it just enough to continue giving us wonderment. .

Photo of the day (9.23.10)

by Meg Nesterov on


Some photos beg more questions than they answer. Flickr user Marisoleta snapped this statue in Nagasaki, Japan, and the caption notes that the figure is Kannon atop a turtle-shaped temple, surrounded by little children. Kannon is the Japanese Buddhist goddess of compassion, which may account for the children, but what about the turtle? She is also known as a protector of seamen, which could also extend to sea turtles. Fun fact: camera company Canon is named for the goddess as well. The temple also includes a Foucault’s pendulum, one of the largest in the world, to demonstate the rotation of the earth and a bell that chimes daily to commemorate the atomic bomb explosion.

Capture an interesting shrine on your travels, or any giant turtles? Submit to the Gadling Flickr Pool and it could be our next Photo of the Day.

Adventures in Eating: The Other Kind of Sushi in Tokyo

by David Farley on

“I serve raw meat,” said the chef, as I approached an empty seat at the counter.

“Did you hear me?,” he said. “Raw. Meat.”

He said it as if he were trying to scare me away, a verbal tone akin to “inadvertently” lifting up his shirt above his waste to reveal a handgun tucked into his pants. I nodded and sat down. After all, I didn’t just happen upon this restaurant by accident. I was in Tokyo and had read on a food message board about a small place in the back alleys of the Ebisu neighborhood that served the raw meat from your favorite farm animals as sushi.

Meat sushi, particularly of the horse variety, isn’t the most uncommon menu item in Japan. The Japanese began consuming “basashi,” as they call it, due to necessity. Mid-19th-century Japan was not the foodie paradise it is today; the people were undernourished and needed protein. So when the hungry people of pre-Meiji Japan looked around, they saw a galloping dinner with four legs and a tail and began sharpening their knives. Still, I gathered from the chef’s hesitation at my presence, raw horse meat is not something a lot of non-Japanese seek out when they’re in town.

Besides, the place was hard enough to find, so I wasn’t going to turn back now. I only had a vague idea of its whereabouts and wandered the narrow streets, popping into restaurants to ask if they served meat sushi. When I’d get a blank stare in return, I’d say, “Sushi: neeeigh,” doing my best equine imitation. Everyone I had asked shrugged. Except for one guy, a chef in an izakaya, who took me by the arm and led me here, to a narrow, covered alleyway flanked with countertop eateries. This place, I later learned, was called Wakadaisho (1-7-4 Ebisu Yokochowai, Tokyo, 03-3444-7005).

The chef plopped a piece of purple, veiny meat in front of me, stretched out on a thumb-sized bunch of rice and said, “Horse.”

The meat was all texture, like masticating on a chewy piece of Play-Doh. The thirty-something couple next to me, slid over a bowl of edamame and gestured for me to indulge. Either I was now part of the horse-eating club or they were taking pity on me. As the chef would plate sushi, I’d ask him to identify each piece: horse neck, cow lungs, chicken breast. It was a virtual farm of raw meat at this tiny 12-seat eatery. The chef, whose name was Hiraoki Toda, said he had only been a meat sushi chef for three months. He had previously been a bartender, but his love of raw meat was so strong it inspired a career change. And from the look of it, he was doing well: the restaurant was full with young people munching their way to raw meat Valhalla.

Next up: a gooey, chunky, pale concoction wrapped in seaweed. I was afraid to ask. But before I could, Toda nodded at me and said: “Raw pork guts.”

I know what you’re saying: yum! For many people, this entire meal probably goes against all things that are good and civilized in the world. And this finale-raw pork-seems as counter-intuitive as eating road kill. After all, how many times did our mothers tell us never to eat raw pork, as if some day we might be stupid enough to actually do it. I guess I am: I commenced chewing, my taste buds absorbing the chewy texture and the porky flavor. When I was done, the couple next to me, slid over a bowl of raw chicken skin. Then raised their pints of beer to me and I followed. “Kompai,” we said, clinking glasses. I came for the raw meat, but I stayed for the new friends I made while I was there.

Baby snow leopard captured on camera for first time in Bhutan

by Kraig Becker on

Snow leopards are amongst the most elusive and shy creatures on the planet. The big cats live at high altitude and are rarely seen by man, let alone captured on camera. But the BBC is reporting that a snow leopard cub has been caught on video for the first time when it triggered a camera trap in the mountains of Bhutan recently.

The video was captured by a camera trap that was set by a BBC film crew who were hoping to get some footage of the rare animals in their natural habitat. The device has a built-in motion sensor that is designed to turn the camera on when something moves within range of the lens. This allows a crew to set up cameras and leave them in the field for extended periods without the need for a cameraman or requiring the batteries to be charged on a daily basis. The team then returns every few days to review the findings and check the status of the device.

This particular trap was activated when the young snow leopard wandered into range. After surveying the area nervously, the cub begins to wander up hill directly at the lens. Looking straight into the camera, the cat sniffs it curiously before slowly moving on. The entire encounter was a brief one, but for the veteran BBC crew, it was the shot of a lifetime.

The footage of the young leopard will air this week on the BBC’s nature special Lost Land of the Tiger a show that also captured video of tigers living at higher altitudes than had ever been recorded before. It seems this particular film crew had lightning strike twice while producing this show.

[Photo credit: Aaron Logan via WikiMedia]

Photo of the Day (9.21.10)

by Stephen Greenwood on

Friendly photo subject, or dangerous primate? Most animal experts would gladly tell you that a monkey bearing its teeth is trying to communicate signs of aggression, no matter just how cute the aggression may be. However, this picture was one of those frames taken at exactly the right moment. Flickr user hsemock caught this sleepy monkey at the end of a yawn and walked away (unscathed) with a great portrait.

Although it may appear that the subject is British, this chance encounter actually took place while the photographer was trekking through the jungles of Indonesia.

Do you have photos of furry friends from around the globe? Share them with us! Submit to the Gadling Flickr Pool and it could be our next Photo of the Day.