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. .