Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo (15 page)

Soon we were joined by Akira’s friends Riku (“call me Rikuchan”) and Eddie, who tested my Japanese skills further. Akira speaks very good English but did a good job of playing language cop when I got tired of speaking Japanese and tried to slide back into my native tongue. “
Gambatte
, Matthew-san!” he would say. You can do it! I managed to divine that Riku had once been to Seattle and that quiet Eddie plays guitar in a band with Akira. I think the explanation involved more air guitar than spoken language, however.

We ordered more food, including pasta salad and curly fries with ketchup, but also
pō-pō
, a rolled crepe spread with miso and ground meat, which I loved. My language skills were not helped along when we switched from beer to
awamori,
Okinawan whiskey. Several times I made it ten words deep into a subordinate clause before abandoning the whole sentence like a sinking ship.

My only complaint about izakaya nights can be summed up in one word: smoke. Seattle banned smoking in bars and restaurants years ago, and to be confronted by a cloud of cigarette smoke in an otherwise welcoming restaurant felt like a betrayal, a literally smoking fissure in the fabric of civilization. But I had no reason to feel superior, because most of Tokyo has banned smoking
on the street.

Yoyogi Park, in Harajuku, is
best known for its gaggles of bizarrely clad fashionistas who congregate there on Sundays. We went one rainy Sunday and saw no gothic Lolitas or other rare species; a cafe employee said the rain had likely scared them off, but apparently the weekly parade has been growing sparse even on sunny days. Either that or the latest cosplay style is to dress up as trees, Macbeth-style.

We did, however, find a wishing tree for
tanabata.
Tanabata is a summer festival during which, among other things, people write their wishes on strips of paper and tie them to a bamboo tree. Then, in August, Santa comes and…wait, wrong tradition.

Iris, not usually known for practical wishes (she seems to actually believe that a trillion dollars is something she might stumble into), wrote “Iris loves takoyaki” on her paper, and her wish came true again and again.

I

Takoyaki are octopus balls—not, thankfully, in the anatomical sense. They’re a spherical cake with a chunk of boiled octopus in the center, cooked on a special griddle with hemispherical indentations. If you’re familiar with the Danish pancakes called
aebleskivers,
you know what a takoyaki looks like; the pan is also similar.

Takoyaki are not unknown in the U.S., but I’ve only ever seen them made fresh at cultural festivals. Iris is a big fan, but I’ve always been more into the takoyaki aesthetic than the actual food. Takoyaki are always served in a paper or wooden boat and usually topped with mayonnaise, bonito flakes, shredded nori, and takoyaki sauce.

The presentation is terrific. Iris and I once spent several days painstakingly assembling a model takoyaki stand a friend bought for us at a Japanese imports store. We rolled modeling clay into takoyaki balls and basted them with brown paint, folded tiny paper boats, and even sculpted a fake cast-iron takoyaki pan. When people come to visit, Iris proudly leads them to the bookshelf and says, “We built this takoyaki stand!”

“That’s great,” says the guest. “What’s a takoyaki stand?”

This never gets old, nor do I ever tire of watching people blanch when I throw the phrase “octopus balls” into a conversation. The takoyaki ball itself, however, whether freshly made or bought in the Uwajimaya freezer case and nuked, is just a mushy dough ball with a tiny, chewy nub of tasteless mollusk inside.

Or so I thought.

II

Remember all the way back at the beginning when we walked from Nakano Station into the Sun Mall and turned right at Gindaco? This time, let’s stop for lunch.

Gindaco is a chain restaurant, so you can also find it in plenty of other places in Tokyo. (Oddly, it’s one of the few restaurants in Japan with many drive-through locations, though not in central Tokyo. Given that the food is hot, saucy balls of dough, this seems as safe as a drive-through knife shop.)

When you visit Gindaco, spend some time watching the cooks make takoyaki before ordering, because it’s an amazing free show. The shop has an industrial-sized takoyaki griddle with dozens of hot cast iron wells, each one about an inch and a half in diameter. The cook squirts the grill with plenty of vegetable oil. She dunks a pitcher into a barrel of pancake batter and sloshes it over the grill, then strews the whole area with negi
,
ginger, and huge, tender octopus chunks. Some of Gindaco’s purple tentacles are two inches long. This cooks for a little while, then the cook tops off the grill with more batter until it’s nearly full.

Up to this point, the process looks haphazard, but then she whips out the skewers. Using only the same slender bamboo skewers you’d use for making kebabs, she begins slicing through the batter in a grid pattern and forming a ball in each well. Somehow she herds this ocean of batter into a grid of takoyaki in a minute or two.

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.

III

We spent a day on Odaiba, an artificial island in Tokyo Bay. Odaiba is one of my least favorite places in Tokyo. Grumpy dad alert: it’s far from everything and it’s mostly a collection of shopping malls.

Iris loves Odaiba. We went there to do a few of her favorite things: ride a Ferris wheel (I’m afraid of heights), ride around in self-driving Toyotas (I prefer trains), and go to a mall which replicated old Hong Kong and featured two floors of Chinese restaurants (now we are speaking my language). Unfortunately for me, the Chinese-themed mall had shut down. Damn you, Odaiba! Fortunately for Iris, the Chinese area had been replaced with Legoland. Iris and I hung out at Legoland for a couple of hours, admiring the Lego replica of Tokyo, complete with a ten-foot-tall SkyTree, Sensō-ji temple, and moving trains. We stuck around long enough for Iris to forget about the Ferris wheel, and then we looked for something to eat. That’s when we stumbled on the 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. Tokyo boasts similar food theme parks devoted to ramen, gyōza, ice cream, and desserts. If you don’t like takoyaki, you’re not entirely out of luck: the stand we visited, Aizuya, also offers
radioyaki.
You would think radioyaki would mean “takoyaki that grows arms and legs after exposure to nuclear radiation,” but no, it replaces the octopus with
konnyaku
and beef gristle. Konnyaku is a noncaloric gelatin made from the root of a plant closely related to the stinking corpseflower.

On the counter at Aizuya, they’d put out a copy of Oishinbo featuring their restaurant, which was one of the earliest takoyaki places in Osaka. Aizuya serves only naked takoyaki, without toppings, which made Iris very happy because she is eight and suspicious of all condiments. I did my best to make conversation with the countermen. “Oishinbo!” I said. “I like Oishinbo. I read it at home. I like takoyaki.” That was as far as I got. Luckily, by then the takoyaki were ready. We ate them next to a wall mural depicting the Odaiba Ferris wheel with takoyaki instead of ride cars. The takoyaki were...well, I still preferred Gindaco. (I definitely recommend the chewy radioyaki, even if you don’t think you’re a fan of beef gristle and corpseflower starch.)

The fact that my favorite takoyaki come from a chain restaurant probably says a lot about my plebeian tastes. Still, the takoyaki museum is one of my favorite places in Tokyo, for two reasons. First, it sent Laurie into an existential haze. She kept looking around and saying, “I can’t believe we’re in a takoyaki museum.” In Seattle, takoyaki are some weird food that Iris and I discovered deep in the freezer case at Uwajimaya. In Tokyo, there is a whole theme park devoted to them.

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.
We bought Iris a smiling takoyaki coin purse, and she bought herself a cute little red octopus. She named it Tako, and it lives in her bed. You can buy takoyaki postcards, takoyaki-flavored snack foods, and tell-all takoyaki chef memoirs. I made up the last part, but who knows? I did not make up the coin-operated takoyaki carnival video games, of which there were two: Takoyaki Heroes and Takoyaki Sniper.

There are still five takoyaki places at the museum I haven’t tried, so I’m ready to head back to Odaiba any time.

IV

We signed up for a home visit with a Tokyo family through a company called
Nagomi Visit
. For a nominal fee, we’d get to visit an average Japanese family at their house for lunch. We requested a family with kids, and the agency matched us with the Usui family of Saitama prefecture.

“Have you tried takoyaki?” asked mom Kanae Usui when we got to their house.

“I LOVE takoyaki,” replied Iris. The family’s takoyaki grill was sitting, ready for action, on a kid-sized table. Kanae took the batter and a tray of octopus chunks out of the fridge and put the kids to work. Much of the cooking, and this is no exaggeration, was done by Nao Usui, age 2. She stood authoritatively at the head of the takoyaki griddle with her skewers, distributing octopus and coaxing the batter into balls exactly like they do at Gindaco. I’ve been a food writer for over ten years and have watched countless hours of Food Network and dozens of chefs doing their thing live, and I have never seen a feat of cooking as impressive as Nao Usui making takoyaki. I took a bunch of photos, and she shot me a look to say, “Hey, dumbass, how do you expect me to do my job while holding up the peace sign, as required in all photos by Japanese law?” The takoyaki were much better than the ones at the museum, although I would say that about anything cooked by Nao Usui.

V

Our final takoyaki surprise happened at Mister Donut.

They don’t make an octopus doughnut at Mister Donut, although it wouldn’t be any weirder than their Double Karepan, a stick of pink fried dough with two pockets of curry inside, each a different flavor. (It’s not bad at all.) What they do make is doughnut holes served in a paper takoyaki boat. When Iris saw this, she devised a complex system of justice for anyone who passed Mister Donut and witnessed the takoyaki doughnut holes without buying them, or—worse—eating them without bringing home Iris’s fair share. All of the punishments under this system, coincidentally, involved giving Iris extra doughnuts. This is probably one of the early signs your kid will be getting an MBA.

Tom Cavanagh:
How does a chocolate bar that looks exactly like a Kit Kat taste completely like melon?

Michael Ian Black:
They can do anything in Japan.

—Mike and Tom Eat Snacks

Tokyo is a city of
sweets, and there is a Berlin Wall down the middle of its sweet tooth, separating traditional Japanese confections (
wagashi
) from Western ones (
yōgashi
). Wagashi are high art, the zenith of Japan’s obsession with presentation, packaging, wordplay, and gift-giving, and the ultimate test of a foreigner’s tolerance for bean paste. Wagashi shops look like jewelry stores or museum cases, displaying perfect little seasonal confections under glass. The candies themselves, often meant to be eaten with matcha as part of the tea ceremony, are—to radically oversimplify the incredibly diverse world of wagashi—most commonly fusions of mochi, red and white bean paste, and fruits, and sometimes vegetables, herbs, syrups, and other flavorings. In size and shape, wagashi resemble the offerings at European chocolate shops; in color and flavor, not so much.

To anyone who grew up with beans on the savory side of the plate, the Japanese way with bean paste is a hard sell. I know plenty of Westerners who’ve developed an appreciation for the stuff, and I feel provincial not to be able to count myself among them, but the smooth, reddish paste of sweetened, mashed
azuki
beans is just too much like the contents of a bean burrito. (My friend Rachael has lived in Japan several times and reports that it took her six years to become a bean paste fan.) You’ll see white bean paste, which tastes similar, and green bean paste, which may be made from English peas or from edamame. The edamame paste, called
zunda-an,
is a specialty of the Tōhoku region and my favorite of the bean pastes. I love edamame, and eating them wrapped in mochi or in a crepe isn’t too much of a stretch.

Tales of wagashi gave Laurie bad premonitions: she has a powerful sweet tooth and a fear of bean paste. Luckily, Japan is known for reverse engineering Western inventions and perfecting them, and nowhere is this done to more delicious effect than in the world of desserts.

What is the cure for 90-degree weather that settles on you like a sweaty Sasquatch by 10 a.m.? In two words, ice cream. We ate so much ice cream, it’s a wonder we didn’t start playing “Turkey in the Straw” when we walked around. Baskin-Robbins has shops all over Tokyo, and they feature some local flavors like green tea and Popping Shower, studded with Pop Rocks. We stopped in at Baskin-Robbins near the beginning of July and sat across from a poster of a three-scoop cone with the slogan
CHALLENGE THE TRIPLE.
This became something of a rallying cry. If you’re not seizing the opportunities presented by life in Tokyo or life in general, you’re not challenging the triple. And the best place to challenge the metaphorical triple is at Dairy Chiko.

Dairy Chiko, in the basement of Nakano Broadway, is a surrealist ice cream shop known for octuple-decker soft-serve cones. You can also order a smaller cone with less than one billion calories, but the draw at Dairy Chiko is watching how other people eat their towering cones of vanilla, yuzu, milk tea, matcha, ramune, orange, strawberry, and chocolate (flavors may vary). Walking while eating is taboo in Japan, and Dairy Chiko has no seating area, so people loiter near the stand, two to a cone, drawing spoons up the sides of the ice cream, trying to forestall the inevitable. Old ladies, meanwhile, usually order a small matcha cone and eat it with a spoon, avoiding the shame of a green milk mustache. Near Dairy Chiko is a cafe with a public seating area and a very angry-looking drawing of an eight-layer cone with the international
NO
symbol superimposed on it.

Soft-serve ice cream, called “soft cream,” is much more popular in Tokyo than hard ice cream. I’ve always been something of a soft cream partisan and consider the Dairy Queen Peanut Buster Parfait a perfect dish. In Tokyo, you can find soft ice cream made with the finest ingredients, as at the Ladurée Soft Cream stand at Shinjuku station, where I had probably the best chocolate ice cream of my life and where Laurie paid over $1 for a topping of two fresh raspberries. Outside a public park one day, a cafe stand did a brisk business selling iced coffee and tea and cones of soy milk (
tōnyu
) soft cream. My friend Akira shared a bite with me, and as the smooth, earthy stuff melted on my tongue, I thought about the ignominious fate of soy milk in America. Until recently, I knew soy milk only as that stuff in the aseptic carton that ruins the lattes of the lactose-intolerant; real soy milk is something different, and a real soy ice cream cone is pure pleasure.

Ice cream lovers in Tokyo spend a lot of time with their heads in convenience store freezer cases. The most obvious difference between Japanese and American ice cream bars is that if the Japanese bar promises something crispy, it will damn well be crispy. The Haagen-Dazs Crispy Sandwich, for example, is a slim bar of ice cream between two delicate wafers. How do they keep the wafers from getting soggy? Is it a layer of shellac? Maybe it’s best not to ask. Crepes, soft but not mushy, are also a frequent player in ice cream bars.

Near the end of the month I discovered my single favorite ice cream treat, the Black Thunder bar, a chocolate ice cream bar on a stick filled with crunchy chocolate cookie chunks. I also tried its sister product, the vanilla White Thunder, but in the immortal words of Wesley Snipes:
always bet on Black Thunder.

Iris and I also became mildly obsessed with Zachrich, a triangular Choco Taco–like bar that looked like a run-over sugar cone, coated with chocolate on the inside and filled with mint ice cream. And Iris often selected Coolish, a foil canteen of soft-serve that you warm with your hands until it’s just melted enough to suck out through the spout. (All of these names, incidentally, are in English; I’m not translating them.)

If I’m making it sound like we went around eating dessert all the time, it’s because we went around eating dessert all the time. That’s why they call it vacation. A day that ended with Black Thunder probably began with a trip to Mister Donut.

The story of Mister Donut begins in the U.S., where it was a Dunkin’ Donuts competitor in the 1950s. The American division was eventually acquired by Dunkin’, but the chain still thrives in Japan and is now as Japanese as Yoshinoya or Hanamaru Udon. (There is exactly one Mister Donut remaining in the U.S., in suburban St. Louis.) Most of the doughnuts will be familiar to Western eyes, but the signature Pon de Ring gets its chewy texture from mochi; matcha doughnuts are always available; and they’ve occasionally offered a jelly doughnut filled with red bean paste.

On our first trip to Japan, I promised Iris that when we returned, we’d sign up for a Mister Donut point card and earn a prize. This turned out to be a snap. When we’d racked up 100 points (this was not hard to do; in addition to the doughnuts, the iced coffee at Mister Donut is superb), Iris perused the prize chart and selected a tenugui imprinted with Pon de Lion, Mister Donut’s mascot, whose mane is a Pon de Ring doughnut.

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 Jiyū
gaoka 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 Jiyū
gaoka 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
.