Rice, Noodle, Fish (23 page)

(Ioanna Morelli)

Vending-machine coffee can be sickly sweet, but Black Boss delivers the caffeine high without the sugar crash. Red buttons on the machine mean hot coffee; blue means cold.

(Ioanna Morelli)

Even more appetizing than its name is the salty-sweet rush of electrolytes it delivers. Pocari is for the morning after a long night of
chuhai
and Yebisu.

(Ioanna Morelli)

A version of the highball made with shochu instead of whisky,
Chu-hi
contains twice as much alcohol as most beer. Best consumed as a pre-karaoke aperitif.

(Ioanna Morelli)

Lesser known but the best of Japan's major beers, malty and smooth. When you spot this rare beast in the vending wilderness, rustle up some change.

 

Conquering Japan's greatest cultural challenges

(Nathan Thornburgh)

Soft, slimy, with a fermented tang,
natto
is everything Westerners don't want in food. But the dish—made from soaked, steamed, and funkified soybeans—is served at breakfast through much of Japan. (It is also a common way to test a gaijin's appetite for real Japanese food.) How to handle? First, spike it with hot mustard and soy-based
tare
, then just close your eyes and think of England.

(Matt Goulding)

There are two genres of desserts in Japan.
Yogashi
are European-style cakes and pastries (universally excellent throughout Japan);
wagashi
are traditional Japanese sweets. The charms of
wagashi
can be elusive if you're not used to sweet rice, adzuki beans, and sticky textures for dessert. The trick is to embrace the subtlety: no blast of sugar means richer, earthier flavors.

(Matt Goulding)

You may regret having chosen a
ryokan
, a traditional Japanese inn, right around the time the innkeeper wakes everyone up for breakfast at 7:00 a.m. on Sunday. But don't rue: spending a day or two in a
ryokan
is the quickest route to understanding the futon-sleeping, robe-wearing, big-breakfasting, hot-tub-loving Japanese soul.

Sitting naked in a communal bath might not sound like a relaxing time, but when you slip into the therapeutic waters of a hot spring, all worries will evaporate. Prepare yourself: First, strip down. No bathing suits, no underwear. Cover tattoos (often banned because of their connection to yakuza). Scrub yourself head to toe. Now you're ready to soak it all up.

 

 

It starts with a
thwack
, the sharp crack of hard plastic against a hot metal surface. When the ladle rolls over, it deposits a pale-yellow puddle of batter onto the griddle. A gentle sizzle, as the back of the ladle spackles a mixture of eggs, flour, water, and milk across the silver surface. A crepe takes shape.

Next comes cabbage, chopped thin—but not too thin—and stacked six inches high, lightly packed so hot air can flow freely and wilt the mountain down to a molehill. Crowning the cabbage comes a flurry of tastes and textures: ivory bean sprouts, golden pebbles of fried tempura batter, a few shakes of salt, and, for an extra umami punch, a drift of dried bonito powder. Finally, three strips of streaky pork belly, just enough to umbrella the cabbage in fat, plus a bit more batter to hold the whole thing together. With two metal spatulas and a gentle rocking of the wrists, the mass is inverted. The pork fat melts on contact, and the cabbage shrinks in the steam trapped under the crepe.

Then things get serious. Thin wheat soba noodles, still dripping with hot water, hit the
teppan
, dancing like garden hoses across its hot surface, absorbing the heat of the griddle until they crisp into a bird's nest to house the cabbage
and crepe. An egg with two orange yolks sizzles beside the soba, waiting for its place on top of this magnificent heap.

Everything comes together: cabbage and crepe at the base, bean sprouts and pork belly in the center, soba and fried egg parked on top, a geologic construction of carbs and crunch, protein and chew, all framed with the black and white of thickened Worcestershire and a zigzag of mayonnaise.

This is
okonomiyaki
, the second most famous thing that ever happened to Hiroshima.

米 麺 魚

Fernando Lopez makes an unlikely candidate for one of Hiroshima's greatest
okonomiyaki
chefs. He was born in Guatemala City in 1963. His father worked for Guatemala's health services, spraying DDT to combat the plague of malaria that gripped Central America in the 1960s. He spent a lot of his time on the road, often in the beds of other women. “He wasn't a good man,” says Lopez.

His father had Mayan blood, with dark skin to match his dark hair. His mother was fair, with wavy hair and a sweet smile. When little Fernando was born with light skin, blue eyes, and curly hair, his father refused to believe the boy was his, and so Lopez was raised mainly by his grandmother, separate from his four brothers and two sisters.

Even when his father did finally accept Fernando as his own, it wasn't an easy relationship. At fifteen, Lopez decided to stand between the man he barely knew and a beating aimed for his mother, and years of abuse and philandering came to a head. His father left, never to come back, and the boy who'd grown up alone was left to absorb the blame for chasing away the man of the house.

Lopez survived, working hard to overcome the early challenges life had posed for him. He studied accounting for a year in college, and eventually took a job managing the books for a popular Italian restaurant in Guatemala City. He soon discovered that the managers were skimming off the top, along with other criminal activity, and he fretted over what to do with this sensitive information. When one of his coworkers turned up dead in a ditch, he knew it was time to leave Guatemala, possibly for good.

Fernando Lopez in the early moments of
okonomiyaki
prep

(Matt Goulding)

He landed in New Orleans on a visa sponsored by an uncle who had lived in the States for years. He planned to stay for three months to study English, but instead took a job busing tables at an Italian restaurant. The chef had a temper issue, and one day the entire kitchen staff walked out on him. He recruited Lopez to help out in the kitchen, but the young Guatemalan knew nothing about cooking. “He fired me every fifteen minutes. It was a mess.”

Soon after, while working as a dishwasher at the Fairmont, he met Andre LeDoux, a well-traveled hotel chef who would become his kitchen mentor—the first of a series of teacher-student relationships that would shape Lopez as a cook and a man. LeDoux made him a deal: Lopez would teach him Spanish, and he would teach Lopez how to cook. When LeDoux became chef of the French Quarter institute Arnaud's, he took Lopez with him, and Lopez's real education began in earnest. “At first you're a slave, you're everyone's bitch, and they can do whatever they want with you. But that's how you learn.” He moved from station to station, mastering the classics of the French Creole canon: shucking and roasting oysters, making roux for gumbo, sautéing frog legs in garlic butter. “There were twelve of us feeding six hundred people a night. People walked out on him. They couldn't take the stress. But I loved it.”

When LeDoux left Arnaud's to run the kitchen at the Sheraton Surfrider in Honolulu, Lopez followed him across the Pacific. The Sheraton's kitchen staff was on strike, so Lopez entered as a scab, stuffed in a van and slipped into the kitchen under the cover of darkness. He cooked nonstop for forty-three days
and nights, until the strike broke and Lopez was left without a place in the kitchen. He took a job as a valet at a hotel where, one night, a young Japanese woman in a beat-up Toyota Corolla with a bad paint job pulled into the parking lot and changed his life. “Nobody else wanted to park the car because it was so beat up, they thought they wouldn't get a tip.” He didn't get a tip, but he got a date out of it.

Makiko Yonezawa was from Hiroshima. Her family owned a
ryokan
back home, and she had come to Hawaii six years earlier to study the hotel industry. They connected right away, but Lopez's timing wasn't great: Makiko returned to Japan a few months after they started dating to help with the family business. Lopez soon followed with a surprise visit, a grand gesture of young love that didn't sit well with Makiko's parents. They didn't like the idea of their daughter dating a foreigner, but her father pulled Lopez aside before he returned to Hawaii and told him that if they remained together for a year, then they could talk seriously.

Fernando and Makiko married in 1992, in a small civil ceremony in Hawaii. For their honeymoon, they took Amtrak around the United States, looking for a place to build a life together. They loved Chicago, Denver, and Seattle, but the cold and the rain scared them off. In Phoenix they fell hard for the spice-charged food of the Southwest, and they hatched a plan to open a Tex-Mex restaurant together in Hawaii. But things didn't go exactly as planned. Real estate was outrageously expensive in Honolulu, and neither of them qualified for the kind of loan they would need to build a business. So in 1995, with dwindling prospects in the States, they made the move to the Far East, to southern Japan, transporting their dream of opening a Southwestern restaurant to the heart of Hiroshima.

米 麺 魚

People around town tell me to look for the giant wooden egg. “The Giant
Wooden Egg!” they say, raising their voices and stretching their wingspans out to mimic its shape—a brown oblong structure eight stories high, inside which I would find the secrets of Hiroshima's most sacred food.

The egg in question is home to Otafuku, Hiroshima's famous sauce maker, which doubles as the de facto museum to Hiroshima-style
okonomiyaki
. Maybe it's the exposed ribs, the empty spaces, the nearly naked aspect of the looming wooden structure, but the building looks less like an egg and more like the skeletal remains of the Atomic Bomb Dome, which stands as a memorial to the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. It seems like a grim architectural echo for the global headquarters of a company best known for its sticky-sweet
okonomiyaki
topping.

That echo, however, turns out to be intentional. Otafuku ties its sauce intimately to the city it comes from, and also to the defining horror that destroyed old Hiroshima and remade everything that followed. It was in the wake of that horror that
okonomiyaki
took shape.

Issen yoshoku
, “one-coin Western food,” gained popularity in the early 1900s as a cheap after-school snack for kids, a crepe rolled with onions and bean sprouts and often sold in candy shops. In the years immediately following the war, as the survivors of the bomb tried to stave off starvation, the snack became a vital part of Hiroshima's revival.

In a matter of seconds, the bomb leveled every eatery in the city center, in essence wiping Hiroshima's restaurant culture clean. With nothing else to work with, loose pieces of sheet metal, the bones of buildings lost to the bomb, became street
teppan
s, makeshift griddles heated from below with coal from the shipyard and used to cook whatever scraps of food could be thrown together: a few shreds of cabbage, loose vegetable bits, an egg or a touch of protein for the most fortunate. As American forces arrived in Japan with surplus wheat
supplies, cooks in Hiroshima used flour and water to stretch and bind the dish.

The Otafuku tour begins the
okonomiyaki
story a few years later, after the dust had settled, after the desperation had ebbed. On the main floor of the museum, the first stop is a reconstructed
okonomiyaki
ya-san from the 1950s. Like many of the early wave of
okonomiyaki
shops, it was connected to a home, perhaps with a small convenience store for daytime commerce, selling gum and cigarettes. More than anything, the ad hoc diners were a way for war widows to earn some money. The reconstructed space has the plastic feel of demonstration food, punctuated by a few original accents: metal
hera
(spatulas) from the period, a small black-and-white television with old newsreels, a menu board offering
okonomiyaki
with egg for 15 yen and without for 10.

As Japan recovered from the postwar depression,
okonomiyaki
became the cornerstone of Hiroshima's nascent restaurant culture. And with new variables—noodles, protein, fishy powders—added to the equation, it became an increasingly fungible concept. Half a century later it still defies easy description.
Okonomi
means “whatever you like,”
yaki
means “grill,” but smashed together they do little to paint a clear picture. Invariably, writers, cooks, and
oko
officials revert to analogies: some call it a cabbage crepe; others a savory pancake or an omelet. Guidebooks, unhelpfully, refer to it as Japanese pizza, though
okonomiyaki
looks and tastes nothing like pizza. Otafuku, for its part, does little to clarify the situation, comparing
okonomiyaki
in turn to Turkish pide, Indian chapati, and Mexican tacos.

There are two overarching categories of
okonomiyaki
: Hiroshima style, with a layer of noodles and a heavy cabbage presence, and Osaka or Kansai style, made with a base of eggs, flour, dashi, and grated
nagaimo
, sticky mountain yam. More than the ingredients themselves, the difference lies in the structure: whereas
okonomiyaki
in Hiroshima is carefully layered, a savory circle with five or six distinct layers, the ingredients in Osaka-style
okonomiyaki
are mixed together before cooking. The latter is so simple to cook that many restaurants let you do it yourself on tableside
teppan
s. Hiroshima-style
okonomiyaki
, on the otherhand, is complicated enough that even the cooks who dedicate their lives to its construction still don't get it right most of the time. (Some people consider
monjayaki
, a runny mass of meat and vegetables popularized in Tokyo's Tsukishima district, to be part of the
okonomiyaki
family, but if so, it's no more than a distant cousin.)