Rice, Noodle, Fish (8 page)

(Sander Jackson Siswojo)

烏賊
IKA (squid)

(Sander Jackson Siswojo)

大とろ
OTORO (fatty tuna)

(Sander Jackson Siswojo)

小鰭
KOHADA (gizzard shad)

(Sander Jackson Siswojo)

車海老
KURUMA EBI (prawn)

(Sander Jackson Siswojo)

穴子
ANAGO (eel)

(Sander Jackson Siswojo)

鰈
KAREI (flatfish)

(Sander Jackson Siswojo)

é°¹
KATSUO (skipjack tuna)

(Sander Jackson Siswojo)

蛤
HAMAGURI (surf clam)

(Sander Jackson Siswojo)

卵焼き
TAMAGOYAKI (omelet)

 

(Matt Goulding)

 

 

This is how it happens: You sit down at a long counter in a restaurant that feels like someone's kitchen. You are alone, a bit nervous, uncertain whether to order a drink or ask the man behind the bar how his day went. He senses your apprehension (after all, he doesn't see your kind around here too often), disappears for a second, then deposits an armful of half-drunk wine bottles before you. Close your eyes and point, he seems to be saying. You abide.

Eventually, the restaurant fills out. A couple in the corner play footsy beneath the gentle heat of the warming griddle. A party of four, the men with spiked hair, the women with skirts and thick-rimmed glasses, slide into the counter seats next to you.

With the first glass of wine, the stilted silence prevails. A plate of warm buffalo mozzarella appears, speckled with pink peppercorns, and something about that combination of tang and spice, cream and crunch, tells you that tonight will be different from the others you've spent in Japan.

With the second glass of wine, your neighbors look over and offer a
kanpai
. Another plate arrives, this one a few pieces of seared octopus, the purple tentacles curled like crawling vines around
a warm mound of barely mashed potatoes.

With the third glass of wine you begin to test your Japanese.
Watashi wa Matt-o desu. California kara kimashita.
Even the stone-faced salaryman eating pasta by himself in the corner cracks a smile. Glasses are emptied in your honor.

By the time you move on to sake, you feel the sweat above your eyebrows. At first you figure it's the spirited drinking and the aggressive round of selfies that has taken over the small restaurant, but then you see the old woman behind the counter testing the griddle, showering it with little drops of water that hiss on contact. She lays down a few strips of pork belly, then a ladleful of batter that she lovingly crisps in the sheen of rendered pork fat. She flips it, dresses it with a thick, dark sauce and shaved bonito flakes, which move like flamenco hands as they hit the hot surface, then slides it across the griddle toward you and smiles.

By the time you ask for the bill, the couple has their family album open on the bar and the group of four has nuzzled their stools so close you can smell the pinot gris on their words. You make plans to eat
hakozushi
with one, an off-duty chef; another wants to show you a secret bar that serves only grilled offal. (Back at the hotel, four friend requests await you on Facebook.)

When you leave, the entire restaurant stands to escort you out the door. The man shakes your hand vigorously. The woman hesitates, then wraps her arms around you. You stand there for a second, unsure of how to thank them for such a beautiful evening. Finally, you bow as low and as slowly as possible and step reluctantly away. As you reach the corner, you turn around one last time, just to make sure, and there they are, the entire restaurant, waiting calmly for you to disappear into the night.

米 麺 魚

A well-worn Japanese proverb has it that Tokyoites spend all their money
on footwear, Kyotoites on kimonos and formal attire. But Osakans save their funds for food and drink. There's a word for this Osakan propensity,
kuidaore
: to eat until you drop.

Unfortunately, most visitors to Japan will never have the chance to eat themselves stupid in Osaka, because most visitors from the United States and Western Europe don't come to Osaka. They go instead to Tokyo, to bask in the full bulk and breadth of the Japanese urban phenomenon. They travel by train to Kyoto, to tour temples and gardens and capture geisha with their zoom lenses. As well they should. Osaka can't compete with Tokyo's size or stature, and it doesn't have the ancient culture and spellbinding beauty of Kyoto. Travel literature does little to stoke outsider interest.
Lonely Planet
warns readers that “Osaka is not an attractive city”; other guidebooks have similarly grim tidings to share with readers.

But Osaka doesn't seem to mind. After 1,500 years of wildly yo-yoing fortunes, the city has developed something of a thick skin. In 645 Emperor Kotoku bestowed upon Osaka, then known as Naniwa, the honor of being Japan's first capital, only to abruptly move the government seat to Asuka just ten years later. In 744 Osaka was once again the capital of Japan, but this stint was even shorter: by 745 Nara had taken up the mantle as Japan's political center.

Come the sixteenth century, Osaka was back on center stage. In 1590 Hideyoshi Toyotomi, considered Japan's second great unifier, completed construction of Osaka Castle, the largest and grandest castle in the country. His son and successor, Hideyori, chose Osaka as his base, but his rival Ieyasu Tokugawa had other ideas. He laid siege to the castle in 1615, driving Hideyori and his mother to suicide, and established as Japan's capital Edo, which lives on today as modern-day Tokyo.

Osaka remained an important commercial center but suffered a series of blows over the next three centuries,
including a peasant uprising in 1855 that razed a quarter of the city, and the brunt of the American attack on the Kansai region during World War II. The Americans may have spared nearby Kyoto, but they hit Osaka with the full force of their firebombing campaign, taking aim at the city's railways and extensive industrial complex. Two thousand tons of bombs and ten thousand lives later, the city was reduced to a skeleton of its former self. The rebuild was hasty and in some ways haphazard, robbing Osaka of the pockets of old-world charm that contrast so brilliantly with the modernity in most of Japan's largest cities.

One thing that never changed in millennia of misfortune: Osaka's place as the eating center of Japan. Osaka earned the moniker “the nation's kitchen” as early as the fifteenth century, when its privileged position on the Osaka Bay created a rich, thriving merchant class with the means to eat well (even today
mokarimakka
, “Are you making money?” is a standard greeting in local dialect). Rice, seaweed, and other staples arrived from all parts of Japan, sent by feudal lords to sell in Osaka's massive system of commodity markets. The city also served as an entry point for Chinese, Korean, and other foreign ships bearing important edible cargo, deepening Osaka's place as a breeding ground for new tastes and big appetites. The table was set for a feast that continues today.

I've barely finished my bento from Tokyo Station when I step off the train in Osaka's Tenma district. Yuko Suzuki, a friend who works with high-end food producers in her adopted city, meets me at the station, and we plunge directly into Tenma's narrow, snaking streets in search of sustenance. Yuko was born to undertake these types of high-calorie missions; not only can she direct you to the city's best place for duck soba but she can also tell you where the restaurant buys its duck and how it grinds its buckwheat.

Our first stop is Tsugie, a smoky pocket square of a bar built around a large charcoal grill covered in unfamiliar anatomy. Tsugie serves
horumonyaki
, an Osaka specialty focusing on offal and other off-cuts left behind by most restaurants (and cities with less discerning palates). “In Kyoto, they'd throw this stuff away,” Yuko says as we settle into a corner of the bar, “but in Osaka it's the star of the meal.”

Grilling odd cow parts at Tsugie, one of Osaka's many offal dispensaries

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

Yuko tells me about the breed of young Osakan restaurateurs, the kind who have bucked the austere traditions of Japanese restaurant culture to focus on more pressing priorities, namely fun and deliciousness. That means open kitchens, louder music, more banter, less staff, bigger flavors, cheaper prices. Tsugie's owner, Takeshi Yamakawa, could be a poster boy for this ethos: after he takes our order, he bones out a few pounds of short ribs, switches the jazz for metal, fans a bed of charcoal, pours two perfect draft beers, and generally looks like he's having the greatest night of his life.

We start strong with chunks of the cow's third stomach, raw and slippery, slicked in sesame oil and green onion. Later come rosy pieces of flank steak and short rib, soft strips of raw heart with a yuzu chili paste, and gorgeous wedges of grilled tongue dripping with ginger-spiked soy sauce.

There are no seats at Tsugie; all of this is eaten standing up at the bar, washed down with generous amounts of
biru
and sake.
Tachinomi
, literally “drinking while standing,” is big in Japan these days, signs of a shifting dining constituency that values good food at low prices over the formalities that dominate
ryotei
, traditional Japanese restaurants. It may not have originated in Osaka, but wander the streets of Tenma after dark and you'll find a well-lubricated mix of salarymen, hipsters, and young couples
tachinomi
-ing like they invented the form.

Later, we deepen our investigation into the drinking-while-standing phenomenon at Mashika, an Italian izakaya in a hip pocket of Nishi-Ku. The
Italian-Japanese coalition is hardly new territory in this pasta-loving country, but Mashika is a different kind of mash-up. To start with, the space isn't really a restaurant at all. During the day, grandma sells cigarettes out of the small space. When the sun goes down, grandson fires up the burners as a crowd of thirtysomething Osakans drink Spritz and fill up on charcuterie, sashimi, and funky hybrids like spaghetti sauced with grated daikon and crowned with a wedge of ocean-sweet saury tataki. The menu follows no particular rules at all. Nobody seems to notice.

Eventually we are joined by Yumiko Nakamoto, editor of
Amakara-techo
, Osaka's largest food magazine. She takes us for a highball break at the spiffy Samboa, where tuxedoed barmen manage to turn a whisky soda into a transfixing ten-minute preparation.

“You see?” Yumiko says, pointing to the tux with the long silver spoon in his hand. “All the details matter. People are just so passionate about food in Osaka. People want to sit at counters, talk to their neighbors, talk to the chef.”

Yumiko, like most people I meet here, is not shy about her Osaka love. She also isn't shy about the rivalry with their Kansai neighbor.

“The French, the Chinese, and the Kyotoites have one thing in common: they all think they're number one. We're not worried about where we rank.”

The last stop of the opening Osaka salvo is at Tenpei, another shoebox joint with a six-seat counter and two wooden booths. The menu, all three words of it, hangs from the wall: Gyoza. Pickles. Beer. Gyoza is Japan's take on the Chinese pork dumpling, shrunk down and refined in the same way the Japanese like to shrink and refine most everything. Still, textbook drinking food.

We order the entire menu four times over and take a seat in the booth.

Emiko Urakami, who opened Tenpei in 1952, claims to have invented the one-bite gyoza, now the accepted style across the city. “I made them like that because my hands are small,” she says, rolling her palms over to show us the proof. “You see this line here; it means I'm going to be rich.” Whether or not she invented the form, she certainly mastered it: the mahogany gyoza skin glistens with griddle fat and shatters with the gentlest bite, giving way to a tide of warm pork juice. The table grows silent as we devour the dumplings.