tokyo food file

Nabeya – an old-school winter-time classic

Is there any food more comforting and satisfying than a nabe? Sitting around a bubbling casserole watching your dinner cook satisfies all the senses, nourishing the soul as you fill and heat your body. So why aren’t there more places like Nabeya?

 

My latest column in the Japan Times is a paean to the classic hotpot specialist, Nabeya. Here are a few more images to set the scene…

This old-time gem lies hidden away in the dingy, seen-better-days back streets of Otsuka, on the northernmost section of Tokyo's Yamanote loop line.

 

Chef Hiroshi Fukuda helped his father set up the restaurant in the hard-scrabble years following World War Two. Serving nabe hot pots was one of the simplest, most nutritious styles of cooking. The restaurant premises have been through a couple of incarnations since then – until the late 1980s, it was a wonderful old two-story wooden house; now Nabeya occupies the bottom two floors of a condominium building – but the style of cuisine remains unchanged. 

Fukuda is 79 now and still hale and spry. Over the years he has become an authority on the traditional food culture of Tokyo, with books to his name about the way people used to eat in the days when the city was still called Edo and was ruled by shoguns. 

 

 

He runs Nabeya with his wife, who greets you at the entrance, waits as you climb out of your shoes, and then shows you to your private room.

There are just four chambers, all traditional in style with tatami mats, shoji screens over the windows, timber beams and some beautiful scrolls and wall hangings. The largest of the upstairs rooms is the most impressive. 

 

If you (or your knees) are not that thrilled about sitting at a low table, there are two alternatives. The room on the ground floor is equipped with horigotatsu-style seating (a table with a leg-well) for parties of four to six.

If there are just two of you (or four smallish people), the room you are likely to be assigned is the smallest one (upstairs), which has a proper table and chairs (on the tatami). 

 

As the name proclaims, Nabeya serves only one kind of food – just the way it has done ever since it opened: nabe hot pots, cooked at the table in front of you.

Basically, the classic wintertime dish is a superlative chicken/seafood/ vegetable hot pot. Other places would just call this yose (mixed). But here it's been given a more poetic name: Horai-nabe, after a mountain of Buddhist legend.

It's a fixed (and fixed-price) menu, shared by everyone at the table. If you want to make adjustments to the ingredients, the time to do that is when you phone to reserve.

The meal always opens with a tray of simple zensai (appetisers). This is what we were served early this winter:

 

The sashimi (back right) will change with the season: it's saba (mackerel) here. And so will the aemono (dressed vegetables; back left). There will also be a small serving of tsukudani relish (in the center): in this case it's iwa-nori seaweed.

But the dishes at the front stay the same year-round: tamago-yaki omelet; and a couple of dried urume-iwashi (sardines), which are very simple but full of umami, and nice to chew on while sipping on beer or sake. 

Here's another zensai tray, this one served earlier last autumn… 

 

While you're nibbling into this, preferably with a flask of sake at hand, your nabe is being readied. The casserole itself contains a special dashi stock made from katsuobushi (bonito flakes) but, unusually, using no kombu (kelp).

Fukuda says this is the way it was done in the old days, when traders in Osaka monopolised the kombu trade from Hokkaido, leaving little for the folks in Edo. There's another reason: kombu tends to make the dashi cloudy; without it the colour is a clear, golden brown.

These will include salmon, cod, hamaguri clams, a good variety of vegetables, chicken, tofu, soft-boiled quail’s eggs, noodles and mushrooms, along with a couple of saimaki-ebi – young kuruma-ebi (king prawns) – so fresh they are still quivering.

 

When it's been brought up to heat, that's the time for the ingredients to be carefully placed into it, a little at a time.

Not that you need to do the actual cooking. This is handled by your waitress. She places the ingredients expertly into the bubbling broth and then, with equal deftness, ladles them onto your plate when they are cooked.

The saimaki-ebi are one of the highlights. But everything tastes good when you're watching and smelling your dinner cooking.

 

Mrs. Fukuda will also look in from time to time, to check on things and attend to the final stages of the nabe.

You will have already eaten the udon noodles that came with all the other ingredients. Now it's time for ojiya – rice cooked down in the last of the broth with a beaten egg until it forms a rich porridge.

 

 

This is rib-sticking, stomach-filling, bulking-up fare, expressly designed to fill the last remaining stomach space. You will not leave Nabeya feeling hungry. In the slightest.

A light dessert is served to close the meal. Usually it will be just a sliver or two of fruit, such as this beautifully ripe persimmon that had been lightly seared to blister its skin – as much for appearance as flavour.

 

Sometimes, though, Fukuda gets creative and comes up with his own ideas. The last time we were there, he also produced a dessert that looked spectacular – in fact, almost molecular in appearance. Tofu encased in an angular layer of clear kanten jelly, served with a thick sweet kuro-mitsu (raw sugar) syrup.

 

In terms of flavour, the tofu was too pronounced, and the kanten too bland. But it was so good to look at. And it slipped down beautifully…

Finally it is time to settle up – at ¥15,000 per head, plus incidentals, it's always more than you expect, especially as you are asked to pay in banknotes (rather than plastic) – and then make your way out into the night. Returning slowly to the 21st century from this little time warp that feels as though it is stuck forever in the postwar Showa years.

The Fukudas will be there to see you off…

 

Here's the link to my Japan Times article…

And here's a map link to Nabeya…

 

New Year, old favourites

"What better way to start the New Year than by looking back? After all, how can we move ahead if we don’t know the past? Here are five classic Tokyo ryoriya where tradition rules and the roots of today’s food culture live on…"

My latest column in the Japan Times is a salute to some of the city's great old-school restaurants — all of them in business for a mimnimum of 100 years. Here are a few more images, with links to my original reviews: 

Isegen, the wonderful anko-nabe house in Kanda-Sudacho…

 

Dote-no-Iseya, trencherman tempura on the seedy fringes of Yoshiwara, formerly the largest red-light area in the capital…

 image from Dote-no-Iseya.

 

Otafuku. 100 years old this year, and nowhere does oden with a greater touch of history. A Tokyo shitamachi classic (even if they did relocate here from Kansai)…

 

When it comes to unagi, there's the one and only Obana, out in Senju. Not neccessarily the very best in town, but among the most atmospheric.

 image from unagidaisuki.com

 

Kanda Matsuya needs little introduction on this blog. I've written about it here… and here… 

I've been eating there every couple of months for 35 years now – and will continue to for as long as I live here. There's only one word for it: classic. 

 

"It is the sense of connection with the past that continues to underscore Tokyo’s vibrant restaurant culture.

"Forgetting the past, as the epithet goes, may mean being condemned to repeat it. But at any of these restaurants that would be no hardship at all."

 

Kanda Matsuya: kusa-kiri soba for Hina Matsuri

To mark Hina Matsuri — Girls Day, on March 3rd yesterday — Kanda Matsuya prepares a special celebratory soba called kusa-kiri. Pretty, isn't it!

 

The yellow chrysanthemum petals may make kusa-kiri look like the perfect noodles for a princess, but there is also a deeper meaning here: it's a dish that signifies good health and strength for the young lady in question.

Kusa literally means grass or weed — but here it refers to yomogi (mugwort), a herb that is reputed for its medicinal qualities, albeit more commonly found in mochi than noodles.

 

It was pure coincidence — or just good timing — that I dropped in there this afternoon, as the kusa-kiri were only available on Saturday and today (they were closed on the actual Hina Matsuri day).

     

 

But really no excuse is needed for visiting Kanda Matsuya: it's an all-time anyday year-round classic.

A while back I wrote it up in my Japan Times column....

Omoide Yokocho, a vicarious visit down an odiferous "memory lane"

To enter Omoide Yokocho – the setting for the recent OPENharvest one-night-only pop-up tacos and margaritas stand – is to travel back decades, to the time when life was hard and pleasures were simple. While most of the rest of Tokyo has been extensively redeveloped (several times over, in some areas) into the modern city you see today, this pocket of narrow alleys in Shinjuku remains firmly entrenched in the middle of the last century. 

The entrance, with its modern illuminated sign, gives little clue as to what lies within. In fact, the first few shops are recent, rebuilt after the area was gutted by a fire. Venture further, though, and the alleys reveal their true colours — well, those that you can actually make out through the smoke and patina from the greasy grills of numerous hole-in-the-wall bars and eateries. 

This is the place to find those Blade Runner-esque low-life atmospherics that reside in many people's imagined version of Tokyo/Japan/Asia. Here are some images for a vicarious visit...

 

It was only a few years ago that this area was rebranded and given the euphemistic name Omoide Yokocho (= Memory Lane). Before that it was sometimes referred to as Yakitori Yokocho. But most Tokyoites still know and refer to it by its longstanding nickname, Shomben Yokocho — or Piss Alley. This, even though the area now boasts modern restrooms, rather than the dank, maloderous facilities of yesterday.

Call it what you like, you'll find this colourful block just outside Shinjuku railway station on its northeast corner.

Here's a map link...

Farewell to the New Year mochi — and another excuse for some New Year soba

The New Year is officially over. All the kadomatsu decorations have been taken down, and the kagami-mochi sitting in our front room have been whisked out of sight. But you can't (or are not supposed to) just chuck it in the garbage. It may be a bit dusty, and even mouldy in parts, but mochi is still food after all — the food of the gods, some might say.

What you're supposed to do — what they always did in the old days — is scrape off the inedible bits, break up the large round bulbous blocks and then grill or better yet deep-fry them nice and crisp. That's OK if you've only got one or two to deal with, but what if you've got a whole bank of them to get rid of?

As they do each year at Kanda Yabu Soba in Awajicho, where I dropped in last week for my annual toshikoshi soba pilgrimage. It's still probably my outright favourite soba restaurant in the whole city. Not for the food but for the stately elegance of the place, especially in the New Year when they have all their decorations in place.

I love the entrance, with its lamp and wooden gate, the flagstones that lead you through the little manicured garden...

I love the simplicity of the interior, tended with such care for 80 years or more... 

I love the old-style ambience, the humble correctness of it all...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And I love the way the waitresses in their prim aprons deliver the orders to the manager, who then sings them out to the kitchen as if chanting sutras.

As for the noodles, well they're simple and good, not really outstanding but honest and filling, especially the kamo-nanban, which is what I invariably order. There's something about that combination of duck breast, negi leeks and the dark, rich aorma rising from that hot savoury broth, with the subtle citrus accent from that tiny cut of yuzu peel... I love it.