Ishigaki: A Game of Two Halves

After five days in Fukuoka, I head down to Ishigaki. It’s a two hour flight and after checking in at the somewhat Provencal-coloured Abyiyan Pana hotel, I take a stroll around town.

On the plane, they show a twenty minute “gourmet” tour of Hawaii. Hawaii shares some features with the Okinawan islands. They’re both places within a country that offer the thrill of exoticism (and white beaches, turquoise water, scuba diving, fantasy weddings, spa treatments, luxury resort hotels, the possibility of an island) without the need for a passport. In fact, plenty of Okinawans emigrated to Hawaii in the 20th century. The food in Hawaii looks unappetising. There are huge slabs of steak thrown onto hot grills, but the American beef doesn’t have the camera appeal of the Japanese wagyu. It’s a sexier looking meat with all that fat marbling. Why not try loco moco? That doesn’t look good either. It might be good food for a hangover. A large fish (opakapaka?) has its body sectioned, battered and then deep-fried in the one piece. Rainbow-hued shaved ice. It’s holiday destination food. I too am going to a holiday destination.

I go into a t-shirt boutique on the shopping arcade called Achicoco and buy a couple of Okinawan pro-wrestling t-shirts. It’s some sort of cartoon parody (?) of Mexican lucha libre, although I see a poster for an actual bout later on. The wrestler has the word “Love The Beef” on his outfit, there’s the phrase “Healthy Food is Maximum Enemy”. Sold! Maybe my hopes are a bit high, but the shop owner seems a bit miserable and rather unengaging in conversation. There’s a poster for the Tropical Lovers Beach Festa this Sunday and the singer UA, who I mentioned in a previous post, is playing. Maybe. Oh well, I think, it’s off-season, you’re possibly fed up with tourists by now, looking forward to a break.

My wandering eventually takes me back to a place I spotted earlier that serves the local Ishigaki beer. The beer is good, but as for the rest of it. There’s only one member of the staff that remotely smiles. Their only real interaction with the customers is “How many of you are there?” and taking orders. They suggest eating sashimi. I decide to try kuruma (car/wheel) shrimp. Why so-called I ask? No one knows. And this is the mimiga? Yes. It’s pig’s ear, isn’t it? Yes. Come on, describe a little, tell me it tastes good, something. A smile, perhaps.

The lovely ramshackle wood interior is wasted. The restaurant is filling up whilst I’m there. I sit at the the counter, looking into the kitchen, seeing how the staff work together. I get the feeling some unresolved feud is going on. The cook’s face is sour. Everyone looks nervous. The food is edible, but I get the feeling the prawn may well be frozen from Thailand, the mozuku (a local seaweed doused in vinegar) is okay, the mimiga is drowning in a sauce that cuts out any possible taste of ear. It’s like vaguely cooked bacon rind, where I think it would be better heading towards pork scratching. A touch of crunch on the outside, melting within.

The salad dressing is decanted out of a supermarket bottle, I can see packets being opened, pre-cooked tofu flash fried in a pan. Kitchens all do it, but do you want your customers to see it? There’s nothing here that you probably couldn’t get off the shelf in any mainland Japanese city. Indifference.

A golden rule of this counter-style eating is that it’s a stage. A performance, it needs interaction between staff and customer. If the staff are silent, fine, but they need to be pre-occupied, putting their focus into something that looks like you want to eat it. They have to look like they know what they’re doing, rather than glaring at each other behind their backs. If the food is average, okay too, but then you need to compensate with some good humour, a welcoming spirit.

I send a text to a friend in the UK with this mobile phone picture: “The local beer in this place is great, but the food lacks soul. It feels like a scene in Tampopo, how not to run a place, their welcome [there's a section in that film about ways of saying "Irrasshaimase!" when customers walk in] convinces no one, well, not me. Fuck it, I’m going up the road for okonomiyaki!”

NOTE: Now that I’ve got a connection, I find that this place’s name, O-ri To-ri (おーりとーり) is in fact welcome in local dialect. Yeah, like whatever…

So I pay, unsatisfied, and try to find somewhere else. I consider “Moustache“, a French looking menu, just because it’s called Moustache. I’m sure you’d do the same. There’s one place I pass by once that looks promising and as I pass it by on the second trawl, I decide that they could probably manage a gin and tonic to cheer a disconsolate Englishman up.

They do! Amurita no Niwa is on the western end of the street with main market on it. A stretch of tourist tat with a local food market, as well as a few more upscale places dotted around. The gin and tonic is good, let’s wash away the taste of the previous place. I end up eating a spicy curry soba noodle soup [There's an article here] on their recommendation. There’s an Okinawan dish called champuru and that word means mix and refers both to its blend of ingredients as well as cultural borrowings. This particuar noodle soup is a similar mix of local island produce but with a Thai-style curry base to it. And a well-executed fried egg on top to mix in. I finally start relaxing. Could be the gin, my stomach is happy, but above all, it’s having amicable surrounds.

The restaurant was opened last year by the Miyamoto husband and wife team of Shingo and Sayuri. She’s from Ishigaki, he’s from Kyushu, they met in Tokyo. It’s a modern sort of space, light, spacious with some good art work, nice choice of books and excellent music in the background. I suppose one might think that it’s somehow not “authentic”, whatever the hell that is, aside from being consigned to a museum. No, the menu is not traditional although it’s certainly local. It’s not ur-Yaeyama cuisine, but it is being cooked by a local person and, always a good sign, she tastes as she cooks!

Later, as conversation flows, I spot a bottle of local coffee liqueur on the counter. It’s made with a base of awamori (the local rice spirit) with cocoa, local “black sugar” and coffee. I wonder whether it might make a decent alternative to Kahlua for a White Russian. We taste compare Kahlua against the local, end up making two versions of the cocktail. Suffice to say, as we suspect all along, awamori and milk are not natural bedfellows.

It seemed a popular enough choice for young people over the course of the night. People came for take-away, chatted, left. The owner of the t-shirt shop popped his head in. His shop was burgled yesterday, Shingo mentions. Eh? Yes, all his silver was taken. I say that he seemed a bit miserable when I was in there and now I can appreciate why. There was this shelf of little empty cushions with price tags. Lucky I didn’t congratulate him on his conceptual art piece. I almost did…

Later, as conversation carried on, I realised how tired I was after a sleepless night before and also how I forget how tiring it is to speak a foreign language. Two hours and I need a sorbet of English or silence to refresh the brain. With my conversation clearly turning into Japlish babble, however much I was enjoying it, I made my goodbyes and left.

Anyway, Amurita no Niwa gets my unreserved recommendation. I may very well head back this evening.