Floyd in Japan

It’s been a lazy morning in bed so far. I awoke and found myself thinking about dumplings. There was an autumnal chill to the air. Hmmm… I watched this clip of Keith Floyd. It seems Keith isn’t in the best of health at the moment. Although I can’t remember having that much interest in food at the time, I always enjoyed watching Floyd in his various tv series. I did once bump into him in the early morning, laughing and leaning into friends as they tried to hail a taxi, I said hello, they burbled something in return as they tried to negotiate the door.

Although Floyd did make it to Thailand and India, he has not yet made it to Japan. A sad loss for Japanese cuisine I think…

Ah, demiglace sauce. My first knowing encounter with this was in Japan. One form of Japanese cuisine that is frequently overlooked by food writers, travel guides and the like is yoshoku (洋食) which means Western food. It’s a style of cuisine that traces its origins to the second wave of Western contact dating from the arrival of the American Commodore Matthew Perry and his Black Ships in 1853.

As I’ve noted before here, previous Japanese contact with the West during the 16th/17th century, such as the Portuguese Jesuits, had also left its culinary mark in Japan (e.g. tempura, kasutera cake) but this second wave, nouvelle vague even, is of particular interest to me because of its relationship to issues of Japanese modernisation, social change and so on. I am a historian – certainly not an historian – to an extent… I’ve often thought that one subject that I would like to write about if I ever returned to study would be a study of yoshoku. It’s not just a historical issue, it’s also something I love eating! Indeed, the many pounds gained during my last stay in Japan were quite possibly the result of me indulging myself at every opportunity.

So, just what is yoshoku? The term is sometimes applied to Western food, but a distinction is normally made between restaurants serving French, Italian and the like and those serving yoshoku. Whatever its debt to Western influences – demiglace sauce, fried breaded prawns, croquettes, pasta, omelettes, hamburger and the like – it is not exactly Western food. For a start, it often seems something of a time warp. It was the peak of modernity once, now it seems rather nostalgic. Of course, nostalgia works very well with food. This is food that takes you back to your mother, school lunch or carefree university days. But do Japanese people really still want to eat their pasta napolitan when supposedly more authentic Italian dishes are now readily available? I think the answer is yes-and-no. An Italian might eat spaghetti napolitan and think “WTF!?”, authenticity is not an issue for the domestic gourmand. Is it tasty? Is it as good as mum’s? I suspect that changing diets and tastes may eventually make yoshoku go the way of pie-and-mash shops but it will be sometime yet until it does.

I’d recommend anyone visiting Japan to try yoshoku at one of the more venerable establishments to be found. For a start, the ambience of these places is one of the few places that you can hear the echo of 20th century Japan, whether pre-or-post 1945. You can see this in some of the interiors shown in this documentary I’ve linked to below.

The video is in Japanese, but I hope the visual appeal is sufficient to pull you through. The general conceit is someone trying to get a recipe for the perfect demiglace sauce. Grande cuisine of the late 19th century is the primary influence on yoshoku. Although, as you can see from the final section, this French recipe has been improved through the addition of sake and soy sauce. The trail starts in Hakodate, a city in Hokkaido that was one of the treaty ports where Western contact (notably Russian, hence the Orthodox church you can see) was prominent. I once took that same overnight train to Hokkaido that she does and I can remember eating that same hamburger set meal as well! I hope the restaurant seen later on still offers that wonderful wooden cutlery! There’s then a mention of Mongolia, as the ur-hamburger, as well as the southern port of Nagasaki, where the Dutch maintained a trading station through the so-called period of Japanese seclusion and which has always been a vital point of external contact. It concludes with a stupendously enormous cooking pot of demiglace sauce…

Anyway, watch these videos, if you’d like. They’re a good introduction to the idea of Japanese Western food.

If you’re in Osaka and fancy some yoshoku, here are two places I’d recommend:

Jiyuken (自由軒): This place is to be found in the shopping sprawl around Namba. Their house dish, pictured on their website, is “Famous Curry” (Meibutsu kare) and is rice with curry sauce stirred into it. A fresh egg is broken on top for you to mix in. Possibly an acquired taste! £4.26 at the current exchange rate.

Katsui (洋食Katsui); This is further north in Unagidani, just along from Tokyu Hands on Nagahori. Map here. This restaurant is certainly a much more upmarket proposition than the old-school and functional Jiyuken. Owner Katsui Keisuke’s grand plan here was to take yoshoku out of its sometimes dusty display cabinet and serve it freshened and anew to a more style-conscious crowd. It works! Keisuke speaks good English and I’ve had my share of conversations with him over free glasses of wine. Which in no way have swayed me to post this recommendation! A set lunch with wine is available from £9.83. Or treat yourself and companion to the substantial special course lunch at £19.96 a head.