Tokyo Meats and Bonito Bonito, Tokyo
If you were asked to close your eyes and visualise Tokyo for a moment, I suspect you would start to visualise a heady blur of neon lights and tall, reflective buildings, perhaps interspersed with the occasional temple or two for good measure. Perhaps you would imagine Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, a man totally at sea in a bustling city of foreignness. Your mind might conjure gleaming bullet trains gliding effortlessly in and out of spotless stations just in the nick of time. Or maybe a narrow back alley full of smoky aromas of grilled meat and Japanese salarymen drinking their evenings away in tiny bars.
And, in fairness, you would be right. Because when you visit a place like Tokyo, this is often what you see. The train from the airport, the city centre hotel, the tall buildings, the occasional temple. A glorious, massive metropolis full of vibrant alien life, screaming at you to wander and also wonder in wide-eyed technicolour.
But when you have been lucky enough to live somewhere, you know this is only the tip of the iceberg. Just like most Londoners don’t spend their weekends staring at Big Ben, the bright lights of Shinjuku and Shibuya are far from the most regular of destinations for Tokyo’s residents.
It’s funny, actually, how only a couple of train stops from those bright, alluring lights are the quieter suburbs, very proximate and still bustling, but different. More local, more at ease with themselves and less full on. There you will observe grandmas quietly shopping for their daily groceries, schoolkids diligently walking home in their yellow bucket hats and, most important of all, bars and restaurants aimed at the residents who surround them.
These are not the flashy eateries of central Tokyo, but the unpretentious servants of the local communities they inhabit. It is a feature of Japanese suburban city life that residents will patronise these establishments regularly, forming a bond between restaurant and community that sustains both. The experience of dining is unfussy, less transactional and more homey, without being overly familiar.
As well as usually being very reasonably priced, the quality of the food is typically high. The Japanese are no fools when it comes to food and its preparation, with a mixture of customer expectation and proprietary pride usually yielding tasty results.
The only problem is how to find your spot. There are too many choices. Take Musashi Koyama, a place that is a hop, skip and a jump from Shibuya, but which immediately transports you back in time, replete with a kilometre-long shōtengai shopping arcade, trolly-wielding grannies on the grocery run and everyday shops aimed at the local community rather than stationary-hoarding tourists.
For the hungry visitor, the options are endless. Deep smoky yakitori joints, crisp tasty tonkatsu places, ramen shops, sushi-go-rounds, yakiniku establishments, endless izakayas… It is overwhelming. The stuff of sweaty anxiety dreams for victims of decision paralysis.
But in the end you just try a few, find one you like and keep going back. This is not a game of Pokemon. There is no need to catch them all. Decide on one or two that suit, forget the rest and roll with it. Admittedly, it took about nine months of to get to being comfortable with doing just that, but when fully absorbed it was liberating.
Today I want to tell you about a couple of these local haunts.
The first, Tokyo Meats, was discovered at the tail end of a decision-paralysis-inducing “grub crawl”™, where multiple destinations are chosen on the same night in the quest for variety and in the hope of minimising restaurant FOMO.
Despite being a relatively early foray into an area which has now become a staple weeknight hangout, it appeared gold had been struck on the first try. The name is misleading, as Tokyo Meats is actually a Japanese/Italian fusion restaurant, serving Italian classics with an occasional Japanese twist. The pastas (soy sauce or cod-roe-infused carbonara anyone?) are more than the sum of their parts. Equally delicious, comforting, familiar and new. It gets you thinking about how you can replicate them at home whilst knowing you never could. Honourable mentions to the bagna cauda with fresh veggies and subtle but delicious carpaccio too. It is no exaggeration to say it is the sort of place you return to for a casual lunch or supper again and again without hesitation.
The discovery of Bonito Bonito, on the other hand, was the product of a more specific search. Ramen broth is often made with chicken, which meant, for the non-chicken eating guests we were hosting, it had sadly been off the menu to-date. But ramen is too good not to eat, and so the search commenced for a chicken-free, but still meaty, ramen broth.
Bonito Bonito looked promising from the pictures and the name, but confirming the chicken-free part was a little more difficult. There was some embarrassing use of broken Japanese from us, and some less broken communication from the old lady who runs the place, who suffered in silence for a few minutes before whispering, in perfect English, “only pork”, to confirm what we had hoped.
The broth, as it turns out, is primarily made of high quality katsuobushi (smoked, dried and flaked tuna), yielding an intense, earthy and salty soup with a deep brown hue, but without the fatty slick of everyday ramen. The real treat though is the boiled and roasted rolled pork, which comes sliced and slapped like a huge ice-hockey puck on top. It is soft and with just enough fat to make it juicy but without being gross, with outside having an almost marmite-like quality. How they season and make it is a mystery, but it is as close to unbelievable as you can get for south of $10 a portion.
The standard bowls of tsukemen and regular ramen (¥980) come with a single pork puck and a few slices of excellent bamboo, which is more than enough for a respectable lunch, but the special versions (¥1280) are adorned with additional nori sheets, a soft-boiled egg and a small nori-cup of salty, shredded pork bits, which taste like the outside of the pork puck, but somehow more intense.
All in all, it is a triumph. Even the slightly grumpy owners – the type who adorn their restaurant with lots of signs telling you what and what not to do (“talk in a small voice” being a particular favourite) - seemed genuinely happy to see us on a second visit.
These two spots are just some but not all of many local favourites. There are plenty of others. There is the local standing-bar near the apartment, good for a beer and a chat. And the fancier bar down the road, improbably run by a Japanese guy who swapped making strawberry daquiris at TGI Fridays for award winning cocktails. There is the easy on the wallet conveyor belt sushi place for quick dinners, the outside stand-up yakitori place where you gobble inexpensive grilled chicken sticks whilst trying to protect your shoes from the dripping sauce. There is the friendly Irish pub which encourages you to take some free dried pasta on your way out. There are the two old ladies serving exceptional grilled fish lunch sets on weekdays, and the place nearer home run by a younger crowd doing a similar but less traditional thing, where you are presented with a huge section of raw tuna body and a spoon to scrape your own negi toro from the carcass. There is a takeaway barbequed eel place down the hill too, and a husband and wife-run tempura place just round the corner for a special lunch.
Once you’re done eating, there is the shaded local park to stroll through, humming with cicadas in summer, or the steps of the impressive local temple at the end of the road to ascend in quiet reverence.
These aren’t the only places to go. Or even the best. They are just local haunts, visited often and loved dearly, like an old friend you call on and without need for an invitation.
With the bright lights of the skyscrapers twinkling in the distance, proximate but just out of reach, this is the Tokyo I see when I shut my eyes.