THE OUTSIDER
How a cup of American and a dash of Jewish heritage cooked a Japanese sensation.
“I
’ ve always known that I’m something of an outlier,” says chef Ivan Orkin. A native New Yorker, he lived for three decades in Japan. In the mid-2000s, when he opened two ramen shops in Tokyo, his singular approach made them fast favourites.
However novel it may have seemed at the outset — an American making ramen — his outsider’s perspective played a role in their success. Already an experienced Western chef, Orkin drew on his Jewish upbringing: rendering chicken fat for schmaltzfried chicken katsu, toasting rye for his three-flour noodle blend and topping rice with smoked whitefish.
Having since returned to New York with his wife, Mari, and their three sons, Orkin owns two restaurants on the Lower East Side, has starred in Chef’s Table and The Mind of a Chef, and laid out his signature, 40-page ramen recipe in a cookbook/memoir. Fuelling it all is a palpable affection for Japan, which is at the forefront of his second volume, The Gaijin Cookbook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019; with Chris Ying).
The fact that Orkin has not only accepted his outsider status, but come to appreciate the benefits of having “an inside- outside view” is evident in the book’s title. Gaijin, a term that can be taken as a slight, means foreigner in Japanese. “Ramen, The Gaijin Cookbook — all of this stuff comes out of my love for Japan and my desire to share it with people that don’t understand it like I do,” says Orkin. “I’ve embraced Japanese culture at a very deep level, so I have a unique view of it and I tend to celebrate it.”
Organized by the aspects of Japanese life that resonate most with him, chapter themes include Otaku (Geeking Out), Open to Anything and Good Times. He writes that Japanese food tends to be “treated with over-the-top reverence” in English- language cookbooks, especially those written by fellow foreigners. Instead, he set out to highlight the cooking he fell for in Japan: Dishes he relied on to feed picky kids, quick everyday meals, and a few more involved celebratory feasts for gathering around.
In contrast with his first book, I van Ramen ( 2013, with Ying) — which was “much more of a geeky, insider, cheffy memoir” — there’s a clear emphasis on cookability. Many of the dishes are from Orkin’s own family table over the past two decades. The likes of onigiri ( rice balls), jouya nabe ( every- night hot pot) and pork curry ( both from the box and from scratch) join a few restaurant favourites, including
Tofu Coney Island ( his vegan take on a Coney Island chili dog).
While e x posure to Japanese ingredients has never been higher in the West, Orkin feels that many home cooks still hold back when it comes to making Japanese dishes part of their regular repertoire. Through offering context in essays and recipe headnotes, he says the goal was to give people the information they need not just to make the dishes successfully, but to take them in different directions.
“Part of why I started cooking in the first place, long before I ever chose to be a professional, was ( because) I found that taking responsibility for what I fed myself made me very happy. It made me feel like I was in control of my life. Cooking at home makes me feel powerful. I really like that feeling, so I try to share that feeling,” says Orkin.
“As a cookbook author — and as a teacher and trainer of cooks for many, many years — I like when people can ultimately own the food t hey c ook. And not feel like, ‘ Well, I’m cooking Ivan Orkin’s food.’ I’d rather them feel like, ‘ Well, I learned this from Ivan Orkin. Now it’s mine.’”