Turning Japanese
‘Dude food’ gets a Far East twist
In a dimly-lit rock ’n’ roll restaurant on the King’s Road, tables of hip young beerdrinkers are playing roulette. A mixture of excitement and fear is written on their faces. Ginger, who is half-manager, half-magician – if his twirled moustache and purple top hat are anything to go by – dances about their table as they eat tuna maki and pour their own pints.
This is a new breed of Japanese dining. Forget pristine restaurants that look like hotel lobbies, where raw fish is served with almost religious ardour by sushi masters who have dedicated their lives, monk-like, to the craft. There might be sushi on the menu here, but it is spiked with chilli hotter than you can imagine and comes with a shot of sake – the theory being that only alcohol that is 40per cent proof will ease the pain of losing at roulette.
Restaurants such as Kurobuta London, which has branches in Chelsea and Marble Arch, are styled more like the casual “izakayas” of Japan; drinking dens that serve cheap, hearty, deepfried snacks to help mop up the booze. It’s the Japanese equivalent of “dude food”, in other words – the next frontier in our quest for refined junk that has seen a recent surge in trendy, high-end restaurants selling burgers in brioche buns, and gourmet fried chicken.
Now, izakayas are springing up all over the place – firm favourites already include Bone Daddies (ramen and steamed buns) and Tonkotsu, which has a branch in Birmingham’s Selfridges. Meanwhile, in Covent Garden, the new Jidori restaurant is serving yakitori: Japanese skewers of chicken, including the thigh, wings or hearts, with bacon. There’s also a twist on the
Scotch egg, filled with katsu curry, ordered by almost every table.
Our appetite for
Japanese cuisine seems insatiable. In the UK, we now eat so much sushi that it’s practically as much of a national dish as chicken tikka masala. The first sushi restaurant opened in London in 1974 and there are now 640 in the capital, according to Tripadvisor, and 3,000 across the country. Sainsbury’s says it sells up to 90,000 boxes of prepackaged sushi a week, sales at high street eatery Itsu have doubled in the past five years, and even Butlin’s has got in on the act, opening a sushi bar in Bognor Regis.
In short, not much is lost in translation, despite Japan being almost 6,000 miles away – and dude food is rapidly becoming one of the biggest gastronomic trends of 2018.
Before it underwent a Japanese twist, dude food was an American import, hitting the UK about five years ago. Back then, the trendiest thing you could do in terms of dining was to eschew Michelin-starred restaurants with white tablecloths and the atmosphere of a library, in favour of eating hot dogs in an old, converted car park near Peckham. The filthier the food, the cooler it became – and if you weren’t leaving covered in sloppy sauce, you demanded a refund. The key was that, while this was comfort junk, it was specialist and used only the highest-quality ingredients; preferably ethically sourced and, ironically, likely to catch the eye of the Michelin judges. So when America moved on to Japanese dude food a couple of years ago, it was only a matter of time before Britain cottoned on, too.
A meal at Kurobuta might feature a tuna and salmon sashimi “pizza” with a crispy nacho-style base (£11.50); wagyu beef sliders with umami mayonnaise (£16 for two); or crispy chicken with kimchi mayo (£9.50), which pays homage to the izakayas’ fetish for everything deep-fried. Takoyaki, a crispy ball-shaped snack, is filled with disconcertingly huge chunks of purple tentacle and called a “doughnut” (£8.50). “This is a Japanese take on comfort food,” chef Andre Williams says. “It works, because the attention to detail in Japanese cooking makes it so much more than the fried chicken and ketchup we might picture as junk food over here. They use a lot of Japanese seven-spice, which we ship over and even season plain things like mayonnaise with kimchi, so everything ends up becoming more than the sum of its parts.” But sushi pizza – really? “In Japan pizzas are very cool,” says Williams. “We’d call it ‘fusion food’ but they’re just more imaginative, which is what draws chefs to the cuisine in the first place.”
Daiki Yoshijima, 31, from Osaka and now living in London, is a regular diner. He says: “Japanese dude food is all about fun. I think it’s seen as more accessible than sushi and is loved by young people in Japan because it is usually very cheap and comforting. It’s something to share with friends and can be a great idea for dinner dates, too, because it’s more casual.” As the sun comes out, the trend is expected to move on to our barbecues, with robatayaki cooking growing in popularity – a method of Japanese grilling over a charcoal fire (and what would any dude food trend be without a pinch of testosterone-friendly kit and the possibility of outdoor grilling?).
The key is indulgence, says Digby Vollrath, co-founder of Feast It, a website that allows you to book restaurant-standard food trucks for private events.
“This food has a little more heft then sushi and pho noodle soups,” he explains. “Some of our most popular vendors are serving Japanese fried chicken, katsu wraps and sushi burgers, with rice taking the place of the bun. It reflects a move away from only having overtly healthy foods. The newest Asian cuisine is all about decadence, unfussiness and fun.”
‘I think it’s seen as more accessible and it is loved by young people in Japan’