FUTURE PROOF

The world of dining has an unlikely muse in Japanese convenience stores, says Shannon Harley.

JAPAN’S CONVENIENCE STORES, or conbini, have long been infamous in the food world for wacky snacks and curiously good takeaway, and now they are inspiring spin-offs in the realm of high-end dining, from London to New York. In Manhattan, Korean-American chef David Chang of Lucky Peach has launched Peach Mart in the city’s new Hudson Yards development. The store is styled on Korea and Japan’s kitsch neon-lit food marts that serve an unimaginable range of packaged snacks, coffee, triangle-shaped onigiri rolls, donburi rice bowls and more. Peach Mart’s takeaway meals include kimbap (Korean rice rolls); sandwiches, including the already Insta-famous ‘black & white’ – black sesame and cream cheese on triangles of milk bread; and chicken katsu bento boxes, while the line-up of Asian snacks ranges from noisy packs of Calbee Honey Butter Potato Chips to Iwamoto Kitty Cookies. Meanwhile, in London, the city’s most famous sandwich – the sexy Iberian Katsu Sando from TĬU – has been styled on a conbini grab-and-go cultural staple. “We have adapted the katsu sando, originally targeted to Japanese office workers at convenience stores, and now the I.K.S. (Iberian Katsu Sando) lives and breathes our identity at TĬU,” say chef-owners Ana Gonçalves and Zijun Meng. The katsu sando headlines the menu at the chefs’ new restaurant after the runaway success of the dish on their previous menu at Tċ Tċ Eatery. The I.K.S is an architectural stack of crustless brioche layered with fatty slabs of crumbed Iberico pork, pickled cabbage and their own raspberry ‘brown sauce’, and despite its humble origins, it’s one of the most decadent sandos you’ll eat.