Web Excursions 2023-02-17
A 600-Mile Quest to Savor the Fading Beauty of Japan’s Traditional Cafes
The pizza toast was like liturgy, like an old friend comforting me as I wept into my hands.
The pizza toast was everything I needed it to be at the very moment it arrived.
When I first arrived in Japan as an undergraduate 19 years ago, I could hardly eat anything.
Sushi and soba and natto (a breakfast staple of fermented soybeans) and eel were unthinkable.
I didn’t even really like ramen.
I had grown up on fried bologna and Spaghetti-Os, Fruit Roll-Ups and Twix.
Japan’s culinary landscape of nuance and texture and procession was lost on my palate.
And so I took solace and sanctuary in a small old-style Japanese cafe — a kissaten— near my university in Tokyo.
It was there that I first encountered “pizza toast.” The name intrigued, and what was presented seemed like food you might serve a child.
Perfect.
For me, it became a bridge between where I had been and where I was to go.
I didn’t think much of it then;
it was just a food I knew I could reliably eat, and the kissa itself acted as a kind of buffer zone, a beacon of comfort, where I could drink black coffee and smoke and read novels.
Kissa — as they’re affectionately called — are suspended, like mosquitoes in amber, in a very specific moment in time.
Japan operates on a non-Western calendar of eras, recently entering Reiwa this past May as Emperor Akihito abdicated the throne.
Before Reiwa was Heisei, and before Heisei, Showa.
Kissa are inextricably linked to Showa, an era that ran from 1926 to 1989.
Showa is generally looked back upon as the “golden age” of modern Japan: technicolor, hardworking, patriarchal, industrial, with the romantic focus squarely on those postwar lean years.
Showa is the jumble of alleyway bars in the now tourist-overrun Golden Gai nook of Tokyo.
Showa is an old-school barber shop with hair tonics and hair liquids tucked between gleaming Mori and Mitsui skyscrapers.
Showa is, above all, kissa.
Pizza toast is what you’re imagining: the concept of using toast to make something like pizza.
A fat slab of white bread, some tomato sauce, cheese, maybe some onions and green peppers.
After that it’s up to the chef.
It is a hug produced in a toaster oven.
It’s also a sort of netherworld food that the Japanese don’t think about and visitors to Japan have assessed — if at all — with a mere tilt of the head.
As in: Huh, pizza toast.
It is a comfort food, part of the postwar food canon, falling squarely alongside the incongruity of Spam in Okinawan dishes and “Neapolitan-style” spaghetti made with ketchup.
It is a food that squeezes joy from very little.
Simple ingredients, simple preparation.
A meal that transcends economic circumstance.
Standard-issue pizza toast is constructed atop slices of white bread about an inch and a half thick.
Yamane innovates in the following ways: The bread is first cut into long thirds, and then slightly scored on the bottom once again into shallow thirds.
The crust is cut 80 percent of the way off — not entirely, but mostly.
The bread, thusly prepped, is topped with a light, sweet tomato sauce, mozzarella, green peppers, onions, mushrooms, and thin-sliced salami.
From a customer experience perspective, a gentle tug on any of the strips of toast produces a square, perfectly bite-sized nugget of pizza-like delight.
And the crust?
“I’ve found some customers don’t like to eat the crust,” said Yamane, “So I made it easy to pull off.
But for those customers that do like crust, cutting it allows it to catch some extra char.”
The ticket system is a kissa staple.
You buy a book of tickets — usually 11 for the price of 10.
Each ticket gets you a coffee, and in the morning, a “morning set,” which is what the old man apparently ordered.
Some kissa keep the booklets of tickets up on the wall for each customer, just as regulars of an izakaya keep a bottle of their favorite whisky with their name on it behind the bar.
Wanted to keep the “morning service” culture alive, which, she said, had its beginnings in Ichinomiya — a small factory town between Gifu and Nagoya cities.
She admitted that nobody under 50 purchased the coffee tickets, however.
“Old patrons are cut from kissa culture,” she said.
“Young patrons are cut from convenience store culture.”
Inoue told me that Instagram drove a lot of her traffic.
Insta-bae is a Japanese phrase meaning “great-looking on Instagram.”
Young food hunters come from far away to eat her eminently Insta-bae dango — rice dumpling — sets, skewered in threes on wooden sticks and fanned out like decks of cards around a circular plate.
Her own unique twist on what might be served up at a kissa.
Specialty genres are broken down into 18 categories, including omelets, waffles, and sandwiches.
Toast alone is given three subcategories: simple toast, French toast, and “toast with stuff on it.” The guide contains breakfast-insider gems, such as the tip that Ichinomiya City Hotel offers up a basket of all-you-can-eat hard-boiled eggs with waffles and coffee for 600 yen.
If you’re ever looking to feast on a basket of eggs, now you know where to go.
Canadian Coffee House was only open until noon on Sundays, and it was already 1:30 p.m.
The other customers had long since left. It was just Sakai and me chatting away.
I apologized for keeping him open longer than expected, and he looked at me like I was nuts. It was his pleasure.
This was what kissa were for — community, connection, conversation, strange encounters.
I reached for my wallet, but he said I was too late. He had already closed the register.
“It’s no longer possible for you to pay today,” he said.
A perfect gentleman and businessman.
That pizza toast was the great unifier, the healer of this modern walker.
That pizza toast was more than just pizza toast.
It was the underdog fighting Pachinko Road.
A food that had been forged in some bizarro cultural oven wedged between American GIs and poverty that somehow managed to shed all of that baggage over the years.
It was unique, a quirk of reality.
And most importantly: It was delicious.