Japan’s pub food can be superb, and Maru’s is as good as it gets
FOR TOO LONG there has been a misperception about Japanese food: that it is uniformly finicky, requires years of training to produce, is steeped in rules and ritual, and hence has to be expensive – and not especially fun. Nothing could be further from the truth. I know dozens of Japanese who have never set foot in a kaiseki haute cuisine restaurant and many who have never eaten top-grade sushi. But I know no Japanese of drinking age who has not enjoyed an izakaya (pronounced roughly ee-ZAH-ka-ya), and – in most cases – at prices surprisingly below the Western restaurant equivalent.
Neither restaurant nor bar, the izakaya is more than a place where you can share delicious food and relaxing drink – though it is certainly that. In many neighborhoods, it is a community hub with a cast of characters and ongoing narratives. The customers will range from locals and regulars to office workers, academics or day laborers. They will order small dish delicacies throughout the evening, perhaps in the beginning sharing just a couple of items. The menu is like a road map and the diners are at the wheel, calling out orders as the mood takes them. All dishes are inexpensive, and as the “scenery” and conversation changes, items that initially escaped notice acquire new appeal. No inquisitive diner can fail to broaden his or her horizons, wandering side routes into exciting new food avenues. And as the evening progresses and energy levels rise, you will hear straight talk and the uttering of hard truths that won’t ordinarily be spoken. In short, at the izakaya, people are more themselves.
Maru, located in the heart of Tokyo’s fashion district of Aoyama, is a designer izakaya, but it is also a remarkable contemporary establishment where the standard of comfort and food are on an absolutely equal, and very high, level. Maru is the complete package.
Put this down to owner-chef Keiji Mori, his years of experience in a Kyoto kaiseki haute cuisine kitchen, his hard-won individualism and the passion he has instilled in his staff. On a first visit, you may feel there are too many of these bustling young men and women behind the counter, in the kitchen and working the floor. But see how attentive they are to customer requests (shouted, if you like, in the usual izakaya way, prefaced by a loud “sui-ma-sen!” or “excuse me”); note their self-confidence and how each is entirely conversant with whatever they are serving, taste the quality of the painstakingly prepared food, and you will conclude that they number just enough. “I don’t think of staffing from a business viewpoint,” Mori tells me. “That makes you lose focus on what you can give to the customer. And the staff that we have – they work with 120 percent motivation.” To maintain this commitment, he takes them on a yearly retreat to a seaside hotel in Chiba. “To discuss what kind of restaurant we are making, and how to change it for the better,” he says.
Some of my friends suggest that Maru is not strictly an izakaya, so superior is its food and setting. But neither is it a typical upmarket Japanese restaurant. The noise level from happy customers on a busy night reaches a steady buzz, and the menu, though of top-class ingredients often treated with complex technique, is unpretentious, composed predominantly of small dishes to be shared, and listed in typical izakaya format, from charbroiled to deep fried dishes, vegetable dishes, sashimi, rice and noodle dishes, and with some rarely seen categories, such as “Kyoto Taste” dishes.
Then there is the room, which despite its understated sophistication, diffused lighting and chic furniture, is relaxing and practical: you can sit at the counter running the length of the space, interacting with the staff in the slightly sunken preparation area in front of you, or alternatively at one of the generously spaced, heavy timber tables directly opposite, behind which runs a single, comfortable banquette. Although here you are slightly removed from the action, you still feel in touch with it. Had Mori and his designer Kanmei Yano been less appreciative of izakaya aesthetics, they might have opted for a much wider “restaurant style” space with more tables, as Maru’s floor area is much bigger than it seems (the banquette fronts a false wall behind which lie three small, private dining rooms). But by maintaining this crucial intimacy, Mori and Yano achieved something special, and Maru customers respond by packing the place almost every night.
The final factor in Maru’s “izakaya-ness” is that I know Mori’s heart is close to the authentic cultural form. On one evening out, sampling downmarket pubs in Tokyo’s suburbs, we ate skewers of han-yaki (half-raw) organ meats at a fold-up table in a hole-in-the-wall establishment and drank the local drink, black hoppy non-alcohol beer mixed with shots of semi-frozen shochu. I could see on Mori’s face a palpable enjoyment at stepping into these worlds, contemplating the menus – universes removed from his own – and how they related to local wants.
The word maru most commonly means “circle,” and Mori’s understanding of this, though he has chosen an arcane Chinese character to express it, is to circulate happiness. “First, through our own pleasure from cooking,” he says. “Because if we don’t have this, we can’t pass on anything.”
He once lost this enjoyment. After developing his cooking skills at the izakaya owned by his mother, he started working in the early 1980s as a pot-washer at Isecho, one of Kyoto’s most venerated ryotei kaiseki restaurants, where he rose to the position of ni-kata, or chef in charge of dashi soups and simmering stocks. These are the cornerstones of a Japanese restaurant’s signature taste. “The nimono [simmered foods] really demonstrate a restaurant’s level,” says Mori. “And if the ni-kata changes, regular patrons will know.” Even after achieving this rank, it takes several years to be confident enough with the timing and seasoning to produce a consistent taste for the head chef. After seven years, Mori thinks he nailed it. “I got the skill from my chef on a one-to-one basis, which was truly precious to me.”
But the strict hierarchy of ryotei culture frustrated him. “There are many good points about apprenticing in a traditional Kyoto kitchen, but also some bad,” he says. “The people above you are always right – regardless. If they say white is black, you have no choice but to go along with them. I found it tedious.”
So in 1987, he quit Isecho, cooked at various other restaurants, worked on perfecting his English, and enrolled in a business course at a college in California. More than his studies, his new environment delivered an epiphany. “The other students were constantly talking about their dreams and everyone was different – there was an accountant, a doctor, the founder of a company – and I realized that to be a cook was not the only way,” he says.
Cutting short his studies, he returned to Tokyo, energized and – in his words – more empowered than any 15 or 18 year old working in a Kyoto ryotei, cooking because they “had to.” While the seeds of his dream grew, he ran his mother’s izakaya, then took on a chain store cafe franchise, and in 2001 opened Maru in Azabu Juban in central Tokyo. Within a few years he had a solid clientele, but renovations by the building owner forced him to move. “We really didn’t want to,” says Mori, but his customers came with him, including a growing base of Westerners, whose appreciation of Maru is reciprocated with Mori’s provision of that rarest of izakaya commodities: an English-language menu.
Maru, Aoyama KT Bldg B1F, Jingumae 5-50-8, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo; (81-3) 6418-5572
Reprinted from Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook courtesy of Kodansha International. Copyright © 2008
