Haritts

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Haruna Toyoda, Baker at Haritts - Hand-made Doughnuts Shop

Haritts is not a place that’s stumbled across. It’s not even for a GPS-enabled device. No, this is a place that’s about a personal recommendation and a map. But then, even with both, the doughnut shop can seem elusive, hidden as it is inside a converted house on a suburban footpath lined with private homes, potted plants and a barbershop. Owner-baker Haruna Toyoda opens her shop at 8am – early by Tokyo standards – and it’s not uncommon to find a few enthusiastic customers already waiting outside. Yet she never advertises and has no hoarding. The only way to hear about Haritts is by word of mouth. Several years ago, Tokyo was consumed by a doughnut craze. On-trend customers queued patiently for hours outside American-brand stores, eager to taste the synthetically sweet glazed variety on offer. But eventually people recognised these shops for what they were – profit-powered chains pedalling fast food. The sugar-high fizzled out. By contrast, doughnuts are still special at – and the specialty of – Haritts. The dough Toyoda bakes is soft, fluffy and bread-like. She makes three or four hundred doughnuts daily, all of them by hand. One popular variety contains a dollop of cream cheese folded into the dough; another includes cinnamon and currants. Toyoda offers her own unique varieties such as green tea or pumpkin, and occasionally drops new recipes in to match the season. But otherwise she remains impervious to baking trends – no blueberries or sprinkles here. “It’s a family-size kitchen, so we have to make the doughnuts in small batches,” she explains, sliding open the door of the shop. It still feels like a private home on entry, and includes a genkan – the space inside where the family who would otherwise live here would remove their shoes. A step up, and the cosy living area has been converted into a miniature café. At one table, students from a nearby high school finish their homework, while at another, local housewives gossip. From the kitchen there emerges the unmistakable smell of freshly raised doughnuts. Toyoda first learned the technique from her older sister, who at the time worked at a bakery. Together, they developed their own recipes and bought a food truck. They named the business Haritts, a combination of their first names – Haruna and Itsuki. The Toyoda sisters drove the Haritts truck around Tokyo for two years, stopping outside office buildings and on shopping streets to sell their wares and build a reputation. When ready for a permanent home, they settled on the current space in Yoyogi-Uehara, a residential neighbourhood characterised by affordable rents and a quaint atmosphere. Despite their plans to keep things small, the business has been growing. Itsuki has moved to Taiwan, where she has opened a new branch of Haritts. Meanwhile Haruna continues to run the shop in Tokyo, rising early each day to start baking at 5am. It’s how she’s ready for those first customers at eight. The success of the business means she … Read More

Gokirakutei

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Gokirakutei - Self-Grill Restaurant

It’s 6pm, and Hisayo Suga has just hung the ‘Open’ sign outside her okonomiyaki restaurant, Gokirakutei. The sliding door rattles open, and three jovial young women arrive. Ducking under the noren curtain, one carries a bottle of expensive champagne. “Mama,” she says to Suga, “could I put this in the fridge?” “Of course,” Suga replies. “But first come and look at my new nails.” As she splays her fingers, a fake pea-sized gem twinkles in the centre of each brightly coloured nail. “What do you think?” she asks. “Beautiful, right?” Suga’s many regular customers at Gokirakutei, which appropriately translates as ‘The Easy-going Home,’ call her ‘Mama’ – or ‘Mama-san’ to be polite. “The girls talk to me about fashion, beauty, their love lives,” she says. “So do some of the boys.” Those girls and boys include more than a few celebrities, many introduced by her close friend Kiyoshirou Imawano, an Eighties rock star who passed away in 2009. Posters of his eternally youthful face adorn every wall of Gokirakutei’s unpretentious interior. There’s a friendly drill to eating here. On arrival, customers – famous or otherwise – remove their shoes, have their jackets and valuables wrapped in plastic bags to protect them from oil, and shuffle over to low horigotatsu tables, the alcoves beneath which will accommodate their legs. Everyone orders at least one dish of okonomiyaki, a thick savoury pancake filled with chopped cabbage and combinations of shrimp, meat, vegetables and cheese; or Japanese foods such as natto (fermented soy beans) and mochi (white rice pounded into sticky chunks). Suga supplies the bowlful of ingredients that patrons cook themselves on a teppan hotplate installed in each tabletop, and each pancake is finished with a generous layer of Worcester sauce and sprinklings of bonito and seaweed flakes. If it feels like Suga was born for hospitality then it’s because she was: her father was a sushi chef and the family lived above the shop. Her mother, like her, was a fastidious cook, for whom only the best ingredients would do – and the same is so for Suga and her restaurant. Using pancake mix instead of flour to make her batter more airy, she adds a rich homemade dashi broth in place of water. To add texture and flavour she throws in fragments of excess tempura batter known as agedama, which she collects from a ritzy downtown restaurant because “they only use the very best oil.” Okonomiyaki is a dish from Western Japan. Tokyo’s version is called monjayaki, and is also on Gokirakutei’s menu, despite being trickier to cook. Its process involves arranging the solid ingredients in a circle to make a doughnut-shaped dam, pouring the broth slowly into the central hole, and using mini spatulas to quickly patch up any breaks in the wall. When mixed and cooked it forms a gooey pancake-style mush. “Admittedly it isn’t very appealing to look at,” Suga says, smiling. “But it’s delicious, especially with a mug of cold beer, and it’s so much fun … Read More

Fellows

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Takashi Kurokawa Chef, Fellows Burger Shop in Omotesando

Walk into Takashi Kurokawa’s hamburger shop and the first person you meet will probably be his mother. She jumped in to help when her son first opened Fellows and has been there ever since. “It’s a nightmare,” says Kurokawa, shaking his head. “I ask her to do something and she just says: ‘Do it yourself!’” He’s joking of course. The familial atmosphere at Fellows is one of its greatest draws – almost as important as the burgers themselves, which are frequently hailed as the best in Tokyo. Kurokawa’s secret is simple: high quality ingredients, patties made fresh, and no gimmicks. He prepares about 200 burgers a day, and when they’re gone, he closes. “My friends tell me I’m a terrible businessman,” he says. “But I’m the sort of person who needs to do everything myself.” His work cycle begins in the evening, when he grinds the next day’s beef for chilling overnight. Arriving at the shop about 9am, he spends two hours shaping patties until his hands are so cold he can no longer feel them. Every burger exits the kitchen charcoal-grilled to order. The big hitter is the bacon cheeseburger, topped with a chunky slab of slow-marinated smoky bacon. But the chef is most proud of his chilli beans cheeseburger. “Chilli isn’t something most Japanese people know how to make,” he says. But after years of practice, he’s confident his recipe rivals any served in the United States, especially when it’s slapped into a burger and covered in a web of melted cheese. Kurokawa was a chubby child with a taste for fast food. As a graduate, he tried working for his family’s construction company, but he never felt comfortable in a suit. He did, it seems, have a head for business. “Gourmet hamburgers had just arrived in Japan and I could see they were about to take off in a big way,” Kurokawa says. “So I had to be quick to stay ahead of the game.” To refine his recipe, he ate hamburgers every day for six months – all in the name of research. “I wouldn’t recommend it. I began to smell nasty,” he says. Fellows’ cult following exploded after it opened in 2005. Burger fans would make regular pilgrimages to its initial location in a west Tokyo suburb. When the building was demolished, Kurokawa moved to the new site in Omotesando – bringing his mother along, too. “Well I had to,” he says with a wink. “The customers seem to like her.” And how does she feel about having her son for a boss? “It’s a nightmare,” she says, rolling her eyes and sighing.

Anrealage

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Anrealage fashion designer, Kunihiko Morinaga

When first encountered, the collection on display at bleeding edge fashion brand Anrealage appears misnamed. It’s called ‘Colour’, but the room is white: the table, the chair, the flowers, the rug and, most importantly, the clothes. Everything is white. The shop assistant moves. He fades the lights, and switches on a high-intensity, full-spectrum white light in the centre of the room. Slowly, out of the white fabric, swathes and stripes in pink, yellow and turquoise develop on the clothes and furnishings. Minutes later, when normal conditions return, the colours slowly fade away. But this is not just a party trick. “When people look at my work, I want them to think: ‘I didn’t know clothes could do that,’” says designer Kunihiko Morinaga. “I want them to be blown away.” Morinaga is inspired, as were the Impressionist painters, by changing light. And with the Colour collection, he wants to emphasise how colour can be a subjective experience. “Look at the silver case of this laptop in fluorescent light. It looks different from how it does in daylight, and different still from how it does in near darkness.” The Colour collection’s photochromic fabric, which uses the same dye technology as self-adjusting sunglasses, is an extreme representation of this. Anrealage (think ‘a real’ + ‘unreal’ + ‘age’) started in Tokyo in 2003, but burst on to the international fashion scene when Morinaga’s meticulous hand-stitched patchwork won the 2005 grand prize in the avant-garde division of the high-profile Gen Art contest in New York. His standalone shop opened on the outskirts of Harajuku in 2011. Getting there is a journey out of the area’s consumerist madness, to place far less commercial, down a residential backstreet. Just don’t go expecting any particular experience – and certainly not the Colour collection, which will be long gone. Morinaga sees his store as an extension of his clothes, so it gets almost completely redesigned twice a year to match each collection. The design always incorporates a single table and a single chair, but even these change with the season. Re-examining everyday surroundings is one of the main themes running through Morinaga’s work. What invisible structures underpin the things around us? What are we really looking at when we stare into digital screens all day? Morinaga takes these thoughts to extremes to make people take a fresh look at the ordinary. Past collections have focused on rethinking shapes and proportions – with even the mannequins squashed and stretched. The ‘Bone’ collection used laser-cut strips of fabric to expose the clothing’s inner structures. The ‘Low’ collection featured pixelated patterns resembling low-resolution computer images blown up so raw that the floral patterns and scalloped edges looked smooth only from a distance. While some young designers fret over having enough ideas to fill a lifetime of runway shows, Morinaga looks ahead at his future career – 20 years if he’s lucky – and feels quite different. “I think so far I’ve only executed ideas that can be described in words,” he says, … Read More

Tokyo Dosanjin

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Hiroshi Nagahama Chef and manager, Tokyo Dosanjin - Soba Noodle Restaurant

Sliding open the door to Dosanjin might reveal, with a turn of the head to the right and a peek through a narrow window, Hiroshi Nagahama at work making soba noodles. It’s a painstaking process that he goes through every day, and he makes it look deceptively simple. “Everyone goes the extra mile these days. Average just isn’t good enough,” says Nagahama, who also manages the restaurant. “A lot of businessmen have quit their jobs and opened soba noodle restaurants. Those semi-pros really raise the bar for all of us, because finally they are doing something they’re passionate about.” Dosanjin, a beautiful shop by the river in Naka-Meguro, is the first Tokyo outpost of a small chain of restaurants based in the Kansai region surrounding Osaka. The restaurants’ founder, Eiji Watanabe, started making soba for a living in his forties after becoming tired of his job in fashion. Where most soba restaurants are designed for speed – some even forgoing seats – Dosanjin is crafted for pleasure. There are comfy chairs placed for a view of the serene garden, and subtle decorative ceramics by the master potter Yukio Kinoshita, who also helped design the restaurant. Kinoshita, who passed away in 2013, used ‘Dosanjin’ as his artist name. The restaurant offers a choice of regular noodles or the chunkier inakasoba, and long before his patrons kick back, Nagahama is working hard to make them. In both, the key ingredient is buckwheat (soba), whose flour many restaurants buy in bulk. But not so Dosanjin, which contracts a farm near the Japan Sea coast to provide whole seeds that are smaller and greener than most. Right there in the shop, the seeds are ground into buckwheat flour for up to nine hours overnight, before being mixed with water and just five per cent of regular wheat flour. Once kneaded, the dough is rolled into a large rectangle a couple of millimetres thick. This is folded, neat as a kimono, and then sliced into strips at military speed with a huge square-blade knife. The perfectly formed noodles take just 30 seconds to cook. Soba noodles are traditionally eaten hot in a bowl of steaming broth or cold in the summer months, dipped in a simple sauce with wasabi and chopped spring onions. In one of its popular dishes, Dosanjin again gently defies convention, placing them in broth topped with slices of sudachi, a sour Japanese citrus fruit. In return for – and to manage – all the ways he exquisitely flouts the rules, Nagahama makes just one simple request of his customers: patience, please. “It can take some getting used to, the pace of things here. People are used to soba being fast food,” he says. “But I only cook two portions at a time. To make more than that, I’d have to stir them with chopsticks, and there’s a chance the noodles could break. And we couldn’t have that.”

6

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6, men’s vintage fashion

In Shintoism, Japan’s indigenous spiritual code, there is a concept called ‘nakami’. It means the content, the energy – the life, perhaps – contained even in inanimate objects. Nakami is the spirit that makes something authentic; it cannot be faked. Masaru Sakai and his trove of men’s vintage clothing and accessories have it in spades. A discreet white sign saying simply ‘6’ is all that marks out the stairs that lead to his shop, whose name is pronounced ‘roku’ in Japanese. This is not a place designed to lure the passer-by inside. You need a sharp eye, a stroke of luck, or the recommendation of a friend to even know it exists. Sakai – nicknamed Moose – prefers it that way. He believes fate will guide those who are meant to discover 6. “I like to surprise people in a good way,” Sakai says. “It’s simple: if you and I both find ourselves here, we need to connect, we need to converse.” Just as life lacks lustre when it’s predictable, and fashion lacks fun when everyone dresses the same, discovering a unique store creates a spark of excitement. And in a culture so organised by conformity and routine, there is a special pleasure in the unexpected. Living in New York 15 years ago, passers-by would see Sakai wearing his crazy old kimono, ‘70s Levi’s bellbottoms, and cowboy boots, and they let him know how they felt. Whether a look or a comment, good or bad, there was communication. Sakai vowed to bring that New York character to Tokyo when he opened his shop 10 years ago in the location it exists in today. He chose a digit for the name of his shop, because numbers are “the same in every language.” A Japanese customer can call his shop ‘Roku’, an American can call it ‘Six’, and a Spaniard can call it ‘Seis’. None of them is wrong. Inside 6, each carefully chosen vintage piece has not only a story, but also an energy – the nakami that Sakai felt when he saw and knew it belonged in 6: Just as every tree has substance and life, so each item has been on its own unique journey to 6 – the beautifully aged kimonos, the beaded Korean monk vests, the obscure antique Danish boots, and the well-travelled suitcases. Because of nakami, vintage cannot be replicated. No amount of money spent copying the fabric or the stitch, the shape or the style, can recreate a vintage garment. Each comes from a place and time with different air, soil, and water; and has been imparted over years with the character, the movement and even the scent of the people who have come into contact with it: maker, handler, seller, wearer, user, and Tokyo-vintage-shop owner. Sakai has been on a 20-year global treasure hunt to bring apparel, accessories, and their accumulated tales to 6. Those who seek out this discreet corner of Naka-Meguro have a chance to meet Sakai and hear those stories. And … Read More