Hi there. Remember me? I haven't written/posted since the earthquake. No, it wasn't because I was scarred physically or emotionally; it was because I am colossally lazy. And yeah... this one wasn't even written by me, it was written by David Z. Morris who blogs at \\Minds Like Knives//, over 6 months ago when he still resided in Japan. Anyhow, it's mid-winter and I thought it'd be nice to finally post something with a more summer feel to help keep you warm during your non-insulated, concrete tenement sucking in cold air, Tokyo winter. Do enjoy, please.
If this blog has any message (beside the
obvious one that drinking is great and you should introduce your children to it
at an early age) it’s that Western images of Japan as a wonderland of shiny
hyper-tech and gleaming elevated highways are spectacularly misguided. If you
want to burn those myths from your mind, I doubt there’s a more large-scale,
spectacular way to do it than Iseya.
This two-story yakitori – well, tent, really – has been around since
1928, and apparently hasn’t been cleaned since (and that includes the staff’s
uniforms, which consist of standard
issue sweatpants, white t-shirt, and towel-around-the-head). It’s like your own little piece of Jakarta
right in Kichijoji.
Any American health inspector would walk
two feet into this place before trying to shut it down, but he’d have an
aneurysm halfway through the paperwork.
The runner over the entryway to the main dining hall is black at the
bottom from decades of scalp oils soaking into it bit by bit. The roof over the main dining area is the
kind of plastic waffle you’d build a shed out of. We were seated on the second floor right next
to a broken section of roof, and leaves, bird droppings, and god knows what
else were collected on a platform conveniently tilted ever so slightly towards our
food. This is where a large section of
roof had been jury-rigged with a tarp.
It looked like the tarp had been there for a while.
Whether because of its shittiness or
despite it, people love this place. It
seats over 100 people, but still we actually had to queue up for about ten
minutes to get in. But it’s more than
just busy – when Iseya opened up a new, clean, fancy store on the other side of
Kichijoji, there was a minor revolt on Mixi and they ended up keeping both
locations. Part of the secret is
location – Iseya is right next to Inokashira Park, one of Tokyo’s best, so you
can get takeout yakitori and go watch a puppet show or professional manga
reading (if you’re lucky). But the place
itself has a great atmosphere, too, public and loud and rowdy. I was kind of reminded of the big open-air
dancehalls around Austin, Texas, except of course that there was no band
(Iseya, you can have that idea for free!)
I’ve been to Iseya twice now, and the
provisions were mixed. The first night
everything was way above-average, with crisp gyoza and great yakitori, with a
truly hand-made vibe that would definitely justify people’s passion. This week I went back and the gyoza were so
oily I only ate one, and the yakitori was okay, but not a jump-out. We got a nice fresh tomato and some great
homemade pickles, though, so maybe the gyoza were just bad luck the second time
around.
And maybe they would have been better with
the bird shit.
- David Z. Morris
So there you are, Iseya is a dump, but our sort of dump. I was surprised to find that they had an official website, and that it's a lot nicer than the restaurant itself... Sign of the times, I suppose.
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