Japan's Machi-Chuka

About this book

Every Japanese town has one: a small Chinese restaurant with a red counter, a fogged window, a menu wall of paper slips and a cook who has stood at the same wok for forty years. It is not in Chinatown, and it does not claim to be authentic — over a century, the town itself taught the kitchen what to cook. This is the machi-chuka, Japan's neighborhood Chinese food, and this guide covers the whole cuisine in 200 entries: how it arrived, from the treaty ports of Yokohama, Kobe and Nagasaki, the cooks who stayed, and the postwar birth of the set meal; the rice canon of chahan and the glazed rice bowls; the great wok plates — sweet-and-sour pork, mapo tofu, twice-cooked pork, chilli prawns; gyoza, steamers and the small plates; the soups, wok noodles and sweet finishes from almond jelly to Shaoxing wine; the shops themselves — the owner-cook, the couple at the register, the cleaver, the lunch rush, the delivery bicycle; the canon at home, in frozen gyoza, sauce pouches and grandmothers' frying pans; and the map of regions, borders and futures, from the gyoza cities of Utsunomiya and Hamamatsu to the new authentic wave and the successor shortage. Every entry follows the same four fields — the dish and its ground, the making and the craft, the taste and the table, and where you meet it today closing with the one official check to make — so any two plates can be compared in seconds. This book claims no health effects, ranks no restaurant, and repeats no origin legend as fact; it documents the dishes, the techniques, the houses and the culture exactly. Written and produced in Japan by a Japanese author and publisher.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.