Dirty Chinese Restaurants

25Sep07

 

I usually go out for lunch at one of the 100’s of restaurants near my office in a posh area of Tokyo. There’s dozens of delicious places, with every imaginable type of cuisine you could think of, within 50 paces of my office door. Yep. Lunch is something to look forward to every day. The hardest part about lunch is choosing which restaurant we (my whole section at work, a total of 4 people) want to patronize that day. This is Japan, so we always go together, nominate establishments, build a consensus, and collectively decide based on consideration for each other’s likes and dislikes. This is Japan, where we go with the flow, and sometimes my boss chooses the place.

I have a middle-aged boss here at my company. He’s actually 58, but because Japanese people live so long, the term “middle-aged” extends until 75. Old age is after 80. These dates are even bigger if you’re from Okinawa. He’s a nice guy. I know this because he told me so when I asked him for a raise. He likes watching soccer, works out every weekend, and doesn’t smoke or drink, making him more agreeable than 80% of old Japanese men. However, when he chooses the restaurant we visit for lunch, it is ALWAYS a Dirty Chinese Restaurant.

It seems like no matter how posh your neighborhood in Tokyo, there is always a tiny, cockroach-infested, wet-noodle-smelling restaurant with recycled plastic bags hanging outside to dry somewhere within 1500 feet. Keep in mind there are no zoning laws in this city, so it makes it very easy for anybody to open a humble health-code-be-damned noodle shop on their front porch anytime they want. So, this results in some flavorful restaurants, none of which I’ve gotten food poisoning from yet, praise Jesus. My boss loves this type of restaurant.

Maybe it’s because there seems to be a kind of caste system for restaurants in Tokyo. The light, airy, Japanese-French fusion restaurant with white decoration and wall-to-ceiling windows is populated by 90% office ladies and socializing housewives during lunch. The bossa-nova blaring, hip restaurant with curries is where female college students outnumber everyone else 8 to 1. Likewise, the Dirty Chinese Restaurant is filthy, smoke-filled, with a menu of 8 items written in marks-a-lot and posted on the wall, chairs that are actually footstools covered in vinyl cloth, and full of balding men in old yellowed suits. Not my favorite place to spend my allotted hour of freedom during lunch.

I can never forget some of the places he’s taken us. One time, we waited for 5 minutes in the absolutely foul air of the doorway to one restaurant, which looked like it may have been a car garage in it’s previous life. There were no windows, black scuffs on the walls, and a brown ceiling from all the smoking that had been going on in there. This place was so dirty that they had softporn magazines in a little cubby under the table for people to read after (or before) their meals.

Another place was a noodle shop where we paid 1200 yen ($10) for soba noodles and sat at the same table that was about 2×3′, our knees touching because the place was so cramped. Yet another place specialized in stir fry. The food there was not so bad, but the last time we went I found a hair in my food.

The absolute funniest thing is that whenever we go to one of his Dirty Chinese Restaurants he always complains about the food after we leave. That’s Japan.

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