Staff Meals 79

It is the season when the plum blossoms are at their loveliest.

This has nothing to do with plum blossoms, but today I thought I would share another installment in our staff-meal series.

Let us introduce a few rice bowls we have eaten recently.

First is the fifth-generation owner’s favorite: gyudon, or beef bowl.

I may have mentioned this before, but when the fifth-generation owner was in middle school, he went to a ski camp in Zao, Yamagata Prefecture, during winter break.

The gyudon he ordered for lunch then is something he still cannot forget.

It was called gyudon, but it was almost entirely onions!

Back then, meals at ski resort cafeterias were generally expensive and bad, so perhaps it could not be helped—but it was still awful.

These days, he willingly eats onions for his health, but at the time he absolutely hated all kinds of scallions and onions, so he remembers it as something like an ordeal.

He remembers fuming to himself, “If only they had called it an ‘onion bowl’ on the menu, I would never have ordered it!”

Incidentally, he still absolutely cannot stand long green onions (perhaps he inherited that from the fourth-generation owner)…

Whether or not he knew about that past, Yuya made him a gyudon generously laden with onions.

The fifth-generation owner is an adult now, though, so he happily ate it, thinking of the benefits for his circulation.

The other rice bowl was oyakodon, chicken and egg over rice.

We normally use more than ten LL-size eggs to make five servings of oyakodon, but with egg prices so high these days, we have been using fewer eggs.

Instead, Yuya thickened it with potato starch to add volume, and it was actually lighter and perhaps even more delicious this way.

That is killing two birds with one stone.

And one more: clam chowder over rice.

For the fifth-generation owner, cream stew lacks the punch needed to serve as a main dish, and he would generally rather not eat it with plain white rice.

But this day’s dish was not cream stew—it was clam chowder.

Contrary to expectations, it was delicious served as a rice bowl.

It is of course different from Fukagawa-don, but it has a flavor reminiscent of it.

He has never tried the real thing in Boston, but knowing Yuya, who cooks while studying YouTube videos, it is surely close to the authentic version.

Incidentally, one of our winter sushi toppings is simmered hamaguri clam.

We serve nigiri topped with large clams caught in Kujukuri and Kashima, Ibaraki, but when serving them to overseas guests, we deliberately make a mistake and say, “This is a clam chowder.”

When the guest looks puzzled, we never forget to playfully say, “Oh, I'm sorry, I was wrong. Then this is math. Clam chowder minus chowder equals… clam!”

And on that note, we will leave you there.