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The pursuit of hap-pie-ness

By on March 29, 2010

I have wondered if it is possible to do an A to Z of restaurant visits in Tokyo, starting with Austria and ending with Zaire.  My family and I have done quite a lot of the alphabet already dining out, and at home it is mostly A (Australian and American), B (British), C (Chinese), I (Indian and Italian), and I am sure you can guess what cuisine J is.

 

I was quite hurt when I first learned that, for many Japanese, B for British also means B for bad. British food has had an awful reputation in Japan for a long time, and when first married, I made it a long-term aim to counter this opinion held by my wife, her friends, and family.

 

I started with a roast beef Sunday lunch. Minted potatoes and Yorkshire puds were a surprise greeted with enthusiasm. Christmas saw two dozen of my mince pies disappear very quickly – I think I managed to save just one for myself – and a bread-and-butter pudding was met with great enjoyment and then frank astonishment by my wife’s university friends. They couldn’t believe the ingredients, and they couldn’t believe it was British food. And they all had taken a second helping.  And then my wife and I became parents … and how quickly do children grow!

 

It seemed but weeks from the moments when our son was learning to walk, to the father-and-son activity of dressing a Christmas tree, to tasking myself to make my son’s very last kindergarten bento box lunch.  I took over that duty from my wife just that once, and to judge by our son’s great reaction to my shortcrust pastry raspberry-and-apple turnover, maybe I should have taken over that early morning duty sooner.  The first years of his elementary schooling saw us dining out even more at the weekends, and shopping for groceries was never more fun.

 

An experience I wanted to share with my son was the variety of quality foods we are lucky to enjoy in Tokyo.  He had already been through his natto phase (thankfully), and took easily to the tastes of anchovy, blue cheese, goat cheese, olives, real baguette, and even snails cooked in garlic butter.  In the kitchen, my son started to learn how to use a knife properly, how to be careful around hot ingredients and items.  Peeling and then crushing garlic was a game for him, and being allowed to smash the garlic loudly an unusual treat. Saved me a lot of work, that did.

 

And so we went on, and I needed a challenge because I had nothing new to teach him in the kitchen, and also I suspected something was missing in our diet.  Last year, on my first trip back to the UK in eleven years, I realized what we lacked, and what was nowhere to be seen in Tokyo:  Pies.  They were everywhere: At rail stations, in pubs, at football grounds, on the seafront, stalls, at fairgrounds, in cafés, and high-street shops. Pies were all around me, and pretty good they were too. The popularity of television celebrity chefs in Britain has caused  a radical improvement in the food there.  Even a remote provincial supermarket will have fresh herbs, very good cheeses, a broad array of decent, affordable wines, and much more. In my home country, I felt like the surprised tourist that I once was in Japan. 

 

Back in Tokyo, I went for the goal.  Could I make pies to match the quality of the best I had tried in the UK? Certainly we have all the ingredients at hand here; the only problem was an oven but that was solved with a lot of legwork, a lot searching, and finally a race to Yokohama to buy the last Italian-made convection oven that Yamada Denki had in stock.  We carried it home in triumph.  Then we had the fun of figuring out the best hot water crust recipe, the right moulds for the job, cooking times, and naturally the pie recipes. It was a great learning experience, and of course we made way too many pies.  This was a problem, until friends started offering to buy them from me. And then friends of friends started buying, and then their buddies joined in, and then I started my Facebook group "The Virtual Pie Pub With Actual Pies", and the one e-mail I sent out to two rugby skippers in Tokyo went viral in the space of a day, and orders and enquiries were coming to me from complete strangers of all nationalities.  

 

Baking to order has now become a little flag-waving business and I hope the pies are acting as small, warm, pocket-sized ambassadors to anyone who holds a low opinion of my country’s food.  I have asked opinions on my pies from all my customers and they are positive but usually slow to reply – maybe because it’s rude to talk with your mouth full.

 

For tandoori chicken pies, Thai green chicken curry pies, Scotch egg pies, venison pasties, hand-raised (jelly in) English pork pies, and more, e-mail nickgeorge@hotmail.com

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About Nick George