Notes on a Steakhouse From a Murakami Novel

We live in an era in which our restaurants are designed, more than anything else, to be photogenic. Our dining rooms are decorated to catch the camera's eye. Our plates are garnished to act as indicators of lifestyle more than anything else.

Naturally, I fucking despise this. Which is why I'm deeply in love with a quietly and magnificently off-trend restaurant, hidden deep in the labyrinthine recesses of the older and grimier of Bangkok's two Japanese quarters, a dusty street where at night, the ladies of the evening come out in full costume to appeal to the tastes of salarymen, row after row of prim schoolgirls, nurses, prom queens, and kimono'd quasi-geisha on folding chairs.

Walk down past the security gate, past the signs for "erotic lady clubs," past the half-empty '90s shopping arcade with its postmodernist fanlights and glass-brick partitions, to a barely marked door. There is a sign in Japanese, but nothing in English to indicate the name, just the words "Teppanyaki," "Japanese," and "Dining" in tiny Helvetica Narrow tucked beneath the katakana characters, and an equally tiny Thai spelling of the establishment's name.

This is where I will pause to conspicuously not give the name of this fine eatery -- for those of you living outside Thailand, you probably don't care, and for those of you living here, I want to make it a treasure hunt. I'm sure you can follow the clues to get there.

Once you walk in the door, you see a dining room that was once peak trendiness, and its peak trendiness of course coincided with peak Japan in the early '90s, in the kind of shitty "Asian minimalist" décor in dark wood with lots of potted plants under track lighting. The soundtrack, is, naturally, piano jazz (the only other choice for such an institution would be the sort of '60s and '70s easy listening that enjoys an enduring popularity in Japan -- Claudine Longet, Judy Collins, and the like). Take a seat on the low chairs upholstered in walnut-brown vinyl, next to the little caddy of liquor bottles for the most conservative possible choices in digestif spirits -- Glenmorangie, Courvoisier, etc. – and I can't imagine the face they'd make if you asked for a craft cocktail.

Having sat down, a warm towel between your hands, take a look at the menu -- all of the à la carte items are written in Japanese, with no English translation, just a transliteration into Latin script. I've only gone at lunch, and I've focused on the lunch set items, all attractively priced, and in keeping with the teppanyaki tradition, it is a set vaguely modeled on Western dining, of the sort developed in Kobe in the wake of World War II during the MacArthur occupation -- a Japanese interpretation of an American interpretation of classical French service à la russe, brought from Moscow to the salons of Napoleon's France by Prince Alexander Kurakin (shortly before Napoleon returned the favor by marching 700,000 men into Kurakin's homeland).

And so what you get is a teppan-grilled steak or a "hanbagu" (oh how the Japanese can completely warp a borrowed English word) steak served under a fried egg with what the Japanese call demi-glace, and which tastes more like teriyaki sauce than a classical French demi-glace, but is wonderful all the same. It comes with the sort of Japanese salad that is designed more as a garnish than an edible, a natural coming from the country that perfected plastic models of food to place in restaurant windows -- fluffed pieces of cos lettuce, a few strips of Vegetable Incognito, a whole cherry tomato – along with a bowl of rice, a remarkably bright and flavorful miso soup, and three sauces (soy and shaved radish, kind-of-chimichurri, and maybe-mayo?), followed by coffee and a beautifully inscrutable Japanese dessert.

Everything is so aggressively outdated, it almost seems studied in its languor. The weird future-Japan '80s aesthetics haven't been preserved like treasured jewels, but have to a certain degree left to fade. One teppan sits mostly abandoned, and they sit me at one solitary chair at the end where a copper cloche sits on the grill alone, fake flowers dusty, and wrinkled, a decorative plate sitting next to the cardboard box the air conditioning unit came in. Sitting alone at the teppan, a piano soundtrack playing, unsure whether the palms are real or not, you can feel like you've stepped out of our reality and into a Murakami novel.

But it is a reflection of its surroundings. A relic within a relic, on a back street in a neighborhood dedicated to the flesh industry.

I often comment on the ubiquity of vaporwave aesthetics in the wild in Bangkok. With the Thai economy having collapsed in 1997 (immediately following Japan's deflationary period, and exacerbating Japan's problems in the process), and having not really recovered since, it becomes inevitable that the architectural style of early '90s Asia has become the definitive standard of the city, much in the same way New York is defined by the style of the years leading up to 1929, and the way Paris is defined by the style of the years leading up to the collapse of the Second Empire.
We can think about food in the context of history pretty readily. You can imagine the thick steak on the plate of a '50s Madison Avenue accounts man taking a big client out, or the massive joint of poultry being gnawed upon by a Medieval king.

So my curious little restaurant is but one instance -- one that takes the impersonal aesthetics of architecture and design and carries them into the intimate aesthetics of gastronomy. And for that it is a monument worth preserving akin to a row of old commercial buildings, an antique tea set on a dusty shelf.