It is barely 10am and the queue outdoors Onigiri Bongo already stretches across the block. A number of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping inexperienced tea and poring over laminated menus. Additional again it’s standing-room solely.
“It’s all the time like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball store and restaurant within the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for nearly half a century. “However we by no means run out of rice,” she provides, seated in her workplace close to a wall clock within the form of a rice ball with a chew taken out.
Bongo, opened in 1960 by Ukon’s drum-playing husband, sells as many as 1,500 rice balls a day. Its prospects are a combination of loyal locals, inquisitive diners from out of city and, more and more, a overseas clientele desirous to style the inspiration for the worldwide growth in onigiri – triangles of heat, flippantly salted rice embellished with a topping or filling and, most of the time, wrapped in crisp nori seaweed.
The queues outdoors Bongo are as legendary as its selection of 57 toppings, from the favored sujiko – salmon roe – and umeboshi plum to the extra unconventional bacon and cheese, all accompanied by pickled cucumber and radish and a bowl of miso soup.
“The longest anybody has waited is eight hours,” says Ukon, 72. “Onigiri are so easy – rice, salt, seaweed and a topping – and anybody could make them. While you deliver a smile to somebody’s face with one thing so simple as that, it’s actually particular.”
At lunchtime, the diners ready for a seat at Bongo’s counter embody Keita Kimura, who’s simply minutes away from sampling its koshihikari rice from Ukon’s Niigata prefecture, enveloped in nori from the Ariake Sea. “I eat lots of comfort retailer onigiri however I’ve by no means tried a speciality store,” says the 27-year-old, including that he has determined to order toppings of tuna and mayonnaise and deep-fried hen. “The range is a giant attraction, and you may eat them shortly.”
Whereas rice gross sales in Japan are in decline, shortages however, demand for onigiri is rising – a pattern trade observers attribute to altering consuming habits when the Covid-19 pandemic started, as folks began ordering “artisanal” onigiri to take house for dinner.
Wrapped triangular or round rice balls have lengthy been a staple of Japan’s ubiquitous comfort shops, the place they’re snapped up by workplace employees in search of one thing low cost and filling to tide them over till the night.
These shops, too, are driving the onigiri wave with new varieties and, on the FamilyMart chain, high-end variations made in collaboration with well-known eating places characteristic fillings akin to meunière-style salmon and line-caught bluefin tuna with smoked pickled radish. The key konbini chain 7-Eleven, which began promoting onigiri quickly after it opened its first retailer in 1974, offered greater than 2bn rice balls within the yr ending April 2023, in keeping with the Toyo Keizai on-line enterprise journal.
Now the common-or-garden dish is making its mark abroad, in Britain, Germany, Australia, the US and elements of Asia – a pattern mirrored in Japanese rice exports, which rose from 4,516 tonnes in 2014 to twenty-eight,928 tonnes in 2022, in keeping with the agriculture ministry.
Mika Kazato, who runs the Japanese cafe Parami in Sydney’s Surry Hills, has been blown away by Australians’ enthusiasm for the dish. “I didn’t anticipate it,” she says.
In 2022 her group began making simply 50 onigiri every day however they now make as much as 500, as prospects flock to attempt the rice balls to accompany cups of espresso or matcha. “It’s actually yum, it’s like the proper little quantity for a snack,” says one buyer, George.
However it’s the French who’ve arguably completed most to propel onigiri into the identical culinary house as sushi and Japan’s different soul meals, ramen. Paris is house to than 50 onigiri retailers, rice balls are offered in lots of supermarkets and, this summer time, the French judoka Luka Mkheidze credited them with giving him and his teammates that little further required to win medals on the Paris Olympics.
“Onigiri are like gas for the physique,” he instructed the Asahi Shimbun, three years after he tried his first onigiri on the postponed Tokyo Video games. “They offer me power so I can carry out correctly all through the day.”
‘A extremely versatile dish’
Within the Tokyo neighbourhood of Asakusa, Anastasia and Rame Bouslimi are amongst a glut of lunchtime prospects outdoors Onigiri Yadoroku, town’s oldest rice ball store and, in 2018, the recipient of a Michelin Bib Gourmand ranking, awarded to eating places that serve cheap meals.
The couple have eaten onigiri of their native Germany however are desirous to pattern an early lunch at Yadoroku, which opened in 1954. “The onigiri in Japan are far, much better,” Anastasia says. “They’re low cost and good for you … like a wholesome sandwich.”
Her husband says onigiri had been the plain selection for a late breakfast on their first full day in Japan. “While you consider Germany you consider bread, if you consider Japan you consider onigiri. Once we had been contemplating what to eat, onigiri was the very first thing that got here to thoughts.”
The Japanese are thought to have been snacking on one thing resembling an onigiri – also known as omusubi in some elements of the nation – since at the very least the early eleventh century.
They seem in Murasaki Shikibu’s Heian interval (794-1185) novel The Story of Genji, and within the Hayao Miyazaki anime masterpiece Spirited Away, in addition to in Utagawa Hiroshige’s 1830s ukiyo-e prints The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaido and Akira Kurosawa’s basic 1954 movie Seven Samurai.
When Ukon’s late husband opened Bongo there have been only a few specialist retailers and Japan’s first comfort retailer wouldn’t open for about one other 10 years. For many years onigiri had been thought of a snack to be made and eaten at house, or as a part of a bento for college sports activities days, picnics and lengthy practice journeys.
Yusuke Nakamura’s love of rice balls began as a younger little one. “I didn’t have a lot of an urge for food so my mom would make onigiri, put them down and inform me it didn’t matter if I ate them or not,” says Nakamura, the chair of the Onigiri Society, which organised the primary onigiri summit this yr and hopes the dish will characteristic prominently at subsequent yr’s World Expo in Osaka. “However, one way or the other, I all the time ate them and grew to like them.”
Nakamura, whose organisation works with companies to advertise onigiri domestically and internationally, expects the dish to adapt because it continues to draw followers past Japan’s shores. “It’s actually versatile,” he says. “So long as it comprises rice and a filling and could be eaten with one hand, you’ll be able to name it an onigiri.”
There may be, although, one non-negotiable rule, he says. “No matter you do, don’t sprinkle them with soy sauce.”
Further reporting by Luca Ittimani
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