Osho 王将

 

Osho. 

 This is not a post about fine dining or food snobbery. This is not a post about the hottest thing on Yelp, or the newest food fad (though I do enjoy those things). This is a post about Osho.

Osho is a Japanese chain serving Chinese cuisine. There are Osho restaurants all over Japan that serve ramen, fried rice, and gyoza (dumplings), among other Chinese dishes. They do so in an atmosphere which one might call family-friendly, or diner-style; fluorescent lights, quick table service, no extra flourishes. Like many restaurants here in Japan, there is a display of plastic food outside the front door. The prices are cheap, and the food, though a bit greasy and nothing truly special, is pretty good for what it is. 

Osho, however, has a special nostalgia for me. When I first came to Japan my language ability was rather limited. I had one year of university Japanese under my belt, which really isn't much, and didn't know much about the nuances of Japanese cuisine. It was in the days pre-Tabelog (Japanese Yelp), so restaurants were a bit tricky to find, particularly in Japan where the best spots have only a handful of seats and are often off the beaten path. I was also on a summer language fellowship that left me with a tight budget, and living in a dormitory with a shared kitchen. You can click way back to my first blog entries from 2006 (!) for more on the summer I lived in Aichi prefecture. Enter Osho. About once a week during that summer I would ride my bike to Osho and order a beer and fried rice, no meat. It was a very simple pleasure, and some much needed time for and to myself, in which I could escape living in a dorm and escape student life. I loved watching my fellow diners- single people, families, high school kids, and feeling the normalcy of life outside of language school. After that summer, I have a fond memory of eating at an Osho near Kyoto Station with Joe at the end of a long weekend traveling around the city. We were exhausted from touring, and ate there because it was the easiest thing for our journey-weary selves. That evening lives for me as one of those great accidentally-romantic-late-night-in-a-cheap-diner memories.

A couple of weeks ago, little dude and I went to Osho here in Tokyo with my mom for a quick dinner. He declared the fried rice his favorite. We've now been back a few times, including this evening. Each time little man yells "gochisosamadeshita" to the kitchen staff upon our exit, a phrase that gives praise to the preparer of the food. It seems to crack them up each time; they generally don't receive this type of honorific praise (it is a chain, after all), and that a tiny blonde kid is screaming it into the kitchen is pretty amusing for all involved. 

Overall, I do take some comfort in the total unpretentiousness of the experience of eating at a place like Osho. Perhaps it is my Chicago upbringing, where hot dog stands are raised to a level of devotion like no other food, or my general Midwestern-ness, where the greatest BBQ in KC is found in an old gas station, but as much as I love haute cuisine, there will always be a place in my culinary life for the Oshos of the world.

 

 

Plastic food. I missed capturing the plastic beer in the bottom corner of the case. Little dude was laughing at it while I took this shot.