Tokyo's foreign residents are bringing the flavors of their respective homelands to their adopted home, enriching the Japanese capital with their thriving restaurants and helping them integrate in the metropolis.
AHINAMA
Higashiueno, Taito-ku
SAMARKAND TERRACE
Takadanobaba, Shinjuku-ku
Soul Food House
Azabujuban, Minato-ku
Diner Vang
Miyoshi, Koto-ku
Bistrot Quatre Avril
Nishigotanda, Shinagawa-ku
Babusya REY
Kichijojihoncho, Musashino-shi
Turkish Cafe ＆ Bar Dogal
Nakanobu, Shinagawa-ku
APSARA
Nishiwaseda, Shinjuku-ku
de Afrique
Okusawa, Setagaya-ku
Inside the eye-catching turquoise entrance of Ahinama Ueno in Taito district's Higashiueno, owner Roberto Miro Luaces -- clad in a bright red apron -- is busy baking and serving Cuban sandwiches.
Ahinama offers a wide variety of fillings to heap into the soft fluffy Cuban bread, such as beef, chicken, ham and shrimp. The most popular choice on the menu is El Cubano, which features a plentiful serving of pulled pork.
The sandwiches are made fresh upon order. Luaces slices open a Cuban loaf and toasts it in a special grill that makes the bread crispy all over.
After coming to Japan in 2001, Luaces worked as a professional dancer for about 10 years as he has loved to dance since a child and enjoyed entertaining others. "I've performed on stages around the country: Sapporo, Sendai, Niigata, Nagoya, Kyoto, Okinawa and so on."
"Decide on what you want to do and go explore different experiences," he says. "Life is fascinating as good things and bad all come along the way."
Trying Uzbek plov, a delicious rice and lamb dish on the menu at Samarkand Terrace in Shinjuku district's Takadanobaba, for the first time proves to be a pleasant surprise.
"With six kilograms each of meat, carrots and rice, we can make 60 servings right in here," owner Akmal Arzikulov explains as he shows off the restaurant's gigantic plov pot.
Chef Olmos Xoja starts the day's preparations at 8 a.m. Once the ingredients are ready, he heats flaxseed oil and sunflower oil in the special pot and then puts in 12 pieces of lamb about the size of an adult's fist and adds onions and carrots on top.
While waiting for the meat and vegetables to cook, he chops coriander and samples the soup to adjust the taste. At around 10:30 a.m., he adds rice grains into the pot with a long spatula and then covers it with a lid.
Meanwhile, in the oven, samsa, a flaky pastry dough wrapped around meat and vegetables, is being baked to perfection, filling the eatery with its appetizing aroma.
Fried catfish, golden and crispy on the outside and fluffy and flavorful on the inside, is a popular item on the menu at Soul Food House, which serves authentic American Southern and Cajun cuisines in Minato district's Azabujuban.
Owner and chef LaTonya Whitaker chats with patrons as music wafts around the restaurant. Her husband David Whitaker joins in and laughter inevitably erupts.
LaTonya says she learned how to cook gumbo when she was living in Louisiana as a college student. The thick stew, slightly spicy and topped with crab legs, goes perfectly with rice, she says.
The stew also features chicken, sausage and celery, but what's most important is the roux, LaTonya says. Even if the best ingredients are used, it's no good if the roux isn't done right.
It takes about 10 minutes of diligent stirring of flour and oil in the pot. If even the slightest bit is burned, the process has to be started over from scratch because it will spoil the taste, she says.
At Diner Vang in Miyoshi in Koto district, chef Tran Viet Hoang prepares the pho bo by pouring hot beef bone broth into a deep bowl filled with rice noodles and topped with thin slices of raw beef.
Manager Le Thi Ha explains that the noodle soup, made with the broth, onions, cinnamon, star anise and other ingredients, "takes 24 hours to make."
The signature sauces used in other dishes on the menu, such as Vietnamese fresh spring rolls and banh mi, are also made from scratch.
In addition to Vietnamese soy sauce and Sate Tom chili oil, the restaurant also uses Japanese sugar, vinegar and other condiments.
"As these come in different levels of sweetness and sourness (from Vietnamese products), we make adjustments to the recipes we learned in Vietnam," says Le, who hails from Thanh Hoa province in northern Vietnam.
Clad in his white chef's shirt and signature orange apron, Jean Bosco is always a cheerful beam of sunshine for patrons when they visit Bistrot Quatre Avril, a French restaurant in Shinagawa area's Nishigotanda that specializes in cuisine from the south of the European nation.
Bosco, who was born and raised in Toulouse in southwestern France, says that when he was in high school, he was impressed by a chef he saw on TV. "I told my mother I wanted to go to culinary school and she immediately agreed to it," he says.
In the kitchen of the restaurant named in honor of his daughter's birthday, Bosco cooks apples to serve with duck confit, paying careful attention to how the color changes. For the confit de canard, he cooks the meat for four hours in duck fat heated to 60 C and then puts that into the oven so it becomes crispy on the outside and soft in the inside.
Bosco says the steps of his cooking are set down to the fine details, like how many minutes in the oven and what to use in the sauce. "The meat gets tough if you cook it for too long, but it's undercooked if it's not long enough. You can't make good food if you don't have all this knowledge."
"Sauces are the most important thing in French cuisine. I only test taste my sauce once. I don't do it over and over."
Stepping into Babusya Rey in Kichijoji in the west Tokyo city of Musashino, customers are greeted by the bright smiles of owner Yukinori Ogasawara and his wife Viktoriia. Working alongside the couple are Viktoriia's parents, as well as her sister and brother-in-law who evacuated from Ukraine to Japan in the spring of 2022.
The food at Babusya Rey, which opens only on weekends and national holidays, is prepared by the whole family. For example, Viktoriia's father is in charge of dicing the ham and vegetables for the Olivier salad while her mother prepares the ingredients for the chicken kyiv. Viktoriia and her older sister Yevgeniva take charge of the frying.
"We pound the chicken breast meat to 5 millimeters thick and wrap it around frozen herb butter," Viktoriia explains as she demonstrates how to prepare the chicken. "Then we coat it with egg, flour and breadcrumbs a few times, and it's ready to be fried."
"Everything is made at home by the family from Donetsk. Even the varenyky dumplings are made from scratch, starting with the dough," says Yukinori. "Viktoriia's parents make their rounds to the butchers and grocers on their bicycles to buy the ingredients, and they make the dishes for customers the same way as they would when cooking for family."
