THE REAL FAST FOOD

Tokyo's Michelin-starred restaurants may dominate the conversation, but it is the city's quickfire comfort food dining scene that's shining.

- By Kate Crockett. Photographs by Graydon Herriott

It's 5.15pm midweek and an orderly queue is forming outside a glass-fronted shop on a street corner in Nihonbashi, central Tokyo. A white noren curtain, the ubiquitous symbol of restaurants in Japan, flutters above its entrance as a clipboard-wielding young woman works her way along the growing line, noting the number of guests in each party. "Hitori desu," I tell her. "Just one." She notes it down and the queue shuffles forward towards a cabinet of food replicas that reveal, in mouthwatering faux detail, the speciality of Hanayama Udon restaurant: wide, wheat flour noodles called oni-himokawa.

Fifteen minutes later, the first of us file in excitedly as the queue continues to grow. It's a scene replicated across Tokyo every lunchtime and evening as locals go in search of low-cost, high-quality favourites such as udon, ramen, gyoza, yakisoba, and yakitori: dishes collectively known as B-kyūgurume, or B-grade gourmet, a term coined in the 1980s by Tokyo food writer Ryuji Tazawa. These dishes occupy a special place in the hearts and stomachs of the Japanese. Served in one-off restaurants and specialist small chains, B-kyū gurume is associated with regional cuisine but also some yōshoku—foods of Western origin—that Japan has long since made its own. For Tokyoites, such meals evoke nostalgia for what they ate in their hometowns or childhoods, and the best attract long lines.