Making Makanai
by Koji Pingry, photos by Jack Newton
My first job started with mowing a waist high jungle of a lawn with nothing but an old push mower. I had never felt so much pain in my teenage shoulder after the hundreds of yanks on the starter string. Grass allergies had deeply hindered my ability to see and breathe. I was only a few hours into my workday but I was ready for it to be over when I apprehensively called my new boss to ask what’s next? “Can you come by the restaurant? I need a busser for a bit.” I spent the next few hours being introduced to the hustling, bustling restaurant world that would become my main source of income for the next decade. Though exhausted, I already knew that dishwashing and bussing was much better for me than cutting grass. As the sound of customers faded into the night, and the last round of dishes went through the machine, I was called out to the front of the restaurant. In front of me was the most beautiful array of food I had ever seen. Tonkatsu with shredded cabbage, gyoza, albacore in ponzu, kewpie mayo noodle salad and a mountain of Negitoro and sashimi. I was awestruck, dumbfounded. Like Shia LaBebouf discovering his car was actually a sentient alien robot species in Transformers, a whole new world had been opened. “What is this?” I asked. “It’s Makanai.”
Makanai means “family meal” or “staff meal” in Japanese. The word is derived from the verb Makanau which means “to make with limited supplies, expenses, etc.” Additionally in the 17th century the word Makanai meant “to assist” and was associated with the domestic responsibilities of the Japanese people living during the Edo period. These days the word Makanai is almost exclusively used in the restaurant setting, although you can also be referred to as the “Makanai-san” if you are the person in charge of cooking staff meal for your coworkers. While staff meals have recently become a popular talking point in the American restaurant world, Makanai has been an important part of restaurant culture for centuries in Japan.
“Makanai has always been around,” says chef/owner Mutsuko Soma of the Soba shop, Kamonegi, in Seattle. “Cooks in Japan have to work such long days and hours that they need food or they will fall over.” And for Soma-san, Makanai is more than just sustenance. “I don’t like to waste anything. Food producers, farmers, ranchers spend a lot of time making their product. I don’t want to see any of that thrown away, so what we can’t use for [the] restaurant, we eat ourselves.” Avoiding waste is a huge part of Makanai culture and can often lead to benefits for the staff. At Kamonegi they change their frying oil multiple times a week to ensure the freshness of their tempura. The Makanai-san knows that when the oil is about to be changed, it might as well be used for one big meal. Often this will mean kakiage, taking leftovers collected throughout the kitchen, lightly battered with flour, water, salt and deep fried into a constellation of different ingredients.
This ethos also makes some sushi restaurants an appealing place of work. “I worked at a sushi restaurant that was closed on Mondays,” Jesse, of Kids Table tells me. “On Sundays the owner and head chef would step off the line a few hours before close and start working leisurely on dinner for the team. When we had upturned the chairs and licked the floor clean we would sit down to a meal of raw fish that wasn’t going to make it until Tuesday and a hot bowl of noodles, or curry or oden with a cold glass of beer. It was a generous and heart warming meal that said a lot even if the sound of utensils or slurping was the only conversation to be heard.”
The food and the camaraderie described by many have historically made Makanai a way for restaurants to attract and keep employees. Nanako and Darren own and operate a restaurant in Karuizawa called Kumobatei. Nanako recalls only looking for restaurant jobs that had good Makanai’s during her student days. Wages in Japanese restaurants are very low, despite Japan’s food obsessed culture, but a good Makanai can make it all worth it. “Staff Meal was the runner up for the name of my first restaurant in Vancouver, and our Makanai was always on the menu,” Darren told me. “I wanted to serve guests the food that I would cook for my friends. Serving our Makanai, the actual food that we were eating that day, seemed like an honest and natural thing to do.”
Darren still takes Makanai seriously (though he did tell me his favorite staff meal he ever made was a massive tray of nachos), even if sometimes he is just cooking for his wife and himself. But making Makanai can sometimes be a grueling task. Coming up with a different meal for your staff/coworkers every day can be challenging especially after a series of long shifts. Simeon worked at a Japanese restaurant in North Seattle and just about every day the same line cook would make lunch and dinner for the whole staff. “For years we all took him for granted, until he got into an accident and missed work for 6 months,” Simeon says. “I started having to make Makanai and most times, it honestly sucked.” Makanai has to be made throughout the day. The Makanai-san has to balance their daily prep work and orders for customers while making the Makanai. “It was almost always either fried rice or curry. If it was curry a few days in a row, the staff all knew not to grumble or complain because it meant ‘fuck you, I’m tired’. But then when I found the energy and motivation to make something else, like one time I made everyone burgers and fries, they made sure to come around and tell me how much they loved it.”
At the heart of it all, it is often the people that make up the memories of the Makanai as much as the meal itself. For Simeon that person was Oscar, a character who would occasionally show up to work in a tattered suit after a night of sprinting through the streets of Seattle after too many post-shift drinks. “He called it Suit Parkour,” Simeon laughs.
“There were a number of bars we weren’t invited back to because of him but man, Oscar made the best fish and chips in the whole world. One day I asked him for his secret. He gave me a bit of a crazed look and showed me a massive handful of baking powder. I am still not sure if he was being serious or not.”
For Darren, it was Gary: “At this place we pretty much got the same ingredients for Makanai every day: beef sinew and mirepoix (onions, carrots & celery). Gary was a master of spices and turned these basics into a myriad of tasty meals every day, but the most memorable was one with star anise and five spice that tasted like something my grandpa made,” Darren remembers.
And for Cameron it was Mitsuko-san. On his very first day of working at a restaurant called Tengu, Cameron was fed Oyako donburi. “I immediately knew how lucky I was to be exposed to both the concept of Makanai, as well as having immediate access to such high quality food! I had learned that the traditional way to make the dish involved a soupy end product, but Mitsuko-san had unlocked
the ability to somehow feature an extremely softly cooked egg while preserving a more solid texture to the dish as a whole. Years later I wonder if this may have also been done to allow for the inclusion of (very wonderful) crispier-than-usual chicken. Of course, for a very long time, I did not understand what was going on in my mouth: savory and sweet, yet no sugar; eggs, veggies, protein, all healthy stuff, and there I was asking for my third helping,” explained Cameron
If there was any one person that made me fall in love with Makanai, so much so that my partner and I have made Makanai the name and driving force of our farm, it was Mitsuko-san as well. Mitsuko-san was a whirlwind. She zipped around the kitchen, her fingers caked in batter, brandishing a ladle or a long pair of chopsticks like a cutlass, yelling at any in her way. Years of working and owning restaurants left her with little to no feeling in the tips of her fingers which she used to bring scalding hot mini tempura udons to customers across the restaurant. Mitsuko san was already semi-retired when her friend opened Tengu and asked her for help running the kitchen. She worked lunch five days a week, as well as filling in when she was needed, which was often.
We often wondered why she kept working long days in the hot kitchen of a little restaurant next to Northgate mall when she could be napping on a beach in San Diego. It was not until later that I realized her passion and motor was fueled by feeding us “kids”. We were a ragtag cast of college students and 20 somethings trying to find our way in the world and there were many of us who worked there for more than five years. Mitsuko-san would deliberately make heaping portions of Makanai, so that we could take extra food home for our days off. She would pour her love, compassion, and skill into woks of fried rice filled with day-old gyoza, Neapolitan spaghetti, or Oyakodon. She would make a small bowl of soba with veggies for Toshi-san and Sato-san when she was worried about their health. After I had surgery, she showed up at my house unannounced, to give me a stack of gallon cream cheese containers filled with Makanai and a big hug.
At our farm we make Makanai everyday, attempting to harness the creativity, thriftiness and care that Mitsuko-san and all of the other Makanai-san’s we have encountered passed on to us through their meals. I now spend an inordinate portion of my brain power thinking about what to make for lunch while doing the morning harvest. But the first time I made Makanai I was not so prepared. It was at Soma-san’s restaurant, the fall before we started our own farm. I was incredibly nervous. I couldn’t think of what to make, like being thrust onto a Karaoke stage without having a song picked out. “Start with Cha-han (fried rice),” Soma-san suggested. Seems sensible, I thought. As I started to timidly gather ingredients together, Soma san took me aside, “Koji, Makanai is a sacred thing. It is where you really learn about food and cooking and where you get to cook for the people you see and work with everyday. Take it seriously. Enjoy it.”