Urban Japan: A Local Food Cafe in Every Neighborhood?

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We are city jumping a little bit here, and it’s just before the lunch rush. On this particular late morning, we sit in Cafe Nonnon, a little pasta restaurant in Nagoya.

The walls of Cafe Nonnon hold a unique cocktail of scents. Sweet cooked onion and tomato, lingering cigarette smoke, dark roasted coffee — a mixture that so far as I know, can only come from a decades old classic cafe such as this one. We feel at ease as we sink into the dark brown pleather seats.

While our pasta is being prepared, various tunes have been coming from behind the bar counter. We look across the narrow room to see the chef, his closely trimmed greying beard and thin face, singing and humming while cooking. In short time he comes out from behind the counter with a steaming dish of pasta covered in a thick ankake sauce with an egg and fragrant fresh basil on top.

It is really good, and we let the chef know it by exclaiming “Meccha oiiishi desu!” as we eat. He laughs and guesses we’re from Kansai. Waving off our compliments, he calls the food “B-Quality Gourmet” all the while humming and smiling and continuing to chop onions behind the counter. Sure, he probably squirts some ketchup in there to get that classic Showa-era taste, but it doesn’t matter. It works.

Later, when the chef delivers the standard after-meal coffee to the table, we get to talking. We learn that all of the fresh vegetables used in his cooking come from his own garden on the outskirts of the city. “No chemicals. No pesticides. Only nature.” he tells us.

This is amazing news to newcomers here. Looking at the restaurant itself, you wouldn’t know it was any kind of farm-to-table place. It basically looks like any other old diner. Only later do we notice a small picture of the owner’s garden on a flier outside.

This is all more common than you might think in Japan. Back in the alleys of our Osaka neighborhood, quasi farm-to-table restaurants are just called restaurants. Nothing necessarily fancy. Just well-done food with some ingredients from the owner’s garden. Indeed, we frequent a delicious cheap udon restaurant, a fancy but reasonably priced vegan restaurant, and several other local cafes that all follow the same practice of harvesting from their gardens daily.

To some of us, the old neighborhoods of Osaka or Nagoya probably seem like another planet. They need not be. Every neighborhood in the world can have access to dining establishments that serve good, affordable, creative, locally-produced food. It used to be the case in the United States and much of Europe. Yet most of us will know that local restaurants in these parts of the world have been decimated over the past half century.

What we might not know however, is that the downfall of the small, family-owned restaurant has come not solely from the (manufactured) apathy towards local produce, but also from laws and regulations that have made it impossible for these small businesses to compete.

Meanwhile Cafe Nonnon has been open for over half a century, run the entire time by the same guy. Small neighborhood restaurants like this continue to survive in urban Japan in part because they have been protected from the kinds of oddly overbearing regulations that have put much of America’s small family restaurants out of business.

In the U.S. for instance, local zoning ordinances and state regulations have long made it illegal to serve produce from a personal garden, or to operate a neighborhood restaurant from your home. Thankfully new laws — often called Cottage Food laws — are starting to change this slowly, on a state-by-state basis. With the changes, neighborhood restaurants like Cafe Nonnon suddenly become possible.

As we finish our thick and smooth coffee, I take in one last breath of the atmosphere here. It took fifty years for this atmosphere to mature into what it is in this shop, in this moment. It is difficult to experience something like this in the United States today. Yet there is good reason to believe that in the near future, more neighborhoods in the world can start the process, again welcoming good, local and regional food back into their lives. Not just for the foodies, but for everyone.

Questions: If you were to open a small restaurant or cafe, where would you do it and what would you serve?

Next Week: This series continues with another look into the urban neighborhoods of Japan.

Read Another Story: This one from a few years back explores a bit more about these kinds of coffee shops in Osaka, and how they might become possible in the United States.

SHORT#11: The Art of Ignoring Trends

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