A lunch at Onigiri Bongo contains mustard inexperienced and salmon flake onigiri, miso soup, pickles and inexperienced tea.

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A lunch at Onigiri Bongo contains mustard inexperienced and salmon flake onigiri, miso soup, pickles and inexperienced tea.

Anthony Kuhn/NPR

TOKYO — The world’s nice cuisines can regale the attention and the palate. Or, alternatively, they could rejoice the plain and exalt the common-or-garden — for instance, by recreating home-style consolation meals in a restaurant setting.

A well-liked and compact eatery in Tokyo’s Toshima ward, known as Onigiri Bongo, does simply that. It has served certainly one of Japan’s most humble meals, the onigiri, or rice ball, for some 60 years.

Diners at Onigiri Bongo — named for the drum, whose sound resonates far and broad just like the restaurant’s popularity — are squeezed into 9 seats round an L-shaped counter. Its tiny area, and its reputation as one of many metropolis’s prime onigiri emporia, produces traces of shoppers stretching down the road, ready for 3 or 4 hours, or extra.

Onigiri Bongo proprietor Yumiko Ukon (foreground) prepares rice balls at her well-liked Tokyo restaurant. Ordering from a chef behind the counter is much like the best way many sushi eating places function.

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Onigiri Bongo proprietor Yumiko Ukon (foreground) prepares rice balls at her well-liked Tokyo restaurant. Ordering from a chef behind the counter is much like the best way many sushi eating places function.

Anthony Kuhn/NPR

The entrance of a line of individuals stretching down the block, awaiting the 11:30 a.m. opening of Onigiri Bongo, a nine-seat restaurant.

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The entrance of a line of individuals stretching down the block, awaiting the 11:30 a.m. opening of Onigiri Bongo, a nine-seat restaurant.

Anthony Kuhn/NPR

Behind the counter is the restaurant’s wiry and sprightly proprietor, 70-year-old Yumiko Ukon. She scoops rice from an enormous pot, placing it in triangular molds and packing them with a wide range of fillings — greater than 50, together with requirements resembling bonito or salmon flake, pickled plum, mustard greens and cod roe, and improvements resembling pork and kimchi, and fried rooster with mayonnaise and soy sauce.

Then she places extra rice on the highest, and deftly shapes them with three ultimate squeezes. She wraps every rice ball in a skinny sheet of seaweed and serves them to prospects on the counter. The restaurant serves between 1,200 and 1,500 onigiri day-after-day.

Onigiri Bongo proprietor Yumiko Ukon stands in entrance of a wall itemizing the 50-plus fillings that diners can order for his or her rice balls.

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Onigiri Bongo proprietor Yumiko Ukon stands in entrance of a wall itemizing the 50-plus fillings that diners can order for his or her rice balls.

Anthony Kuhn/NPR

Japanese individuals have been consuming onigiri for two,000 years

The onigiri is typically born of the leftovers of household rice pots, and infrequently packed at school and journey lunchboxes and mountain climbing and picnic baggage. Packaged, business variations of onigiri line the cabinets of comfort shops throughout Japan.

Archaeological proof from Japan’s Yayoi interval (roughly 300 B.C.E. to 250 C.E.) seems to suggest that Japanese have been consuming variations of onigiri for greater than 2,000 years. The rice balls are recognized by totally different names, relying on the period and area. The phrase onigiri itself comes from the Japanese phrase “nigiru,” to squeeze, referring to how the rice ball is formed by hand.

Onigiri Bongo proprietor Yumiko Ukon wraps triangular rice balls in skinny sheets of nori, or dried seaweed, behind the counter at her restaurant.

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Onigiri Bongo proprietor Yumiko Ukon wraps triangular rice balls in skinny sheets of nori, or dried seaweed, behind the counter at her restaurant.

Anthony Kuhn/NPR

Bongo Onigiri’s important elements are sourced from across the nation, together with short-grain Koshihikari rice from terraced paddies of Ukon’s native Niigata prefecture, seaweed from Japan’s Ariake Sea and salt from Okinawa.

For the present proprietor, the restaurant was “love at first sight”

Onigiri Bongo restaurant workers put together elements for rice balls forward of lunchtime.

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Onigiri Bongo restaurant workers put together elements for rice balls forward of lunchtime.

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At Onigiri Bongo, Ukon’s mild squeezes depart the rice balls fluffy and crumbly. The onigiri are sizable, the rice a bit al dente, and the tastes easy, real and straight-up delicious. The rice balls are sometimes served in a set, together with pickles and miso soup. A weekday meal set with two onigiri and tofu soup goes for for 800 yen, about $5.98 — in Tokyo, a really reasonably priced lunch.

But to Ukon, what makes onigiri particular is just not the small print of preparation, however their which means, and the best way individuals bond over them.

“It’s not about the technique. It’s about how much feeling you can put into each onigiri. That’s why I’ll never forget my mother’s onigiri for the rest of my life,” she says.

“It was part of our culture not to buy them, but to make them at home,” she recollects.

After she moved to Tokyo at round age 20, “Onigiri were always there in my happy memories, like of athletic festivals or school hikes,” says Ukon. “My best memories of onigiri are of the ones my mother made when I came home from Tokyo.”

An image on the wall at Onigiri Bongo exhibits the restaurant’s authentic proprietor, Tasuku Ukon (again row, left), and his spouse, the restaurant’s present proprietor, Yumiko Ukon, in entrance of him.

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An image on the wall at Onigiri Bongo exhibits the restaurant’s authentic proprietor, Tasuku Ukon (again row, left), and his spouse, the restaurant’s present proprietor, Yumiko Ukon, in entrance of him.

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Freshly arrived within the capital, she says she felt like a “food refugee” as a result of “I couldn’t find food I liked,” she recollects. “But a friend introduced me to a delicious rice ball restaurant, and it was love at first sight.”

Ukon was not destined to be simply one other buyer. She married the restaurant’s proprietor, Tasuku Ukon, 27 years her senior. After he handed away in 2012, she took over.

Now, after greater than 40 years of working the place, she continues to serve up onigiri with vigor and keenness.

“I thought about retiring at 70,” she says, “but I’m still in good health, and I want to see the smiling faces of the people eating the rice balls.”

Chie Kobayashi contributed to this report in Tokyo.