Tonkatsu, "Pasta Napolitan," and Sake

An interview with Kayoko Akabori of Oakland

Jun 20, 2023

Hello, readers and cooks. Apologies for being late with this missive; I always forget how busy the last week of school is for parents. The good news is that the start of our family’s summer coincided with the start of some slightly more summer-appropriate weather (finally!), and I can’t wait to share some bright, fresh, hot weather recipes with you all.

Today’s newsletter is an interview with Kayoko Akabori, the co-founder of the fantastic sake, shochu, and Japanese barware store Umami Mart. I met Kayoko through cookbook author Erin Gleeson (whom I featured back in March of last year), but I’ve known and loved her store for years. Kayoko told me about her California upbringing, how she and co-owner Yoko Kumano came to start Umami Mart, and what she cooks in her home kitchen today. She also shared a fantastic recipe for kitsune soba (soba in broth with seasoned fried tofu), which you’ll find toward the bottom of the email, and a couple other recipes that I’ll share in future weeks. Here’s my interview with Kayoko, condensed and edited for clarity.

Kayoko Akabori

[GF:] How did you end up in California?

[KA:] It was probably 1979, and my father was a chef at a tempura restaurant. He had always wanted to come to America. The restaurant he was working at was opening up a branch inside the Bonaventure Hotel, in downtown Los Angeles, so he volunteered himself to go.

My mom wanted to go as well, but she was pregnant with me, so he went first to LA, and I was born in Japan, and then we followed after I was born—three months after. In Japan, there's a tradition where you're born in your mom's hometown, so my mom went back there, and I was born in Saitama, Japan, which is just a prefecture outside of Tokyo; it's like a suburb of Tokyo. That was totally intense for my mom. She says that all of the nurses at the hospital were mean to her because they thought that she didn't have a partner. Isn't that awful? Times have changed, I think, a little bit.

So, then, your parents came out here and just decided never to go back?

My mom wanted to stay. She was like, I definitely want to raise my daughter here. I think it was her decision of not wanting to go back and raise a girl in Japan; the expectations are a little bit different. They applied for a green card, and my brother was born in LA. He's three years younger. So, yeah, we just never went back.

I grew up in LA, for a couple years, and then we moved to San Jose, and after that, they bought a house in Cupertino. So I grew up in Cupertino all through high school.

Kayoko and her dad and brother on a trip to Japan.

Why did they move to Cupertino?

My dad's brother was there, and I think my mom wanted more seasonality—she wanted to see the change of the seasons and the color of the leaves. For my dad, being a tempura chef didn't really work in LA, so he taught himself to make sushi. He was a sushi chef at a few restaurants in the 80s and 90s in the Bay Area, and then he opened his own place, in Cupertino, and he had that for 25 years.

What was food like at home when you were growing up? Presumably your dad was at the restaurant, so your mom was doing the cooking?

Yes. My dad was always at some restaurant; we didn't see my dad until Sunday nights, basically. My mom did all the cooking—just easy Japanese home cooking. There was sweet and sour pork, there was lots of noodles, refreshing tsukemono cucumber salads—which is a vinegar and cucumber and seaweed salad—lots of different kinds of noodles, hot and cold with different kinds of sauces. Gyoza (she's very good at the pot stickers) and hambagu, which is the meat patty that's simmered in sauce. All of the classics.

She would also make really funny ‘60s-style dishes, like pasta Napolitan, which is a very Japanese dish that is spaghetti with ketchup and ham and green peppers. My brother and I did not like that, but she would always make it.

Whenever she didn't want to cook, we would go to Chinese restaurants, or Kentucky Fried Chicken was very novel. Or Marie Callender's. But her home cooking was definitely pretty elaborate. My mom is a very good cook.

She would make us elaborate lunches, too—bentos, rice balls—but we were always made fun of for those. That’s kind of sad.

Was there not much of a Japanese community when you moved up here?

No. No, not at all. Not in my corner of Cupertino.

But, you know what, there must have been a Japanese community nearby, because we definitely had a major Japanese grocery store in San Jose, and there was little Japantown in downtown San Jose. And I went to the Girl Scouts there, where there were a lot or second-generation, third-generation, fourth-generation Japanese.

So, there were plenty of Japanese ingredients available for my mom to cook with. That was not a problem. There were also large Chinese markets and things. There's much more now, but there was definitely one when I was growing up.

You eventually left northern California to go to college in Santa Barbara?

And then I moved to Italy my third year. I was a total Italophile. I was in love with Italian films right out of high school, so I took Italian language courses and then went to Italy.

When did you start cooking for yourself?

When I came back, senior year, I definitely cooked a lot. And, actually, my brother lived with me, so I was in charge of that.

Were you mostly like making the stuff that your mom had made at home?

Yeah, definitely. It was just kind of what came naturally to me. I think that is just what I like to eat. Freshman year, I lived in the dorms and gained a lot of weight with the omelet bar and the cereal. It was kind of a culture shock—the American food and then American style of eating.

Had your mom taught you to cook when you were little?

I guess so. I have good knife skills, so that must come from my parents. I guess maybe just watching her? I'm not sure. She definitely did not ask me for help. Now I call her for recipes all the time.

And then what did you do after graduation?

I moved to New York. I had an art history degree, so I was wanting to work in museums. I lived mostly in Brooklyn, and I cooked a lot of Japanese food. When I first moved there—it was like 2001, 2002—the grocery stores were so bad. My grocery was, like, a C-Town on my corner. It was the Sunset Park area, right by Greenwood Cemetery.

I was definitely spoiled coming from California. It was kind of a culture shock to go to New York, where the produce was really bad, the Mexican food was really bad, and anything that I could afford was not good. But that was just in my little section of the neighborhood. If you travel much farther down into Sunset Park, there's a lot of good Chinese food and Mexican food. But it took me a while to figure that out. It's a little bit of a schlep.

Did you end up like going to the Japanese markets in Manhattan? What's the one that's on the second floor?

Oh, Sunrise Mart, in the East Village. Yeah, yeah. I went to Sunrise Mart a lot. And there was another one in the East Village, around the corner, called JasMart. That was my inspiration to call my business Umami Mart.

Umami Mart started out as a blog.

When did you start it? And how did you know Yoko [the co-founder]?

In 2007. I knew Yoko from high school. We kept in touch, and then we must have both been in our hometown for Christmas break or something like that. She was living in Tokyo and I was living in New York, and I was like, “Oh, I want to start a food blog.” And she's like, “Okay, let's write.”

I was working at Japan Society, and the blog was just a total labor of love from my cubicle, because I was eating out a lot. I was eating my way through New York City, all the boroughs. We kind of had a gourmet club with my friends from the Bronx Museum, and we would travel all over. I sort of became the person that people knew would know where to go for any occasion. So, I was kind of like the restaurant and food concierge for any occasion in any part of the city that you might be in.

What did you originally have on the blog?

Originally it was me and Yoko, and she was living in Tokyo and I was living in Brooklyn. And we were writing about what we were eating, what we were cooking at home. I would do these challenges—one week on $20, or one week on $50—and document every single day. Restaurants that we would go to, newsy places, places that were closing, things like that.

Then it quickly grew into this more worldwide community, where we had all sorts of friends from all around the world helping us write. They were writing about their own areas of expertise, like food packaging, and we had a really well-known cocktail blogger who wrote recipes. He worked at PDT, which was a reputable cocktail bar.

He’s the one that was like, “Oh, Japanese cocktail ware is very popular right now.” And, so, we launched our online shop in 2010.

At that point, Yoko and had both moved back to the Bay Area.

What brought you back here?

Just wanting something new. I just was not feeling New York. I guess I thought that maybe Umami Mart was more viable in California. I couldn't see how to it keep going in New York. I had a good job; I was working in the film department at Japan Society. I had great coworkers. But I think it was just time for me to go.

So, I moved back in with my parents, and then I started working at a restaurant as a server, and then I started as a bar back, and then moved my way up to being a bartender. I was a bartender for a few years, and then we opened our brick and mortar in downtown Oakland while I was still working at Camino [a restaurant in Oakland].

How did you guys first start sourcing things and figuring out what you wanted to carry for the online shop?

Yoko got her import-export license. Yoko had left her advertising job in Tokyo, moved here, and was teleprompting. She came from a film background from college, and, using her film expertise, got into teleprompting. She moved back to Berkeley and went to adult night school to get her import-export license. And she was, obviously, totally fluent in Japanese—in writing as well—so she reached out to all of these vendors and was able to ask if we could buy from them.

A lot of people said no.

You know, in Japan, it's still very traditional and very strict, and you have to really ask many times, or you have to know somebody who knows somebody. So, there were a lot of hurdles to go through. But we were finally able to work with this one exporter who specialized in a brand of stainless-steel barware that was very reputable (and still is today, and we still work with them). They totally gave us a chance.

We only had like five things in the beginning: It was a mixing glass the diamond cut; and a gold cobbler shaker, which is just a cocktail shaker; we had the trident bar spoon; and then we had a couple of original Umami Mart design items. Just five or six things.

Kayoko (left) and Yoko (right) at the current location of Umami Mart, in Oakland.

When did Umami Mart become your main thing? And how did you decide on your downtown Oakland location for the first brick-and-mortar?

We were part of this initiative called Popup Hood, where they gave us six months rent free, organized by the city of Oakland. The landlord was mainly the funder, because they were the ones that gave us rent six months free. And then if we found it to be a good experiment, we would sign the lease. So, that's how we got in, and that was August of 2012. We e signed the lease six months later, and we were there for seven years. We moved here [their current location, on Broadway in Oakland] in 2019, because we wanted a tasting bar, a sake bar.

How were those first few months?

Yoko and I were just joking how we made something out of nothing, because it was in the middle of the recession, and opening up like a Japanese barware store in downtown Oakland was so bizarre. There are many people who told us that we wouldn't make it. Yoko kept teleprompting, and I kept bartending, probably for like a year into it. And I can't even remember if we were paying ourselves at first. I think maybe we were paying ourselves very nominally. We did it all ourselves. Our first employee, I think, was one year in.

We quickly learned that the downtown community didn't need a Japanese barware store, so we turned this back little nook into a konbini, which is a Japanese convenience store with snacks and drinks and candies and things. And that was pretty popular. Then, in 2015, we got our beer and wine license, so we started selling sake and Japanese beer. And then maybe a year later, we got our hard liquor license, so we were able to start selling Japanese whiskey and shochu.

I think that was always kind of a part of our plan. I think that we had always been interested in the drinks portion. I was a bartender, and Yoko had actually also worked at Takara Tasting Room, which is the sake brewery in Berkeley, so she had amassed a lot of knowledge about sake.

Kitsune Soba

This recipe originally came from Kayoko’s father, Kuni, and it makes a fantastic, easy meal. It’s full of savory-sweet flavor, and the simmered abura-age (deep-fried tofu pockets) have a fantastic texture. According to the Umami Mart site, kitsune means fox in Japanese, and dish is named "kitsune soba" simply because it’s said that foxes (which are venerated in Japan for their shape-shifting qualities) can't get enough of this abura-age.

The tsuyu used to flavor the broth in this soup can also be used as a dipping sauce for cold soba or udon; when making this dish, I doubled the tsuyu recipe and froze half for a later use (You can also find bottled tsuyu—soba broth—in Japanese markets. The flavor isn’t as nice as it is if you make the broth from scratch, but it’s perfectly serviceable for a quick weeknight meal.)

Makes 2 servings

For the Abura-Age
3 sheets of abura-age (deep-fried tofu)
2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons mirin
4 teaspoons granulated sugar
¼ teaspoon No-MSG Dashi Powder

For the Tsuyu (Soba Dipping Sauce)
1 cup dashi (recipe below)
¼ cup mirin
¼ cup soy sauce

For the Soup
1 pack of soba noodles
4 cups water
1 scallion

Prepare the abura-age: If the abura-age is square, cut each piece in half diagonally, to make triangles. Bring a couple cups of water to a boil in a medium pot, and blanch the abura-age for 2 minutes, to remove excess oil. Drain the abura-age and rinse it with cold water, then squeeze each piece between you palms (keeping it flat, rather than crumpling it) to remove as much moisture as possible.
Put the dashi, soy sauce, mirin, and 1 cup of water into a medium pot, then stir in the sugar and dashi powder. Bring the mixture to a simmer, and add the abura-age. Turn the heat down, to keep the pot at a low simmer, and cook the abura-age for about 10 minutes, until it has absorbed most of the liquid. Set the seasoned abura-age aside.
Make the tsuyu: Put the dashi, mirin, and soy sauce into a saucepan and bring to a boil. Remove the pot from the heat and let the liquid cool. (You can store the tsuyu in an airtight container in the refrigerator if you want to use it as a dipping sauce for cold udon.)
Assemble the soup: Bring a medium pot of water to boil and cook the soba according to the instructions on the package, then drain the noodles and rinse them under cold water to shock them.
While the noodles are cooking, combine the tsuyu with 4 cups of water in a medium pot, and bring it to a simmer. (You can adjust the flavor of the broth as you like, adding more or less water to taste.)
Add the shocked soba noodles to the tsuyu and let them simmer for 2 minutes, to absorb some of the flavor. While the noodles are cooking, cut the scallion diagonally into thin slices.
Divide the soba and broth between two large bowls and top the soup with pieces of abura-age and some scallion slices. Eat immediately.

This recipe is public so feel free to share it!

Dashi

This dashi recipe is a really simple version that I learned from award-winning cookbook author Hiroko Shimbo. Kayoko has a more elaborate recipe—which involves hand-shaving the bonito flakes and adding dried shrimp or mushrooms—on the Umami Mart site. Either one will work for the recipe above. I often make a big pot of dashi and freeze it in quart containers so that I have it on hand for a quick bowl of noodles.

Five 6-inch squares of kombu (kelp)
1 tightly packed cup katsuobushi (bonito flakes)

Wipe the kombu with a damp cloth or paper towel. Put the kombu in a large pot with 2 quarts (8 cups) of water and bring the mixture almost to a boil.
Remove the kombu from the water, with the pot still over the heat, and immediately add the katsuobusi. Cook the mixture for just 10 seconds or until it comes to a boil, then turn off the heat and let it stand for 2 minutes.
Strain the stock through a fine-mesh sieve lined with a few layers of cheesecloth or a tightly woven cotton cloth. The stock will keep in the refrigerator for up to 4 days.

The California Table

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