High-end starts in Tokyo’s department store basements

The subterranean food halls of Tokyo offer endless treats — but they don’t come cheap.

Depachika are meant to appeal to all and a culture obsessed with quality, freshness and packaging design.

Tokyo’s depachika are the silk lining of Japan’s intricately woven food culture — extravagantly high-end food halls located on subterranean levels of department stores, selling everything from hulking slabs of otoro(the most coveted cut of tuna belly) to ­immaculate white strawberries called hatsukoi no kaori (“scent of first love”).

The going price for 15 of the latter? ¥10,800. That would be close to $US100 ($140), even with today’s strong US dollar.

For a foreign visitor, as I was ­recently, the depachika’s maze of food counters and restaurant pop-ups is a living, steaming (also bubbling and sizzling) encyclopedia of Japanese food. Plus, the Japanese are generous with the free samples. “The opportunity to absorb an extraordinary amount of information, and calories, is remarkable,” says Matt Goulding, author of Rice, Noodle, Fish, a deep dive into Japan’s shokunin (craftsman) culture as it pertains to food. “If you have one hour and want to learn, head to the basement.”

Depachika is a mashup of ­depato (department store) and chika (basement). In Tokyo many depart­ment stores are built near or atop busy subway stations because train companies, beginning in the 1920s, saw the opportunity to turn straphangers into shoppers. To this day some department stores and railway companies are owned by the same parent company.

In the case of Mitsukoshi, Japan’s first modern depato, the store came first; Mitsukoshimae, the name of the adjacent subway station, means “in front of Mitsukoshi”. By 1932, when that station opened, well-stocked and seasonally oriented basement food stores were becoming the norm, often ­located steps away from a train exit. “In Japanese economics, it is called the fountain effect,” says Momoko Nakamura, a food business consultant who helped launch Iron Chef in the US. “If the basement is doing well, people will take the elevator up to the higher floors and shop more.”

Nakamura agreed to guide me through several of the city’s depachika, a tour that took us from old-world Ueno to the packed streets of Ginza, to the gateway to the suburbs at Ikebukuro. Japan’s population is largely middle class; socio-economic differences between halls were subtle. The depachika is meant to appeal to all and a culture obsessed with quality, freshness and packaging design.

“Arigatou gozaimasu!” In the depachika at Mitsukoshi, the more formal version of “thank you” rang out repeatedly. One perfectly coiffured shop girl lured me towards a case packed with exquisite fried things: tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlet), kaki furai(golden oysters), ­potato croquettes and shrimp tempura the size of a baby’s forearm. I ­resisted the impulse to buy everything in sight, despite the extra ­incentive of seeing each piece individually wrapped in a paper sleeve, creased perfectly, taped on the seam and affixed with a bow.

Sensing I was being distracted by every shark-fin gyoza, hunk of marbled Matsusaka beef and $US19 celery stalk we passed, Naka­mura insisted I begin by getting the lay of the land, which turned out to be similar at each of the ­depachika we visited. The ­offerings in the massive halls — sometimes as many as 30,000 products — reflected a balance ­between ­ancient customs and modern trends. The pastries and sweets, for example, were divided into strictly Japanesewagashi — desserts made with mochi(chewy rice cake), fruit and azuki bean paste — and Western hybrids such as green-tea Swiss rolls and choux a la creme filled with yoghurt.

Fresh produce was sealed in plastic bags and sold by the piece. At Mitsukoshi, some musk­melons, priced as high as $US150 each, were kept under glass like designer handbags. Lots of real ­estate was dedicated to prepared foods, like onigiri (rice balls), elaborate bento boxes with expensive unagi (eel) and astronomically ­expensive ikura (sal­mon roe).

Depachika are typically open between 10am and 8pm. At the end of the day, vendors offer deep discounts to turn over product. Shrewd shoppers plan their buying around these flash sales.