Gyu Don: The Bowl I Lived On in Japan

When I was interning in Japan, learning how to cook, I did not have money.

I usually got one meal at work. That was the reliable one. Everything else came down to what was left in my pocket, and after a mandatory night out drinking with coworkers, which was not optional in any real sense, there was often not much left.

So I ate at 7-Eleven, at FamilyMart, or at Yoshinoya. Yoshinoya was my favorite, and I ate a lot of it.

What Gyudon Is

Thin-sliced beef and onion simmered in a sweet-savory broth of soy sauce, mirin, sake and dashi, spooned over a bowl of white rice.

That is the whole thing. It is not a special-occasion dish and it is not trying to be. It is what you eat standing up at a counter at 11pm, or at 7am, because most of these shops never close.

It Started as Leftovers

Japan did not really eat beef for a very long time. Buddhist prohibitions kept meat off the table for centuries, and it took the Meiji Restoration to change that. The government of the day actively encouraged meat-eating, partly out of a belief that the country needed bigger, stronger bodies to keep up with the West.

What came out of that was gyunabe, a beef hot pot, and it became the fashionable thing to eat in Tokyo.

Gyudon's most-told origin is that people started pouring what was left in the gyunabe pot over rice. The broth was the good part, the rice was there, and nobody wanted to waste either.

In 1899, a man named Eikichi Matsuda opened a shop in Nihonbashi, where Japan's biggest fish market was at the time, and sold that idea as its own dish. He named the shop Yoshinoya, after Yoshino in Nara, because he loved the cherry blossoms there.

The early version was closer to the hot pot it came from. It had shirataki noodles, tofu and long onion in it. Over the following century it got stripped down to beef, onion and rice, which is what a gyudon is now.

Everyone Picks a Side

There are three big chains: Yoshinoya, Sukiya and Matsuya. People have opinions about them the way Americans have opinions about KFC versus Popeyes. It is not really a debate anyone wins. You just belong to one.

The differences are small and people care about them enormously. The benishoga is a good example. Benishoga is the red pickled ginger that goes on top, and it gets its color and its sourness from umezu, the brine left over from making umeboshi. Yoshinoya's has a clean plum-vinegar sharpness. Matsuya's tastes less of plum and keeps more fibrous crunch. People will tell you which one is correct.

I am a Yoshinoya person. Here is why, and it is not sophisticated: the benishoga and the shichimi sit on the counter for you to help yourself. For seven or eight hundred yen I got a large bowl of rice under a pile of beef, and then I put on as much scallion and as much benishoga as I could reasonably get away with. I love benishoga. I would build that bowl up until it was a different dish, and that is what I survived on for a long stretch.

The Year It Disappeared

If you want to understand how much this bowl means in Japan, look at what happened in 2004.

In late December 2003, a cow suspected of having BSE was found in the United States, and Japan halted American beef imports. Yoshinoya's gyudon was built on American short plate, and they would not swap in a different beef to keep it going.

So on 11 February 2004, Yoshinoya stopped selling gyudon. The chain that had sold nothing else for a century switched to a mix of pork bowls and beef curry bowls to stay open.

It was national news. On 11 February 2005, exactly a year later, they brought gyudon back for a single day using remaining stock, and people queued for it. Regular sales did not return until September 2006, when imports resumed and they ran a one-day revival capped at a million servings.

A fast-food beef bowl going away was a genuine cultural event. That is the part I would want you to take away.

Chii-gyu

There is a piece of internet slang worth mentioning, mostly because it shows how deep this dish sits.

Chiizu gyudon is gyudon with cheese, shortened to chii-gyu. Around 2020 the term spread on Japanese Twitter as a label for a particular stereotype, a plain, meek, unremarkable young guy, off the back of an illustration that circulated with it. It got popular enough to be nominated as an internet buzzword of the year.

I am not going to pretend it is affectionate. It is an insult about someone's appearance, and Japanese writers have spent the last few years arguing that people should stop using it. I bring it up because I find it remarkable that a menu modification became shorthand for an entire personality. That only happens with food everybody eats.

Ours

Our gyu don is that bowl, built the way I remember wanting it.

Braised sliced beef and onion over white rice, with pickled ginger and scallion, and we spice it up a little more than the chains do. Then there is an egg on it.

The egg is not a garnish. In Japan a raw egg on gyudon is a standard order, and the yolk loosens the whole bowl and takes the edge off the salt. We poach ours instead, so you break it and it does the same job.

It is still a cheap-night bowl at heart. That is what I liked about it.

Try It at Juraku

Gyu Don is on the menu at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side. Pile on the benishoga. That is the correct way to eat it and I will not be taking questions.

See the rest of the menu.