The Kiyo Special: What Is Actually in It

For years the description on our menu was one line, in quotation marks, attributed to me.

"Oishi desu." It's delicious.

That was the whole thing. No ingredients, no explanation. If you ordered it you were taking my word for it, and that was the point.

I am going to explain it now, which slightly ruins the joke. But the people who order it these days are the ones who already know, so it may as well be written down.

What It Is

It is our yakiniku over a bowl of rice, with most of the cold station on top.

The yakiniku is sliced washu beef short rib, sautéed with a Korean-style barbecue sauce. That part is already on the menu on its own. Everything else that goes on the Kiyo Special is what got added later, and none of it was my idea.

Why Everything I Eat Is in a Bowl

I have been cooking a long time, and the hours are the hours. You work long, you work through service, and sitting down to a meal is not something the shift makes room for.

A traditional Japanese meal is built as ichiju-sansai, one soup and three sides, plus rice. It is a good structure. It is also four or five vessels, which means a table, and a chair, and twenty minutes.

I do not have that. So I eat everything donburi style, in one bowl, standing up. I would ask the kitchen to put the yakiniku over rice, and that was dinner.

Donburi Was Invented for People Working My Hours

This is not me being lazy about a tradition. The bowl is its own tradition, and it exists for exactly this reason.

Donburi traces back to a Muromachi-period temple dish called houhan, rice with vegetables and broth poured over. But it became what we would recognize during the Edo period, when shops called kendon-ya served it in a large bowl, the kendonburi-bachi, which got shortened to donburi-bachi and eventually to just donburi.

Edo was full of single craftsmen and merchants working long days. They needed something generous, quick to make, and fast to eat, and they were not going to set out four dishes to do it. The modern form is usually dated to the early nineteenth century with unadon, grilled eel over rice.

So gyudon, katsudon, oyakodon, tendon, all of it comes from the same idea: take a proper meal and collapse it into one bowl, because the person eating it has to get back to work.

That is me. I am the target customer, two hundred years late.

The Kitchen Started Messing With It

Makanai is the Japanese word for the staff meal in a restaurant. The word comes from makanau, to prepare and serve food, and in kitchens where cooks took turns feeding each other it came from the idea of providing for one another. Traditionally it is made by the youngest cooks from whatever is on hand.

Makanai has a real track record of escaping the kitchen. Omurice and tenmusu both started as staff food before anyone sold them.

Ours escaped too, but it took a detour.

The kitchen decided it would be funny to keep adding things to my bowl. Pickles one day. Sesame dressing the next. Then something else. Over time they worked their way through basically everything on the cold station, and it became a running bit to see what else they could pile on before I said something.

The joke did not land the way they wanted, because it was good. Genuinely good. It became what I ordered for myself every day.

Why It Went on the Menu

This was 2019. I ate it constantly, in the dining room, in front of people.

Guests kept asking what it was. Then they asked if they could have one.

So we put it on the menu and called it the Kiyo Special, and we decided not to describe it. Just my name and a quote saying it's delicious. It was half a joke and half a genuine idea: if you order this, you are trusting me. That felt like a nice thing to ask of somebody.

The Hug We Never Got to Do

The original plan was better than what we ended up with.

When someone ordered the Kiyo Special, I was going to walk out of the kitchen, over to their table, give them a hug, and say "there, you got the Kiyo Special." That was it. That was the bit.

We were about to start doing it when COVID arrived, and walking up to strangers and hugging them stopped being funny more or less overnight. We scrapped it.

The dish stayed. The hug never happened. I still think about it.

Why You Do Not See It Anymore

Two reasons, both boring.

The first is that people started modifying it. Could they get it with chicken. Could they get it with pork. Could they hold most of the toppings. Every one of those is a reasonable request and every one of them turns it into a different dish, which defeats the entire premise of a bowl you order on trust.

The second is that it has almost everything from the cold station on it, and that is a genuinely slow ticket on a busy night.

So it quietly became something we make for people who know to ask for it, rather than something we advertise.

Try It at Juraku

You know about it now, which I suppose makes you one of those people.

Ask for the Kiyo Special at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side. Order it as it comes. That is the only rule, and it is the same rule it has always had.

See the rest of the menu.