The Miso Bacon Started With a Cut Coolant Line

In the early days we had several Hitachino beers on draft. One of them was their Anbai Ale.

We also had a problem I did not know about for months. The line carrying coolant to the beer lines had been cut. Not failing, not leaking. Cut.

What that means in practice is that whatever beer is sitting in the line is warm. You cannot serve warm draft to a guest, so every single time somebody ordered a beer, we pulled the warm part off and threw it away. For months. Once I understood what was happening, the waste was the part that bothered me most.

So we started saving it instead of pouring it down the drain, with no plan for what to do with it.

Meanwhile I Wanted Bacon

Around the same time I had a craving for thick cut bacon. The kind you get as a starter at a steakhouse, a slab rather than a rasher.

I mentioned it to Chef Mitch. His response was, "you used to be a chef, why not just make it yourself."

I want to be clear that I was proposing we go to a steakhouse. That was the entire idea. But he had a point, so I said sure, I can try.

The Part Where It Does Not Work

I started with dry rubs. Made my own blends, including one with sansho in it, and worked through a series of them.

Then I ran into the real obstacle, which is that we do not have a smoker and cannot have one. The permits alone run into the thousands before you have bought anything, and then there is the smoker itself and the upkeep of it. For one dish. It was never going to happen.

So I needed another way to get pork belly tender without the thing that traditionally does it.

That is where the beer came in. We had a container of it in the walk-in that we were saving out of stubbornness.

What It Actually Is

Pork belly goes into a marinade of Japanese beer, maple syrup and red miso.

It sits in that for nine to twelve days. Not overnight, not a day. Somebody turns it through that time so it takes the marinade evenly, because a belly left flat in a tray comes out as two different products.

Then it gets rendered down and chilled.

The last step happens at the pass. Just before it goes out we heat it and set it on a small hibachi with cherry wood chips. That does two things: it puts a layer of smoke on at the end rather than at the beginning, and it keeps the bacon hot on the walk to the table. What we could not build into a smokehouse we do in the last ninety seconds instead.

About the Anbai

The dish began with Anbai Ale because Anbai Ale was what was going into the bucket. That is the only reason.

We have not carried it for a while now, so the marinade uses Japanese beer rather than that specific one, and the menu says so. The blog gets to keep the original because this is where the story lives. Things come on and off a menu constantly. Nobody deletes an old Instagram reel because the dish in it changed.

It is a good reminder of how much of this place got made. Not from a concept. From a broken cooling line, a craving, a chef calling my bluff, and a permit we could not afford.