Goya Champuru and Taco Rice, and the Tin of Spam That Connects Them

We do not serve either of these. I am writing about them anyway, because they are my two favourite Okinawan dishes and because the reason they exist is a better story than most things that are on a menu.

Goya Champuru

The first time I had it was at an izakaya in a residential part of Shinjuku, which I have written about before as the most memorable izakaya I ever went to. It was memorable because it was Okinawan, and Okinawan food in Tokyo is its own thing.

Goya is bitter melon. It looks like a warty green cucumber and it is genuinely bitter, not bitter as a figure of speech. People new to it usually salt it and let it sit to pull some of that out. I would rather they did not. The bitterness is the entire reason the dish works.

Champuru is the Okinawan name for this style of stir-fry. You will often see it translated as simply meaning mixed, and that is too neat. It is a noun for the dish itself, and the Okinawan verb for mixing is a different word. There is a decent theory linking it to campur in Malay and Indonesian, which does mean mix, and that would fit a trading kingdom that spent centuries dealing across that part of the world.

The standard build is goya, egg, pork and shima-dofu, the dense Okinawan tofu that holds together in a hot pan where a Japanese silken tofu would collapse.

My version is spam, goya and egg. No tofu. A purist would tell me I have made something else, and they would have a point, and I am going to keep making it that way.

The bitterness plays against the fat and salt of the pork, the egg softens everything, and it takes about eight minutes. It is one of the best fast dinners in the world.

Why the Spam

That tin is not a shortcut somebody took. It is history sitting in the pan.

Canned pork luncheon meat arrived on Okinawa with the American military, in quantity, at a time when the island had very little. It went into the local cooking and it stayed there. Okinawa now eats more of it per person than anywhere else in Japan by a distance, and it is not nostalgia or novelty. It is an ingredient, used the way an ingredient is used.

Which brings me to the other dish.

Taco Rice

Taco rice is seasoned taco meat, cheese, lettuce and tomato, served over white rice. No shell, no tortilla. It sounds like a fusion concept invented in a marketing meeting.

It was invented in 1984 by a man named Matsuzo Gibo, at a place called Parlor Senri, in the strip of restaurants outside the gate of Camp Hansen in Kin Town.

Gibo had been running a bar. When the exchange rate moved and the Marines who drank there suddenly had less money, he worked out that what they needed was not drinks but cheap food with volume to it. Tacos were already the popular thing at his bar. Rice is cheaper than shells and fills people up.

So he put the taco on rice. Not a concept. A man looking at his own customers getting poorer and solving it with what he already had.

It spread across the island through King Tacos, the affiliated chain, and it is now on menus everywhere in Okinawa and a good part of the mainland.

The Cart in Harajuku

I moved around a lot in those years. One of the places was Sakura House on Uradori in Harajuku, and there was a cart down the street that sold taco rice.

I loved that place. Not in a way I can make sound sophisticated. I just went constantly, and it is one of the strongest food memories I have from those years, and it was a cart.

What They Have in Common

Both dishes are what happens when a place with its own strong cooking sits next to a foreign military for decades and absorbs things without asking permission.

Neither is a compromise, and neither is a novelty. The spam is in the champuru because it was there and it worked. The taco is on rice because rice is what was cheap. That is how real food gets made, and it is a lot more honest than most things described as fusion.

If You Want to Get Close Here

We do not cook either one, and I am not going to pretend a menu tie-in exists where it does not.

What we do have is the drinking half of Okinawa. Awamori is the island's own spirit, and our list of it is one of the deeper ones in the city. Orion, the Okinawan lager, is on tap for beer.

Order an awamori, ask whoever is pouring which island it came from, and I will take that as a good enough excuse to have written about food we do not serve.