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Hatsushiro Muraoka (Papa San) appeared on many of our radars in 1995 a caricatured Japanese tourist, manically buzzing around the Cape winelands in a small red car in a futile search for the nonexistent Douglas Green vineyard.
Papa San has never needed any extraneous motivation. He started delivering newspapers at 13 on the outskirts of Tokyo in 1953. It must have been a dystopian wasteland, eight years after US bombers razed it to the ground.
Today we are chatting at Obi, the latest on a continuum of excellent Cape Town Japanese restaurant’s he has established and helped to run, which is situated towards the harbour end of Long Street. An obi is a broad sash worn around the waist of a kimono and obi-less kimonos are displayed in glass box frames on the walls. A poster commemorating his appearance in the ad hangs on the wall behind him. He has hardly aged; at 82, his impish smile couldn’t be wider.
I have been a regular customer since 2009, first at Takumi and then at Obi. My wife has been munching his food since 1993, when she was an adorable 10. She had inherited her father’s passion for Asian food and they regularly dined at Papa San’s establishments in the 1990s while her mother stayed at home with some cottage pie. It became their thing.
I visited Tokyo a couple of times in 2004. Once I mistakenly caught the milk train into the city from Narita airport rather than the express. We stopped at all the semirural commuter towns on the outskirts. The view from the window was all cherry blossoms and pagodas — like the generic traditional scenes that appear on the walls in Japanese restaurants. I was shocked from this suburban calm when we chugged into Tokyo Station’s giant multistorey commuter factory. It was packed with human commuter ants, unfolding themselves and patting themselves down after being squashed into steel tubes, and then shuffling forward one step at a time.
Bucolic suburban calm was replaced by full-scale urban panic — particularly when I discovered that English signage was hard to come by. I was hyperventilating when I made it to the taxi queue, and when I reached the front I discovered my taxi driver didn’t speak English. Google translate didn’t exist so I phoned a friend who serendipitously happened to be waking up beside a Japanese girlfriend, who explained to the driver where to take me. My taxi driver drove a Datsun, which reeked of smoke.
Tokyo was unearthly in a way I have experienced no other city before or since. It made sense at the time that the Japanese called us gaijin — aliens. The highways were elevated, cased in steel and contained giant rubber shock absorbers — presumably for the earthquakes. Roads and streets were clogged with cars, people and flickering electric lights. We passed a row of unusual teenagers, seemingly trying to outdo each other in their interpretation of Harajuku street fashion.
I finally made it to my destination, though it took me a couple of days to acclimatise. It was on this trip, and with a high level of disorientation, that I experienced Japanese food as it should be. It was hard to recognise from the Westernised, chain produced sushi, lathered in sauce that I had been eating in London, which arrived on a conveyor belt having been prepared by an East European living in Croydon.
The fish perched on the sushi in Tokyo was fresher, fishier, painstakingly prepared and served on a counter in smaller, darker rooms, and savoured by serious people more concerned with eating than being seen eating. Relishing raw eel or sea urchin was very much in the mainstream. The flavour of the food was not disguised with mayonnaise or too much wasabi and soya sauce as a gateway into the genre, like menthol cigarettes are to smoking.
Papa San started working in a restaurant in Tokyo when he was 16. He began washing dishes but progressed to chef after a sedate six-year apprenticeship. In 1989, when he was running a successful restaurant in Tokyo, a friend persuaded him to relocate to Johannesburg and teach his staff how to make Japanese food.
Papa San jumped on a plane with a naive enthusiasm for adventure without being sure whether he would find lions roaming the streets. He couldn’t have been reading the political or the economic pages. Japan was booming at the time while SA was imploding under economic sanctions and in its last death throes as the world’s political polecat. Johannesburg was a powder keg. Either his risk analysis was poor, or his friend was paying well.
He visited Cape Town on a holiday in 1991, and then relocated to the Mother City. He mentioned unsurpassed geographical beauty and the proximity to fresh fish. I didn’t press him. Joburgers are sensitive about semigration. He sussed out the market in someone else’s restaurant before he opened Tokyo in 1993, on the corner of Long and Strand streets. Seating was limited to three low tables with cushions on the floor in the front, and a bar counter at the back. There was a Pachinko machine on the wall. My people always sat at the counter. My father-in-law’s hip flexors couldn’t put up with the floor. Magic emerged from the kitchen.
Papa San had established relationships with the fishing boat operators from Kalk Bay. His sushi was made from fish, eel and every manner of sea creature, fresh and in the raw with the premier combo on the menu housed in a small pine boat.
This must have been veryexotic for inquisitive Capetonian palates re-entering the world of cuisine from behind the culturally restrictive curtains imposed by apartheid. There are joyfully ravenous remembrance’s in our house of chicken yakitori, nigiri and futomaki stuffed with fresh fishy flavours and many other things besides.
Papa San transitioned from Tokyo to Minato in 1998. Minato was housed a larger space in a white Beezy Bailey-styled building with a happy exterior decorated with colourful mosaics. If SA was capable of avant garde at this time, Baily was at its heart. The restaurant was furnished in blonde-coloured wood, complete with a karaoke section. Papa San had developed a strong client base among the Japanese tuna boats which arrived in town en masse when the fish were on the bite, and Minato was established primarily to provide these sailors with home comforts while on shore leave.
My wife and her father were equally enthusiastic supporters of Minato, though occasionally they were turned away when the sailors were in town. Papa San didn’t regard sailors on shore leave accompanied by their short-skirted companions on the clock as appropriate dinner companions for a young girl, regardless of her passion for his food.
Business boomed and, as usual, pecuniary success drew out the Mother City’s shadow. Underworld figures and Cape Town protection rackets have been in the press lately but this is not a modern phenomenon. Minato’s profits soon attracted the wrong sort of attention and Papa San was kidnapped twice by gangsters demanding their piece of his pie. He paid them off, but after the second incident he sought protection from across the South China Sea. The Chinese may have been ancient enemies but he preferred the devils he knew. As far as Papa San was concerned, Manchuria, and the bygones of the past would remain there, provided they could protect him from this imminent threat from Rondebosch East.
Mama San was less comforted by the protection offered, and soon packed up and moved the family back to Tokyo, but Papa San was restless in retirement, he missed the purpose and satisfaction he found in his mastery of his work, and I suspect he had developed an unbreakable bond with Cape Town, its golf courses, in particular.
Soon he was back, as a chef at Takumi on Park Road. Mama San remained at home in Japan. Ben Bettendorf was a trainee chef at Takumi at the time. He was a generously tattooed millennial Capetonian, fresh out of chef school and hungry for knowledge. He and Papa San hit it off immediately while working together at opposite ends of the experience continuum — the master and the apprentice, eager for knowledge. When Takumi closed in 2016 they opened Obi together. Observing them at their craft, I sense a deep and honest bond that is rooted in the shared appreciation of the simplicity of hard work and a disciplined search for perfection.
According to Papa San, Bettendorf is “clear and clean” and possessed of an “inside Japanese style”. Bettendorf treats Papa San with the deference of a master and the kindness of a son. I don’t know who owns the restaurant — it doesn’t seem relevant because it’s clear that a true partnership exists.
The food is the main game here, and it remains outstanding and authentically Japanese. I love the variety of the bento box for lunch or ramen noodles in winter. A boat of sushi with thickly sliced fresh fish or a handroll remain a treat. Obi has not been designed to attract the nouveau poseurs of the Atlantic seaboard. It is relaxed but serene, set semisubterranean, slightly below street level and comfortable in its ancient tradition. Impossibly small kimonos decorate the walls. I think traditional music may be piped in the background but I can’t be sure.
Our family goes to Obi for birthdays now. I have tried to restrict this practice to marquee dates via an austerity budget designed to reflect my career gear change, but this has proved unpopular. My children, who are mostly under 10, have inherited an insatiable taste for Papa San’s food from their mother and their grandfather. Birthdays are about a celebration of family so I always relent.
There is something illuminating about eating at the table of a happy and ageless, multilayered master surrounded by his partners who love him. How civilised in an age of ego maniacal, celebrity chefs who are lauded for image, hype and poor manners. I sense approval from the ancestors.
Support our award-winning journalism. The Premium package (digital only) is R30 for the first month and thereafter you pay R129 p/m now ad-free for all subscribers.
Master sushi chef makes magic in the Mother City
Hatsushiro Muraoka (Papa San) appeared on many of our radars in 1995 a caricatured Japanese tourist, manically buzzing around the Cape winelands in a small red car in a futile search for the nonexistent Douglas Green vineyard.
Papa San has never needed any extraneous motivation. He started delivering newspapers at 13 on the outskirts of Tokyo in 1953. It must have been a dystopian wasteland, eight years after US bombers razed it to the ground.
Today we are chatting at Obi, the latest on a continuum of excellent Cape Town Japanese restaurant’s he has established and helped to run, which is situated towards the harbour end of Long Street. An obi is a broad sash worn around the waist of a kimono and obi-less kimonos are displayed in glass box frames on the walls. A poster commemorating his appearance in the ad hangs on the wall behind him. He has hardly aged; at 82, his impish smile couldn’t be wider.
I have been a regular customer since 2009, first at Takumi and then at Obi. My wife has been munching his food since 1993, when she was an adorable 10. She had inherited her father’s passion for Asian food and they regularly dined at Papa San’s establishments in the 1990s while her mother stayed at home with some cottage pie. It became their thing.
I visited Tokyo a couple of times in 2004. Once I mistakenly caught the milk train into the city from Narita airport rather than the express. We stopped at all the semirural commuter towns on the outskirts. The view from the window was all cherry blossoms and pagodas — like the generic traditional scenes that appear on the walls in Japanese restaurants. I was shocked from this suburban calm when we chugged into Tokyo Station’s giant multistorey commuter factory. It was packed with human commuter ants, unfolding themselves and patting themselves down after being squashed into steel tubes, and then shuffling forward one step at a time.
Bucolic suburban calm was replaced by full-scale urban panic — particularly when I discovered that English signage was hard to come by. I was hyperventilating when I made it to the taxi queue, and when I reached the front I discovered my taxi driver didn’t speak English. Google translate didn’t exist so I phoned a friend who serendipitously happened to be waking up beside a Japanese girlfriend, who explained to the driver where to take me. My taxi driver drove a Datsun, which reeked of smoke.
Tokyo was unearthly in a way I have experienced no other city before or since. It made sense at the time that the Japanese called us gaijin — aliens. The highways were elevated, cased in steel and contained giant rubber shock absorbers — presumably for the earthquakes. Roads and streets were clogged with cars, people and flickering electric lights. We passed a row of unusual teenagers, seemingly trying to outdo each other in their interpretation of Harajuku street fashion.
I finally made it to my destination, though it took me a couple of days to acclimatise. It was on this trip, and with a high level of disorientation, that I experienced Japanese food as it should be. It was hard to recognise from the Westernised, chain produced sushi, lathered in sauce that I had been eating in London, which arrived on a conveyor belt having been prepared by an East European living in Croydon.
The fish perched on the sushi in Tokyo was fresher, fishier, painstakingly prepared and served on a counter in smaller, darker rooms, and savoured by serious people more concerned with eating than being seen eating. Relishing raw eel or sea urchin was very much in the mainstream. The flavour of the food was not disguised with mayonnaise or too much wasabi and soya sauce as a gateway into the genre, like menthol cigarettes are to smoking.
Papa San started working in a restaurant in Tokyo when he was 16. He began washing dishes but progressed to chef after a sedate six-year apprenticeship. In 1989, when he was running a successful restaurant in Tokyo, a friend persuaded him to relocate to Johannesburg and teach his staff how to make Japanese food.
Papa San jumped on a plane with a naive enthusiasm for adventure without being sure whether he would find lions roaming the streets. He couldn’t have been reading the political or the economic pages. Japan was booming at the time while SA was imploding under economic sanctions and in its last death throes as the world’s political polecat. Johannesburg was a powder keg. Either his risk analysis was poor, or his friend was paying well.
He visited Cape Town on a holiday in 1991, and then relocated to the Mother City. He mentioned unsurpassed geographical beauty and the proximity to fresh fish. I didn’t press him. Joburgers are sensitive about semigration. He sussed out the market in someone else’s restaurant before he opened Tokyo in 1993, on the corner of Long and Strand streets. Seating was limited to three low tables with cushions on the floor in the front, and a bar counter at the back. There was a Pachinko machine on the wall. My people always sat at the counter. My father-in-law’s hip flexors couldn’t put up with the floor. Magic emerged from the kitchen.
Papa San had established relationships with the fishing boat operators from Kalk Bay. His sushi was made from fish, eel and every manner of sea creature, fresh and in the raw with the premier combo on the menu housed in a small pine boat.
This must have been very exotic for inquisitive Capetonian palates re-entering the world of cuisine from behind the culturally restrictive curtains imposed by apartheid. There are joyfully ravenous remembrance’s in our house of chicken yakitori, nigiri and futomaki stuffed with fresh fishy flavours and many other things besides.
Papa San transitioned from Tokyo to Minato in 1998. Minato was housed a larger space in a white Beezy Bailey-styled building with a happy exterior decorated with colourful mosaics. If SA was capable of avant garde at this time, Baily was at its heart. The restaurant was furnished in blonde-coloured wood, complete with a karaoke section. Papa San had developed a strong client base among the Japanese tuna boats which arrived in town en masse when the fish were on the bite, and Minato was established primarily to provide these sailors with home comforts while on shore leave.
My wife and her father were equally enthusiastic supporters of Minato, though occasionally they were turned away when the sailors were in town. Papa San didn’t regard sailors on shore leave accompanied by their short-skirted companions on the clock as appropriate dinner companions for a young girl, regardless of her passion for his food.
Business boomed and, as usual, pecuniary success drew out the Mother City’s shadow. Underworld figures and Cape Town protection rackets have been in the press lately but this is not a modern phenomenon. Minato’s profits soon attracted the wrong sort of attention and Papa San was kidnapped twice by gangsters demanding their piece of his pie. He paid them off, but after the second incident he sought protection from across the South China Sea. The Chinese may have been ancient enemies but he preferred the devils he knew. As far as Papa San was concerned, Manchuria, and the bygones of the past would remain there, provided they could protect him from this imminent threat from Rondebosch East.
Mama San was less comforted by the protection offered, and soon packed up and moved the family back to Tokyo, but Papa San was restless in retirement, he missed the purpose and satisfaction he found in his mastery of his work, and I suspect he had developed an unbreakable bond with Cape Town, its golf courses, in particular.
Soon he was back, as a chef at Takumi on Park Road. Mama San remained at home in Japan. Ben Bettendorf was a trainee chef at Takumi at the time. He was a generously tattooed millennial Capetonian, fresh out of chef school and hungry for knowledge. He and Papa San hit it off immediately while working together at opposite ends of the experience continuum — the master and the apprentice, eager for knowledge. When Takumi closed in 2016 they opened Obi together. Observing them at their craft, I sense a deep and honest bond that is rooted in the shared appreciation of the simplicity of hard work and a disciplined search for perfection.
According to Papa San, Bettendorf is “clear and clean” and possessed of an “inside Japanese style”. Bettendorf treats Papa San with the deference of a master and the kindness of a son. I don’t know who owns the restaurant — it doesn’t seem relevant because it’s clear that a true partnership exists.
The food is the main game here, and it remains outstanding and authentically Japanese. I love the variety of the bento box for lunch or ramen noodles in winter. A boat of sushi with thickly sliced fresh fish or a handroll remain a treat. Obi has not been designed to attract the nouveau poseurs of the Atlantic seaboard. It is relaxed but serene, set semisubterranean, slightly below street level and comfortable in its ancient tradition. Impossibly small kimonos decorate the walls. I think traditional music may be piped in the background but I can’t be sure.
Our family goes to Obi for birthdays now. I have tried to restrict this practice to marquee dates via an austerity budget designed to reflect my career gear change, but this has proved unpopular. My children, who are mostly under 10, have inherited an insatiable taste for Papa San’s food from their mother and their grandfather. Birthdays are about a celebration of family so I always relent.
There is something illuminating about eating at the table of a happy and ageless, multilayered master surrounded by his partners who love him. How civilised in an age of ego maniacal, celebrity chefs who are lauded for image, hype and poor manners. I sense approval from the ancestors.
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