Buttercup restaurant san mateo12/31/2023 Outside the Takahashi Market in San Mateo They called each other’s mothers “aunty.” It was that kind of a tight-knit community. They had their own baseball and basketball leagues, their own Boys Scout troops. The Japanese Americans he grew up with back then were mostly just friends with each other, Cleary recalls. Afterwards, he’d walk down the street to Takahashi Market, the Japanese-Hawaiian grocery store, where he’d buy a package of rice-paper-wrapped Bontan Ame candy and the new issue of the Shonen Jump manga magazine, which the shop would ship in from Japan each week. For years, it was the same routine every Saturday morning: First, he’d go to his Japanese class. But throughout his childhood, he remembers spending three days a week in San Mateo at the Japanese school and Buddhist temple that shared a building. Over time, grocery stores and restaurants opened to cater to the burgeoning Japanese community.ĭuring the ’70s and ’80s, Tommy Cleary, the chef at San Francisco’s soon-to-open Hina Yakitori, grew up one town over in Belmont. Later, many of these first-generation immigrants went on to start their own landscaping businesses and flower nurseries. In Building a Community: The Story of Japanese Americans in San Mateo County, Gayle Yamada and Dianne Fukami document the lives of those earliest Japanese immigrants, many of whom settled in San Mateo in the late 1800s and worked as “school-boys” (domestic servants), gardeners, or laborers in the local salt mines. It’s a community hub and a link to more than a hundred years of Japanese-American history. It’s a community hub and a link to more than a hundred years of Japanese-American history.īut for many Japanese Americans on the Peninsula, San Mateo is more than just a place to eat. San Mateo is more than just a place to eat. And just in terms of sheer density, San Mateo is tough to beat: The bulk of the city’s 40 or so Japanese restaurants are concentrated in a four-block radius downtown, an outsize presence that belies the city’s actual Japanese population, which now hovers somewhere in the vicinity of 2 percent. The ramen scene is more consistently solid than anywhere else in the Bay Area. It’s home to what’s probably the Bay Area’s best-regarded traditional kaiseki restaurant, Michelin-starred Wakuriya. It’s got Japanese restaurants that specialize in hard-to-find culinary sub-genres. San Mateo remains a singularly excellent destination for Japanese food. What, then, is the function of an ethnic food enclave once the cuisine in question goes mainstream? Or, to put it another way, is there still any reason to endure an hour-plus-long drive through traffic to eat in San Mateo? The latest splashy izakaya or ramen-ya is just as likely to open in Oakland - or Palo Alto or the Tenderloin - as it is in historic Japanese neighborhoods like the one in San Mateo. But these days, the Bay Area’s Japanese food scene has exploded and dispersed. “If you want to eat the best Japanese food in the Bay Area,” the conventional wisdom has long held, “you should go to San Mateo.” For the tastiest ramen or the most traditional sushi, you drove down the Peninsula to the affluent suburb.
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