Meat Yokkaichi, Mie
Yokkaichi Tonteki
All year
FOOD & DRINK

A thick cut of pork shoulder is scored deeply with a knife and then grilled. The cuts deliberately do not go all the way through, so the piece stays in one connected mass on the plate, and the shape and the bulk of the finished thing reminded customers of a baseball glove. They started calling it that, and the name stuck without anyone at the shop proposing it.

The seasoning is a blend of lard and sauce. The current shop states plainly that it uses the same manufacturer and the same blend that the previous generation was using back in the Nishishinchi days, entirely unchanged in the decades since.

Garlic comes with it. Grilled, rather than raw or sliced thin.

The origin is placed in the late 1960s, at a Chinese restaurant in the Nishishinchi district, where a cook named Shimoda Norio devised the thing. The present owner of this shop trained there for a full ten years before going out on his own and opening in Matsumoto in February of 1977. What I keep noticing about this one is who actually named the dish. Not the kitchen, and not any promotional committee. The people eating it looked at the object sitting on the plate in front of them and told the shop what it was.

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