About this site
I'm Mike Lanzetta. I'm an American living in Tokyo, and I eat here with what my friends generously calls "serious intent" and what my doctor calls "a problem."
Koji Culturist is where I write about the food in this city — not in the sense of telling you where to eat (Google Maps does that fine) but in the sense of trying to figure out what it all means. Why a pizza chef in Nakameguro throws salt into his oven every morning like a Shinto rite. Why the standing bars in Shinbashi feel like the last honest places in a city that is rapidly, nervously polishing itself for the world's gaze. Why a bowl of ramen can start an argument about tradition that goes on for thirty years and counting.
I'm not a chef. I'm not a credentialed food critic. I'm a person who has lived in Tokyo long enough to know the difference between Famichiki and Nanachiki (Family Mart, obviously) but not so long that I've stopped noticing what makes this city's food culture strange and wonderful and occasionally baffling. I can afford Kohaku sometimes. I prefer a counter seat at a tachinomiya in Shinbashi most of the time — dried horse mackerel, pickled mountain vegetables, a cup of whatever the house nihonshu is, standing up because there are no chairs and that's the point.
The name: koji (้บน) is Aspergillus oryzae, the mold that makes miso, sake, soy sauce, and mirin. It's a living culture that transforms raw ingredients into something with more depth, more funk, more time folded into it. A koji culturist cultivates cultures — the biological kind and the human kind. I liked the double meaning. My partner said it sounded like a medical condition. Both can be true.
What this isn't
This isn't a restaurant review site. I don't give star ratings. I don't rank things. I don't write "top 10" lists or "if you only have 3 days in Tokyo" guides, because if you only have three days in Tokyo you should be eating, not reading some guy's blog.
Each essay uses a specific food topic — pizza, ramen, the economics of a standing bar, whatever has been keeping me up — as a way into a bigger argument about craft, culture, identity, or the particular kind of productive stubbornness that makes Tokyo's food scene unlike anywhere else.
If that sounds interesting, there's a newsletter. If it doesn't, there are 160,000 restaurants in this city. You'll be fine.