Takashi smiled as he held up his mobile phone and photographed the slightly shriveled piece of tonkatsu (deep-fried pork cutlet). "At today's lesson I made another awful-looking dish," he tapped out in an e-mail to send with the photo to a friend.
The recent boom in popularity of cooking schools among young Japanese men can be put down to the industry satisfying two very different types of clientele. One is interested in learning to cook. The other is interested in learning to cook and in meeting women. Takashi, 38, (who preferred to use a pseudonym) is an example of the latter.
Blinking under the bright lights of ABC Cooking's chic +m Marunouchi Studio, he said that attending cooking school was a good way to impress girls. "You say you're going to cooking school and it's like, 'Wow!' "