Is there any food more comforting and satisfying than a nabe? Sitting around a bubbling casserole watching your dinner cook satisfies all the senses, nourishing the soul as you fill and heat your body. So why aren't there more places like Nabeya?
As you can guess from the name, here is a restaurant devoted solely to the pleasures of traditional one-pot cooking. What you can't know, until you find it tucked away in the backstreets of Otsuka, is that Nabeya is a one-off, and so is its veteran owner-chef, Hiroshi Fukuda.
It's not just that he's an authority on what people cooked and ate back in the day, when the city was still called Edo, and applies that knowledge in his cooking. More than anything, Nabeya embodies a discreet, slow-paced style of dining that is fast disappearing, especially in the brighter, buzzier parts of town.