Why a ¥1,000 Assortment Works at Rikkakai, a Four-and-a-Half-Mat Yakiniku Restaurant: Ryuji Visits the Place Where Hayato Morita Got His Start

The visit begins in the kitchen at Crossam Morita. Morita was peeling an apple while testing a new cooking method. Ryuji tastes it and is surprised, calling it "completely new."

Rikkakai fits its kitchen and even its restroom into four and a half tatami mats, and it basically has no refrigerator. Because it cannot store ingredients, in the early days Morita went straight to Shibaura to buy meat and brought back only what would be used that day. Now that there are more restaurants, cuts that Crossam does not use or cannot use are taken to Rikkakai. Including offal, cucumbers and so on, whatever is brought over makes up all of that day's ingredients. Everything is used within 24 hours, so there is no need for storage, and when it runs out, that's it for the day. Morita says this approach has continued for 16 years.

When Ryuji filmed at Crossam previously, only the cuts Morita had selected from large blocks of meat were served, and Ryuji had wondered where the rest went. Learning that it goes to Rikkakai, Ryuji responds, "So the meat served at Rikkakai is seriously good meat, then." All of the meat is wagyu.

Morita still gets around by train. It is to keep expenses down, and that has not changed since the restaurant opened. The restaurant sits right in front of the station's east exit and is narrower than the span of outstretched arms. The property used to be a discount ticket shop, and Morita laughs that it was a place started because "I didn't have any money."

Originally an architect, Morita designed the restaurant personally. The ceiling is just high enough that Morita's head doesn't hit it, and all the work counters are set at Morita's waist height. The kitchen is about the size of a single tatami mat and has no refrigerator; this is where the meat is cut and the dishes are washed. According to Morita, even at this size the restaurant obtained its permit in compliance with the Food Sanitation Act, something that would be impossible without knowledge of architecture.

The shelves are lined with plenty of condiments, but Morita did not buy a single one. Rikkakai does not season the food on its end, so it keeps condiments that customers have brought in. Since opening, the restaurant has used charcoal briquettes as its heat source. Morita's view is that without charcoal the temperature drops and the meat won't grill well, and the briquettes burn out in six and a half to seven hours. The restaurant opens at 5:30 p.m., and the fire goes out by midnight, so there is no need to worry about putting it out. Once the fire is out, the customers go home too, so the restaurant can't stay open any longer. The system is one briquette per day, and that's the end of it. Morita says this restaurant, which has kept going for 16 years, has become something of a flagship for Kanda.

Rikkakai is also a place to enjoy beef paired with sake. It serves about six kinds of sake a day, and that day's sake was ¥400 a glass. Seeing how generously the glass was filled, Ryuji asks, "Are you sure you didn't pour the wrong amount?"

At Rikkakai, it is the custom for the whole restaurant to raise a toast every time a new customer comes in. This goes back to opening day. Morita had no friends and opened the restaurant alone, but no customers came. So Morita fanned the smoke from the fat dripping in the shichirin grill out the door with an uchiwa fan, saying over and over, "The meat here is delicious." When someone drawn in by this came in and asked, "Is it good?", Morita revealed being the one working there, and the person said, "Oh, it's you." That customer gave Morita sake as an opening gift and said, "Let's have a toast." That first toast, Morita says, is how it became a restaurant where everyone who comes is toasted.

Sake labels line the walls. According to Morita, the restaurant's start came from encountering Nabeshima from Saga. Morita first paired Nabeshima with meat, and from there tried sake from Osaka, Iwate and elsewhere, one by one.

The menu is effectively just assortments, and customers first eat the ¥1,000 assortment, which is all but mandatory. After that, they order by price. Add "red" and you get only lean meat; say "horu 5" and you get ¥500 worth of just offal, and so on, and additional orders are accepted even in ¥100 units. When a cut runs out, customers are asked to change their order, so the earlier you come, the more likely your requests will be met.

Morita was calling out customers' names one after another. According to Morita, the names of around 3,000 people who have come are memorized.

The drawback of the restaurant that Morita volunteered was the heat. It originally had an air conditioner, but it broke after two weeks. Repairing it would cost a lot, so it hasn't been fixed, and Morita jokes, "I'd like you to feel the four seasons."

What Morita introduced as Rikkakai's secret was the ponzu, which has been around for 16 and a half years since the restaurant opened. Kanda is a neighborhood of office workers, so it contains no garlic, to keep the smell from getting on their suits.

There is another reason for not using garlic. Morita says, "I want people to eat yakiniku tomorrow too," explaining that if the garlic is strong, you won't want to eat it again the next day. Ryuji took this as "an amazing thing to say." When Morita asked the customers who were there, several came twice or more a week, and one came seven days a week. Morita thinks of making people want to come back the next day as "a subscription in the food business," and says it is gratifying that this has been achieved.

While cutting the meat, Morita explains cutting along the direction in which the fibers split, and trimming off the sinew. The knife in use was one sold by Ryuji, which has dimples in the blade so meat is less likely to stick to it.

Seeing the ¥1,000 assortment that comes out, Ryuji exclaims, "This is crazy." Yet none of the regulars around them is surprised. Morita says, "At a normal place, this one slice would probably be ¥1,000," and explains the reason: "We have a ranch."

The tongue in the assortment is a part that Crossam didn't use. According to Morita, it's best to sear the surface well and cook the underside more gently. Ryuji remarks that while many yakiniku restaurants use umami seasoning, it is extraordinary for it to taste this good with just salt. Morita replied that it is because it has been thoroughly aged. The tontoro is just right when eaten with ponzu, which cuts the fat. The sinew is deliberately left in, giving it a crisp, crunchy texture. Morita also mentioned that when the two of them went to Gyu-Kaku before, Ryuji had said the tontoro was the most delicious.

That day, aged marucho (small intestine) had been specially prepared. Morita explains that it is fermented on the same principle as sausage, saying it has none of the odor typical of offal and instead has an aroma closer to dairy products like butter or cheese. Prepared to this extent, it can be eaten after little more than warming it up.

Once grilled, it takes on a color that ordinary marucho doesn't. With offal, there is the problem of not knowing when to flip it, and Morita says this was something Morita wanted to solve. As at Crossam, it is finished by blasting it with heat to give it aroma. Tasting it, Ryuji is surprised that the texture is completely different from ordinary marucho. According to Morita, after the war, offal had so little value that it was thrown away. Morita wants to turn it into something of real value.

When Ryuji asks, "Do you get meat like this every time?", the regulars answered in unison, "We do." Morita says, "More than profit or anything, the biggest thing is wanting to protect the faces that have supported me."

When Fukushima's Roman was brought out, Morita talked about first encountering this sake. When Morita first tried pairing beef with sake, the initial combinations didn't work well. Around that time, Morita happened to go to South Korea and noticed how well makgeolli goes with pork. According to Morita, sake and makgeolli are made in almost the same way with almost the same ingredients; the difference is that sake is brewed with non-glutinous rice and makgeolli with glutinous rice. So Morita searched for a brewery that adds glutinous rice in a four-stage brewing process and arrived at Hanaizumi Sake Brewery. It had a sweetness and richness not found in other sake, and Roman was the first one brought into the restaurant.

Next came ris de veau, the thymus of a calf. It is a rare cut that hasn't come in much lately, and it is eaten with ponzu after a good deal of the fat has been rendered out over the charcoal. Ryuji called it "top-tier delicious."

Kainomi is a lean cut, grilled over high heat to about rare. According to Morita, lean meat tends to release blood, but this meat doesn't bleed even when left to sit. After tasting it, Ryuji repeated, "Way too good."

Then came ribeye from Crossam. It has been aged considerably, and both Ryuji and Morita say a single slice could easily command ¥1,000. Ryuji let slip, "If you eat at these prices, it'll warp your sense of value."

Here, in front of regulars who have been coming for 16 years, Morita said the following. At ordinary restaurants, quality often declines when they can't raise prices, and that's unavoidable within the limits of what a business can do. But Rikkakai bought a ranch along the way and began working together with production, so over these 16 years its quality should have kept going up. The regulars responded that the fat has become lighter and lighter.

When serving a pairing of sparkling sake and loin, Morita said, "This is what I wanted to do at Rikkakai."

One regular said they basically want to come every day, that talking and drinking with everyone here lets them go back to work the next day, and that if anything, they go to work so they can come here. That customer's bill came to about ¥2,600.

Morita said repeatedly that it was thanks to the customers that the restaurant has lasted 16 years. There was the BSE problem, and by Morita's reckoning, a beef price shock inevitably comes about once every eight years, so the restaurant has been through two in 16 years. Then there was the COVID pandemic. Even then, the regulars kept coming, spacing themselves a meter apart and keeping their personal space in groups of four or five. The restaurant also did lunch service for the first time, handing out ¥100 beef bento boxes in limited quantities such as 50 a day. Morita says it was meant as a way of giving back to the people who had offered their support.

Ryuji described Morita as "hospitality incarnate," saying that Morita is worthy of respect because Morita thinks of nothing but the happiness of the people who come.

Morita also pointed out how the way Morita runs restaurants differs from other restaurateurs. Normally, a restaurant's price point is set when it is created, so it becomes a ¥15,000 place, a ¥6,000 place, or a ¥3,000 place. In Morita's case, Rikkakai's average spend per customer is just under ¥3,000, after which Morita opened ¥6,000, ¥8,000 and ¥10,000 restaurants, leading to the current Crossam. Morita says it is a privilege for a single owner-chef to be able to interact with customers across such a wide range of price points.

Toward the end, the restaurant served sausage kneaded with herbs such as oregano, authentic kimchi of the kind made in Korean homes, and abomasum (giara) tenderized with enzymes from fruit such as kiwi. When Ryuji said, "So you can do it at this quality," Morita replied that it is precisely because this quality has always been maintained that some people have kept coming for more than ten years.

Even so, Morita asked the regulars to say if there was anything lacking or anything that had changed, and to offer advice.

When a regular mentioned that they tell professional boxers who come in to eat their fill, Morita revealed the restaurant's origins. Professional boxers eat for free at Rikkakai. Morita once worked as a trainer at Daisuke Naito's gym. Naito had talent and became a world champion, but the other boxers did not. Morita says the restaurant was created out of a desire to let those boxers eat beef cheaply, so they could get protein and build muscle.

Morita also looked back on the path that began with this restaurant. From the first restaurant, Rikkakai, came the second and third, and with the fourth Morita opened Crossam. After that, Morita listed receiving an award from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, traveling 650 km from Osaka to Kumamoto with a cow during the COVID pandemic, brewing sake while moving across Russia in an attempt to create the world's most expensive sake, and engaging in activities involving a slum in Nigeria, and said the regulars had watched all of it the whole way.

Ryuji told Morita that hearing Morita say, "Without this place, I wouldn't be who I am today," was moving. The contrast with the previous Crossam video is huge, Ryuji said, but it came through that Morita takes both restaurants completely seriously.

After wrapping up filming, Morita, who doesn't usually drink much, started drinking with the regulars because friends had come. Many of the regulars here are also regulars at Crossam. As for that day's aged marucho, the regulars had noticed right away that it was "different from usual." Morita says it's because they come so often that even a small change gets this much of a reaction.

Finally, the video returns to the apple from the beginning. What Morita served Ryuji was a new variety of apple that tastes like peach, and its color was also different from the apples Ryuji knew. Morita recommends it, saying the flavor is especially incredible when juiced. Asked by Ryuji whether Morita still carries out experiments like this, Morita replied, "I can't wait to try cooking methods no one has ever tried before."