Finding the Real ‘Midnight Diner’

So is it real? Is there one place like it? Can I go to Midnight Diner?

“There is none. It’s utopia. It’s an ideal in your heart.”

Yet he also knows what he would order there.

“Yakisoba with Worcestershire sauce,” he says in a nod to his neighborhood. “They always serve this at the summer festival in Nakano.”

This simultaneously raises and lowers my hopes, but he also pulls up an address on his phone for a place that might fit the bill and sends me off into the night.

Found in Translation

The next evening, following his instructions, I take a train out to the Keisei Hikifune station, walk through a residential neighborhood, then up to the restaurant’s frosted glass sliders. Opening them reveals a bar with four women working behind it wreathed by customers and a handful of tiny tables along the opposite wall.

Everyone looks up as I poke my head in and, to my amazement, I am meeting people before I sit on a green stool at the corner of the bar. The guy two seats to the left is five cigarettes in. I meet my neighbors to the right: a rental car agent who works in the Tokyo Station and her chef friend who works at an izakaya. As we talk, a fish broker sits in the empty seat to my left.

Almost immediately, we’ve opened the translation apps on our phones and are chattering away.

“Do you like to drink?” the fish broker asks while sharing some sake. “I love alcohol.”

The apps and everyone’s willingness to use them allow us to have surprisingly intimate and detailed conversations. In all my years of travel writing, I’ve never used a translation app this way, and I’m stunned at how quickly it allows you to create a conversation with some depth to it.

First, I get them to tell me what to eat. I start with an herby meatball on a stick, ham tonkatsu, and an only-in-Tokyo casserole-like dish called monja. These are followed by slabs of wasabi-dabbed cheese wrapped in nori, horse mackerel sashimi, and grilled dried anchovies with mayonnaise. It’s all good to very good, and there’s a fair amount of sharing among strangers.

I ask about the clientele and how they all seem to know each other, and the rental car agent tells me that even if you’re by yourself, “there are many people who often come, so everyone gets along well.”