The 98-Year-Old Chinese Diner Near Tokyo That Goes Through 40 Kilos of Rice a Day

Soka is a commuter town in Saitama, about half an hour north of central Tokyo. One minute from the station exit, on the ground floor of a building facing the bus rotary, a long red sign runs the full width of a restaurant: Chinrai.

Fifty-three seats, counter and tables. It opened in 1928 and bills itself as the oldest ramen chain in Japan. In 2028 it turns a hundred.

The man running the kitchen has been with the company for twenty years. He is forty, and he is preparing to leave.

What a machi-chuka is

Machi-chuka (町中華) translates roughly as "neighbourhood Chinese." These are not Chinese restaurants in the way a Westerner would picture one. They are Japanese diners, usually family-run, serving a century-old localised version of Chinese cooking: soy-based ramen, pan-fried gyoza, fried rice, stir-fries, and set meals built around a bowl of white rice.

They are cheap, fast, open late, and disappearing — the generation that opened them in the postwar decades is retiring. Chinrai is older than most of them, and unusual in another way: it is a chain, with directly-run branches and a company behind it.

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Ninety-eight years by the station

Chinrai opened in 1928, which puts it ahead of almost everything the word "ramen shop" now describes in Japan. There are five directly-run branches today; the company president is the third generation of the founding family.

The boss is the third generation. Two years from now it's a hundred years.

Plenty of other shops carry the Chinrai name without being directly run, and they do not all taste the same. A customer who had come over from Tokorozawa, on the far side of Saitama, to buy takeout dumplings put it plainly: the flavour varies by branch, and Soka is the one he likes. He started coming at about ten years old. That was forty years ago.

Seven in the morning

The manager is Fumihiro Sanpei, forty. He joined at this branch, moved to the Chinrai near Dokkyo University and then to the one in Umejima in Tokyo, and came back to Soka. Twenty years, all with the same company.

He arrives a little after seven, before anyone else, and the day starts when he turns the lights on.

The first job is portioning yakisoba noodles: one handful, 250 g, over and over. He does not weigh them.

After twenty years, you just know.

The soup starts the day before

The base is made the previous afternoon — pork bones, vegetables and kombu, simmered three hours. That pot is where the morning begins.

He tops it with water, brings it back up, and skims. The more patiently the scum comes off, the clearer the soup gets.

In a second pot, chicken carcasses are blanched, then transferred across. Five minutes later a yellow film comes to the surface: chicken fat. He lifts it off, strains the stock through a mesh, drops in vegetable trimmings, and divides it into smaller pots for service.

The heat has a rule.

Once it boils and the fat comes up, you go straight to low. That's how you hold the soup. It's been made this way since the day I started.

The soy tare for ramen is built separately and strained. All the vegetables are domestic, delivered every morning by a greengrocer who comes to the door.

Five hundred dumplings, folded by hand

The filling is cabbage and pork and seasoning. Nothing else. The ingredients are domestic, he says, and they are not cheap ones. A spatula loads the filling, the wrapper closes, and the next one starts — about 500 a day, every one folded by hand.

Our gyoza are pretty big.

The person folding them is a foreign staff member who laughs that her Japanese is still bad. Her hands never slow down. "Everyone here is kind. The manager is kind. It's fun."

Takeout dumplings are cooked before opening: laid out in the pan, water in, lid on, five minutes of steaming, water off, then lard poured over the top to finish the crust. They go into containers and out to the display case on the pavement.

At eleven, when the doors open, there are already people there for them.

Forty kilos of rice

The rice is milled on site. The shop goes through 40 kg a day, and the cooker holds five at a time, so it is cooked eight times between morning and close.

We do about a hundred fried rice a day. That's where the forty kilos goes.

Each one takes two minutes: egg, rice, then the additions and seasoning in one pass.

Staff lunch, with natto for dessert

At 11:31 the prep is done and he cooks for himself — hoikoro, twice-cooked pork, which is not on the menu. Vegetables and sauce into the pan, thin-sliced pork after.

He has been working since seven. He sits down and eats at a speed that is hard to watch. Then, when the plate looks finished, dessert arrives: a pack of natto, which goes down the same way.

At 12:39 the staff line up for the morning huddle. Chilled noodles start next week, he tells them. Attention. Bow.

Let's have a good day.

Eleven o'clock

The shop is open 11:00–01:30 Tuesday to Saturday and 11:00–00:00 on Sunday and Monday. Fifty-three seats, counter and tables, easy to walk into alone or with a family.

A salaryman on his lunch break ordered sauce yakisoba with a half portion of rice. Asked whether fried noodles really work as a dish to eat rice with, he said yes without pausing. Asked for his one recommendation, he did not name a noodle at all.

The stir-fried vegetables. That's the base of a machi-chuka, and Chinrai does it well.

A mother and son had been coming for thirty years — since he was near enough a baby. They ordered miso ramen and ginger pork.

It tastes like what I ate as a kid. It's home. It's reassuring.

11:43 — the fried rice rush

At 11:43 the house is full, and the kitchen changes character.

Look at it. All of these are fried rice. They just keep coming.

He works two woks at once — miso ramen soup finishing in one while tanmen comes together in the other — and between them plates stir-fried pork and vegetables, kanton-men, the stamina stir-fry, chashu ramen. The orders do not stop.

Getting to stand at that station takes a while.

You used to start at the bottom and work your way up to the wok. For the lunch station, two or three years.

Twenty years in, he is leaving

Asked why he stayed with this company, he gives an answer that explains the whole arrangement.

The good thing here is that you can go independent. You're not just somebody's hired manager.

So the plan is to open his own place, as soon as he can — at forty-two or forty-three, which means within two or three years.

That is not the whole of it, though.

After I'm gone, I want the ones here now to be brought up properly to take over, and to build the same kind of shop.

Asked for a word to the people who keep coming:

Out of all the places they could eat, they choose us, and some of them tell us it's good. I hope they keep using us the same way.

If you're going

Hours and prices change. Worth confirming before you go. It is busiest from about 11:40 — if you want a quiet counter seat, come early.

The part text can't carry

Everything above is the reporting. What it leaves out is the sound and the speed.

At a full house he has two woks moving, a fried rice landing every two minutes, soup being finished in between, dumplings going into the pan, plates going out. His hands never stop, and he never looks like he is hurrying.

That is the 27:04 mark onward. The large fried rice goes up at around 23:26.