IT’S NEARLY HAPPY hour at the Nob Hill izakaya Tanuki.
The goat’s been roasted, and the hamachi delivered. A Japanese
noren door curtain (essentially a panel of printed fabric split
down the center) hides the back-room kitchen where ingredients line
tables and fill refrigerators. Owner and Chef Janis Martin has been
preparing since six in the morning. It’s very hot and very humid, but
Martin is at home here.
She stands at a table topped with containers filled with pungent and
exotic items like pickled lotus roots, Korean fried fish and cuttlefish
jerky, kimchi, and a nest of Japanese sun-dried chili threads. She
motions to a large bottle of fresh unpasteurized white soy sauce.
“That’s what I use on the hamachi,” she says. “Most places it’s just
prohibitively expensive. But it’s the right thing for the fish so I
take a little bit of a loss.”
Martin says Tanuki’s limited potential for profit, at 16 seats, is
improved by low overhead. She admits that the chairs may be
uncomfortable and, much like “ladies of a certain age,” the dining room
looks better in the dark, but the food and drinks are of unflinching
quality.
“So you’re going to sit on a shitty chair,” she says. “But you’re
going to have great soy. That’s the trade-off we have here.”
It’s a trade-off that’s garnered Tanuki a cultish following, and as
happy hour starts, the faithful begin to arrive. In the kitchen,
tickets are stuck to loops of masking tape wrapped sticky side outward
around the glass door of a cooler. Martin reads them off to herself and
circles her kitchen, quickly building the small dishes as she
moves.
Beneath a ghostly photocopied photograph of Lindsay Lohan sits a
two-burner hot plate, and a conventional electric griddle on which
Martin prepares much of her menu. Tanuki is all about resourcefulness.
However, Martin builds menus that are more and more difficult to
accomplish given her limited resources.
“When it’s busy, it’s pretty insane,” she says. “That question, ‘Am
I going to pull this off or is it going to be a hideous failure?’ is
always up in the air. I actually like that kind of stress.” She smiles.
“Otherwise, idle hands and devil’s playground, and next thing you know,
I’m off wandering the streets.”
Martin makes it sound as if kitchens have saved us all from her
devious mind. She’s been enthralled by cooking since her first job at
an Italian joint in Cleveland, Ohio, when the chef mystique prompted
her to drop out of high school to pursue cooking; a pursuit that’s
taken her through top kitchens in the US and New Zealand.
Though Martin’s den of drinking food is far from the polite excess
of fine dining, it is indelibly her own. And like Martin, Tanuki can be
obnoxious, profane, wry, and inspired.
Sure, things could be changed to suit sensitive guests, but it
wouldn’t be “The ‘Nuki” and it wouldn’t be Janis Martin, who at 35 is
realizing her dream to “do the best food I can for the lowest price I
can.”
Some find Martin abrasive and her food too brash. Others seek out
the noisy dining room for the direct culinary dialogue of
omakase. Very loosely translated as “it’s up to you,” ordering
omakase allows patrons to set their price and the chef to create a
multi-course meal to fit that price. Up to 70 percent of a night’s
orders at Tanuki will be omakase.
Around 7:30 pm, an omakase ticket is slapped up on the tape. Martin
questions the server.
“How many are there?” Four. “How old are they?” Two adults in their
40s, two kids in their teens. “What are they drinking?” Nothing,
yet.
She begins working. After each plate is garnished, she bellows out
“Serve please!” in strange, low voice. A server responds—”Coming
through!”—flicking aside the noren. A plate of halved crawfish is
sent out to the family, and soon Martin enquires how it’s been
received. The answer will change the course of the meal. More
adventurous or less?
As she plans the next course for the family, more orders come in.
It’s nearly 9 pm. Martin is unfazed. The problem is, with only a
hotplate and a griddle, things can quickly turn into a “banquet of
jackassery.”
No matter. Eventually the dining room will fill, as will a waiting
list, and Martin will truly be in her element: another night alone in
her kitchen, pushing herself. Every moment a potential careening
disaster, but every dish more delicious for the effort.
When Janis Martin has time to catch breakfast, she’ll often go to
HA & VL (2738 SE 82nd). “It’s just really well made and
really well crafted,” says Martin. The Vietnamese family that runs the
restaurant focuses on noodle soups, not your average Western
breakfast.