At a little cafe near the Ikegami train station in Tokyo, a young Chiaki Ohara would often meet her father for a bite of spaghetti Napolitan after school. “Sweet ketchup spaghetti is something pretty much every kid loves,” she says, “and I was definitely one of them.” It was a noodle date for just the two of them. That plate of spaghetti stayed with her when she moved to New York City as an adult in 2009. She started cooking in Japanese restaurants like Cha-An in the East Village and Rice & Miso in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, and eventually Davelle on the Lower East Side, where, as lead chef, she developed what might be Manhattan’s clearest, most pristine iteration of spaghetti Napolitan.
Recipe: Spaghetti Napolitan
Named after Naples and thought to have been invented by a hotel chef in Yokohama, spaghetti Napolitan (sometimes spelled Naporitan) is Japan’s interpretation of Italian red-sauce pasta. Slightly sweet and intensely savory, Napolitan is more stained with seasoned ketchup than slopped with it, and it’s sprinkled with green peppers, onions and sausage or bacon. “It’s kind of a weird combination,” Ohara says, but the ketchup is “what makes it really special to me.” If you’re afraid of the ketchup, remember that it’s used as an ingredient here, not as a condiment. In Japanese yoshoku cuisine, or Western-inspired dishes, if there’s ketchup, there’s often Worcestershire sauce and probably soy sauce as well. This rounding out of the acidic, sweet tomato with salt and umami is what makes other dishes of the category — like hambagu (hamburger steak), omurice (fried rice draped in a soft-set omelet) and tonkatsu (pork cutlet with demi-glace) — timeless comforts served at kissaten, or Western-style Japanese cafes.
The key to a great spaghetti Napolitan, a dish that’s hard to get right, is to think of it as a yaki (“fried”) noodle more than an Italian-style pasta. Frying the ketchupy noodles and vegetables over high heat, as quickly as you can in a generous amount of oil, results in a deeply satisfying sauce, so don’t be afraid of a little fire (or oil, for that matter). In fact, in Japan, Ohara said, the dish is sometimes served sizzling on a hot cast-iron plate so that the noodles are a little burned at the edges (in a good way), and sometimes sprinkled with cheese. When she was a child, she used to push the green bell peppers to the side, but she has since grown to like them. Her version lets them work as an accent, seasoning the oil while preserving their color and tender crispness. Ohara’s dream Napolitan, now that she’s in her 30s, includes a little dashi powder, Tabasco and Parmesan, with a soft fried egg on top.
‘This,’ she said about cooking, ‘is just a part of my life.’
On a recent rainy Monday afternoon, swathed in Tokyo night jazz, I sat across from a wise and ebullient Ohara, who shared all this after Davelle closed for the evening. As we chatted like old friends, she pointed out that most Japanese people cook three times a day, so calling herself a chef feels off. “This,” she said about cooking, “is just a part of my life.”
As she described the homemade rice balls and hamburger steaks that she packs for her daughter’s lunches, she reminded me that real cooks never veer far from their old selves. The foods we want to eat and share later in life are indelibly influenced by what sustained us as children. Ohara said she appreciates Japanese culture and cuisine even more now that she’s watching non-Japanese people appreciate it, whether it’s the other parents asking after her daughter’s lunches or a young journalist returning six years after first trying her incomparable spaghetti, sitting at the bar alone, slurping away. That the Napolitan she ate with her father near the train station in Tokyo is now replicated in a tiny kitchen in Manhattan is a gift to us all, a result of an artist in touch with her craft.
When I left Davelle, grateful and full of spaghetti, I opened my umbrella and walked to the F train, thinking of the jazz trumpeter riffing over the piano and picturing the little girl meeting her dad at a cafe in Tokyo.
Eric Kim has been a food and cooking columnist for The Times since 2021. You can find his recipes on New York Times Cooking.
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