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(Originally published in Japanese in Esquire Japan, October 2025)

Some twenty-three years ago in Tokyo, I used to eat at a funny little tendon shop called Imoya. I was a student at Waseda University back then, and this place was a campus staple. Tendon, when done well, can be divine, and Imoya was divine through and through.

The shop was run by the crankiest husband and wife you ever met. The whole place was just seven or eight counter seats around an open kitchen. The husband apparently lived in the attic of the shop. A little hatch in the ceiling opened and down fell a ladder. Up he climbed like a spider. (So went the college kid lore.) The wife lived down the road a few miles away in Iidabashi and walked back and forth each day. But together they had decided that their community role — as a cantankerous duo — was to provide as many delicious bowls of tendon to as many students for as cheaply as they could. I forget the precise cost, but it was probably about ¥500. Boy was it voluminous. And I think a fat ōmori heaping was free. But they had rules, and you had better obey those rules.

First, no talking. The shop was just a counter, the price was cheap, and the number of people waiting daily was non-trivial. The food quality, it must be said, was stellar. It was perhaps one of the best ratio of elevated_meal:price in Tokyo history. All these starving, poor college kids just wanted to power-up on tendon, and this one happened to be approaching Michelin levels at McDonald’s pricing. So the purpose of their rules was to cycle our hormone-bursting, gangly student bodies through the tendon system as quickly as possible. Talking slowed things down. You couldn’t talk AND eat. So no talking. Apart from the sounds of burbling oil and chewing, the place was dead silent. It felt like a church.

And, no books. Come on. Books? No. You were there to eat. This was not a beachfront resort in Bali. You didn’t prop your feet up and sip a piña colada while gingerly nibbling a tendon bowl, flipping through the latest Banana Yoshimoto short story. No. Your job was: Eat. That. Bowl. And the wife (the husband never spoke to anyone) would admonish quickly and brutally if you happened to not know the rule, if you happened to pull out a book while waiting for your bowl. (Or god forbid, after your bowl arrived.)

I started eating there just as Japanese flip phones were becoming a thing. So that rule, too — no phones, even though they were far more benign than anything we have today, no doom scrolling, no photographing your food for foolish algorithms. The “like” did not yet exist. You could accrue no followers and in this way these old phones were pure, but still, they were a distraction from the task at hand. So: No phones.

Finally, if you ordered the big portion of rice and left even one grain uneaten, you were banned from ever ordering a big portion again. How did they remember? The wife had a photographic memory. (More lore.) But then again, I never saw anyone dare break the rule. I never saw anyone hand in a bowl that looked anything but licked clean.

So it was, this little duo made good on the stomachs of a hundred thousand college kids over the course of five decades. One day, not too many years ago, the husband simply didn’t come down from the attic. And that was the end of Imoya.

Imoya was beloved. Yes, they were cranky, but they were fair, and by the tenth visit, you might even get a smile. And the food was truly nonpareil in the pantheon of ¥500 or even ¥5,000 meals. You had to earn your place, had to prove you understood what they were doing, why they were doing it, and you showed your honor and reverence by being a good customer.

I miss Imoya. I miss those rules. I look around me in cafés and small businesses today, and people eat alone with a phone propped up on the counter, watching YouTube or flicking through TikTok or Reels or watching TV. They tap-tap-tap Candy Crush style video games between bites. They hardly look at their food, let alone taste it. They are anywhere but “in” the place, anywhere but focused on the meal. The line behind them grows, and the turnaround for seats gets longer and longer the more addictive our phones become, and the more inward we all seem to turn.

I’ve visited dozens of jazz kissa all around Japan. When they opened in the 50s and 60s, records were prohibitively expensive, and American musicians touring Japan were rare. The only way to really listen to overseas jazz, was at their shops. There was an information arbitrage happening, a kind of translation between abroad and local, and the jazz kissa was the intermediary broker. So they had rules, too. No talking (you’re there to listen). They had little pads of paper on which you could request an album. (The music was so loud you couldn’t issue a request using your voice, anyway.) If you made a music request and went to the bathroom while it was playing, you were never allowed to make another request. Obviously, back then there was no Spotify, no Apple Music. The rules were modeled in alignment with their purpose, elevated their purpose, created a kind of superlative in-shop presence, tasting that burnt coffee, hearing Charlie Parker for the first time, having your mind blown. The matchbooks would sometimes have lines printed on them for you to take notes about what you heard that day (this was some deadly serious business, listening to jazz).

Today, I often think about what could be arbitraged, what could be brokered, and how we could regain our attention from the black mirrors in our hands. I’ve come to feel that a café or restaurant banning phones themselves (never mind laptops; phones always strike me as the real vibe-killer (but of course, dingdongs rocking video calls in cafés will forever be the ultimate boss of sanity)) would provide some kind of utility to the world, would self-select for a certain kind of customer craving shared silence from the algorithms, from the news, from the din of endless horror and outrage.

I feel like there’s a hint of something in the shoe locker system at sentos, local bathhouses. Those wooden cabinets with big metal or wooden keys. They’re lovely to use. The keys are huge and satisfying. I could imagine the same kind of system being used for a café. You walk in, and put your phone in the locker, take the giant key, sit down, read a book, perhaps … write on paper?! No video calls allowed, no dopaminergic loops. Do something where you are in the moment, something far from the algorithm, far from an LLM tempting you to ask it to re-write or draw or perform the creative act for yourself.

There’s a café in Kyoto that feels like a church. You have to reserve your spot. Two hours. No devices. Just you and silence and the books.

When I see someone scrolling away alone at a counter, I’m always reminded of Imoya. The first shop I ever visited with rules. Rules that didn’t make any initial sense to me (kinda frustrated me the first few times I visited), but then not only made sense, but became something I loved, adored — the audacity to have the rules, but then the beauty of what they enabled. The rules kept the seats turning over, the oil burbling, the vegetables frying, the student’s bellies full. They forced you to look, really look, at where you were and to study the beautiful work happening behind the spotless wooden counter. They enabled a restaurant to flourish, for the shop to generate profit on razor-thin margins, and two cranky — but ultimately quietly compassionate and passionate — lives to be filled with meaning.