February 5-11, 2004

naked city

A Taste of Home

Maido to order: Seiko Dailey stocks a shelf with Ramune, a popular but hard-to-find Japanese drink. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Fancy candies, wacky soft drinks, frozen eel and hairy potatoes -- Japanese expats and American foodies can find it all in … Narberth?

by Bruce Schimmel

When Seiko Dailey came to America in 1985 -- 23, and newly married to an American soldier -- what she missed most about her native Japan was the pizza.

At least that's what Dailey calls the big, white bumpy lump that's sizzling on a hot iron grill. In Japanese, it's called okonomiyaki.

With a spatula in each hand, Dailey pokes and prods at the hardening glob, saying that it was this particular okonomiyaki she especially missed, the way her mother would make it in her little café in Hirakata in the Osaka prefecture -- where competition for the best okonomiyaki is as fierce as it is in Philadelphia for cheesesteaks.

Part crepe, part frittata, part pancake, the okonomiyaki that Dailey is making is stuffed with pieces of crisp cabbage and tiny shrimp. Now that the dough is set, she's squiggling threads of dark, spicy fruit sauce across its top, which she then crosses with silky strands of "Kewpie," an ultra-light mayonnaise. Dailey finishes her favorite okonomiyaki with a dusting of translucent flakes of smoked tuna, to form a crispy crust.

Crunchy, doughy, sweet and smoky, the Western-inspired okonomiyaki has become a classic in Japanese comfort food, much like the more traditional noodle soups.

Satisfying this and other food urges of the Japanese expat community -- and of adventuresome Westerners -- is the idea behind MAIDO! Located right off the main drag in the affluent suburb of Narberth, Dailey and her husband, Pat, transformed a former underground taxi-garage into a bright, 3,500-square-foot showplace of hard-to-find Japanese staples, locally grown Asian vegetables and hundreds of packaged chips, candies, drinks and snacks.

"This snack here is nearly a religion in Japan," says Dailey, holding her own favorite, called Pocky. Pockies are skinny biscuits, crunchy squizzle-sticks, that are dipped in various icings, including coconut, chocolate, strawberry and green tea, and are often speckled with jimmies or nuts. "Pocky is to Japan as jelly beans are to America," she says, surveying several shelves of the popular treat.

MAIDO! (the store's name is a generic greeting, used by many Japanese shopkeepers, meaning "welcome back") has aisles of these and other snacks that Japanese people in America can't find -- and crave. Here's a sampling: chocolate mini-marshmallows, crunchy almond curls, shrimp chips, wasabi chips, yam chips flavored with melon and -- in a close coupling of packaging and product -- miniscule creme-filled cookies that come stacked in a slender, see-through tube. Makes your teeth hurt just to look at them.

As for drinks, MAIDO!'s refrigerated displays have squat bottles of sweet and pearly soy milks, tiny, shiny cans of sharp black coffee and little tins that contain an iced tea made of mushrooms, which Dailey says is a health and beauty aid.

Dailey reaches in and pulls out a little transparent blue bottle, the color of water in a stream. The bottle has the shape and feel of a smooth, small grenade.

"This is Ramune. It's like champagne," says Dailey, as she pops off its lid. She then inverts the top, using it as a tool to jam a large marble located just under its lip into the neck of the bottle. As you drink, the clear crystal marble in the bottle whirls and sparkles, as a semisweet, citrusy drink sluices past. Somehow, the marble stays in the bottle.

To Japanese ears, the word "ramune" sounds like the English word "lemon." The drink is less sugary, an adaptation of Western lemonade. According to Daily, it's a top-seller in both Tokyo and Narberth.

In addition to drinks and snacks, MAIDO! also carries basic Japanese staples, specializing in high-quality, artisanal foods that are tough to find even on the Internet, items like dry goods (noodles, sauces and a variety of pickles) or frozen fare (logs of fishcake wrapped in bright paper, bags of octopus balls and sacks of eel

chunks) that are rarely found in Western supermarkets. Before starting MAIDO! last spring, Dailey had to drive from her home in Bucks County for a couple of hours every week to find items that met her standards.

So Dailey and her husband -- a former Marine and now an executive at a pharmaceutical company -- put together a marketing plan that identified a hundred or so expat families in the Philadelphia area that bring their children to a nearby Japanese language school every week, a captive constituency that would support a Japanese speciality store.

Now, every Saturday, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., the Daileys run a shuttle bus from the school to MAIDO! so parents can shop while their kids are in school.

Response from Narberth locals has been surprisingly positive, Dailey says. "People are really supportive. Merchants and residents check in to tell us that they want us to be here, they’re happy to see [us]."

The store opened in late spring, and now local shoppers who come on weekdays account for about half of its sales. On a recent visit, a couple in their 20s from Narberth were sitting at the counter, enjoying their first okonomiyaki.

If you’re new to Japanese specialities, the Saturday rush is not an optimal time to visit MAIDO! Other times in the week, with fewer shoppers, Dailey says she enjoys explaining some of the products that Westerners find curious. "I want [customers] to come up to me, and ask me how to use the products," she says, adding that most inquire about the seaweeds (or sea vegetables) and tofu.

"I get a kick out of people picking up a bag of dried fish," she says -- to the uninitiated, it might suggest transparent, oversize sperm with bug-eyes. "This has eyes! I can’t eat this," most people say to Dailey, to which she replies, "It’s a great source of calcium and minerals.

"We’ve been cooking healthy for years," says the trim mother of two, who readily agrees that she’s accurately described as "perky." Dailey says that the Japanese secret to a long and healthy life is daily activity and that "we eat not too much [that’s] fattening, and we eat a lot of fiber and soy."

The store recently scored a coup when they started carrying fresh Asian vegetables from the Suzuki farms, grown in nearby Maryland. Their fresh-vegetable display has daikon, hairy potatoes, yam, fresh lotus root, gobo root and -- for those who crave it and can’t get it -- the famous two-and-a-half-foot-long Tokyo scallion.

MAIDO!, 36 N. Narberth Ave., Narberth, 610-747-0557, www.narberthpa.com/Maido.