Berkeley’s Tamon Tea Has (Rice) Balls

Berkeley’s Tamon Tea Has (Rice) Balls

Portable and easy-to-eat Samurai-style snacks, including sweets and savories, bring on the crowds.

In Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic Seven Samurai, a brave 16th-century swordsman uses two humble, hand-patted rice balls to save a child’s life.

In a little slip of a downtown Berkeley shop, customers stand in line ordering rice balls almost identical to those seen in Seven Samurai and countless other period films. Juggling skateboards and smartphones while speaking Japanese, Chinese, and English, the folks lining up at Tamon Tea are eagerly awaiting a type of snack that dates back more than a thousand years.

Open since late June, Tamon Tea sells chewy sweet mochi, hot curried donburi, jasmine lemonade, the octopus balls known as takoyaki, the skewered sweets and savories known as dango, and shaved ice so transcendentally light and fluffy as to defy gravity. But the main attraction here are omusubi: plumply pocket-sized, truncatedly triangular, nori-wrapped rice balls served plain or with fillings ranging from pickled plum to sukiyaki beef to spicy tuna to salmon skin to Hawaii’s pride, Spam. Mentioned in Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century Tale of Genji, these rustic wonders are often called musubi—but Tamon Tea grants them the honorific prefix o.

The fact that the rice in omusubi is neither sugared nor vinegared is what defines them as something other than sushi. Bite into one of these luxuriantly lukewarm babies, and that lightly salted rice manages almost magically to stick together, mouthful by mouthful, rather than scatter all over your table, lap, or hands. They’re that portable and that easy to eat. Which, of, course is their point.

Choose the eel filling (unagi, which is Tamon Tea’s most popular), and you’ll delight in a perfect blend of ingredients, each bite a power-punch of crisp seaweed, soothing steamed rice and saltily-sweetly sauced, smooth-chewy-rough fresh fish. Choose pickled plum (umeboshi, one of the oldest known omusubi fillings) for pure, mind-clearing tartness. Choose kelp (kombu) and savor, in its thick, umami-tastic flesh, the eternal sea. Choose natto and give yourself a gold star for confronting these fermented soybeans whose nutty flavor and sock-like reek are often compared by optimists and con artists to those of cheese, although even optimists and con artists don’t dare euphemize those slimy, smelly, spiderwebby strands that stretch terrifyingly from snack to teeth.

Pair these with hot tea, iced tea, green tea, barley tea, ginger tea, English tea, pan-roasted hojicha, rice-dotted genmai cha, or Tea Ceremony-staple matcha. Or, you know, Coke.

Each culture—for reasons involving its history, geography, economy, spirituality, and/or philosophy—does certain things preternaturally well. In Finland, for instance, it’s cross-country skiing. In Japan, it’s making and eating snacks.

Is that because Japan is an island nation in which speed matters and space is often scarce, where much of life occurs in transit, in cubicles, on fields and/or at sea? Is it because portable insta-meals suit certain archetypes that aren’t mere cartoon characters but real: students, sararimen, soldiers, farmers, factory workers, wandering samurai, roaming monks?

Omusubi are nutrition, transistorized. They’re samurai sandwiches.

Yet they aren’t retro—because to be retro, something needs to have vanished into obsolescence. Which omusubi never did. They’ve uniquely withstood history intact, notwithstanding the invention of rice-cookers, Spam, and Japan’s latter-day affection for mayonnaise, which is in the chicken-salad filling served at Tamon Tea.

Owner Hiro Okada also owns Coach Sushi on Oakland’s Grand Avenue.

“Everyone calls me ‘Coach,’ ” says the wiry restaurateur, who before emigrating to the United States spent years coaching baseball at an international high school in Japan. Okada chose this new spot’s name for two reasons: Tamon is the Buddhist god of the north. And “Tamon” sounds, phonetically, like the English “c’mon”—as in, “C’mon in.”

Two tiny tables comprise the only seating here; plan to eat your purchases elsewhere. But what it lacks in floor space, Tamon Tea abundantly provides in quiet, confident authenticity. Prepared in a kitchen you can’t see from the shop, alternatives to omusubi include rice topped with curried meat or vegetable stews—a tad fierier here than your typical Japanese kare-raisu—which make a nice full meal, served with tangy pickles and green salad. A hearty contrast to monastically plain miso soup, chunky pork miso soup (tonjiru) will stand up stoutly to cold winter days.

Except for certain crowded lunchtimes when they’re premade to forestall long lines, Tamon Tea’s omusubi are handcrafted to order. Workers pat, stuff, then wrap the warm rice: White is standard; brown costs a bit extra but adds some wholesome, arguably hippie-ish bulk.

Another 21st-century touch—but really, such touches are rare in the rice-ball realm—at Tamon Tea is a clever cellophane wrapper that keeps the nori crisp and, whenever you’re ready, “unzips” to let the un-soggy seaweed slip neatly into place.

While omusubi have some visibility outside Japan, they’ve never gone global as have German sausages, say, or American sandwiches. Maybe that’s because, as evinced endearingly at Tamon Tea—whose mascot is a sportjacketed, samurai-skirted, riceball-headed character clasping snacks in each hand—omusubi refuse to dumb down and assimilate. Their components remain primordial. Primal. Poetically prosaic, and often probiotic. Rice, obviously. Seaweed, not as a festoon, but as a feature. Fish. Pickled fruit. That’s what makes omusubi, now as ever, so special. But it’s also what keeps them, for many people who didn’t grow up with them, unassailably alien. Served at Tamon Tea, sea algae (hijiki) and salted cod roe (mentaiko) won’t appear on McDonald’s menus anytime soon. Nor will Ici ever debut natto ice cream.

Lining a glass case like fat, powdered gems are desserts, some of them—such as aromatic pink sakura-mochi, wrapped in edible cherry-blossom-tree leaves—handcrafted at Shuei-Do, a popular manju shop in San Jose’s Japantown. Others, such as mitarashi dango—skewered rice-flour dumplings doused in syrupy sweetened soy sauce; you’ll want to masticate these knuckly nuggets forever and ever because their startling resilience embodies comfort itself—feel and taste so fresh that you’d never guess they’re imported, frozen, from Japan.

Made on the spot and served hot are taiyaki, sweet-bean-stuffed wheat-flour waffles cooked in a special device that renders them adorably seabream-shaped, scales and all. Might these be the new cupakes?

But save room. While shaved ice sells well here, hiding under it shyly on the menu is the lesser-known (at least Stateside) uji-kintoki, which hands-down has to be one of the most ingenious, most epic icy drinks ever devised.

Named for the Kyoto-prefecture green-tea city, Uji, this undersung OMG-in-a-cup comprises frozen green tea flaked into a soft snowdrift, crowned with soft white unsweetened mochi balls, a scoop of sweet and even softer jasper-red adzuki beans, and that apex of Asian-tea-shop luxury: thick condensed milk. Every spoonful is roaringly creamy, crunchy, pasty, chewy, melty, slippery, diversely sweet, and exponentially soft, proclaiming yet again the resourcefulness of a nation to which chocolate arrived only relatively recently. Heck, yeah, it’s a bean-and-tea sundae. Got a problem with that?


Tamon Tea

2055A Center St., Berkeley
510-647-9370
TamonTea.com
Open Mon.-Sat. 10:30am–6:30pm
Entrées $2.25–$8.50
Cash only.
No alcohol.

Faces of the East Bay