Japan’s stand-up steakhouses build a loyalty that can be weighed（716words）

By Leo Lewis

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There is no doubt whatsoever that Kunio Ichinose loves steak.

Part chef, part chief executive, he pops up regularly on Japanese television bearing his steak knife, wearing his steak-cooking outfit and talking about steak. In the garish reception of his Tokyo headquarters, a video loop shows Mr Ichinose cooking, serving, tasting and discussing steak. His company logo is a rocket, symbolising, he says, the cosmic ambitions he feels about steak.

Asked to consider other favourite global cuisines, Mr Ichinose stretches back into a sofa, pats a well-fed stomach and has a think. “No . . . I just really love steak.”

He has unstintingly combined this passion with entrepreneurship. Trained as a chef at a Tokyo hotel, Mr Ichinose left in the early 1990s to pioneer low-cost steak restaurants in Japan. Growth was rapid, but to accelerate the nation’s conversion he invented an automated plate-heating technology that reduced the need for specialist cooks and definitively introduced steak as a taste of the masses. Now, two decades later, he is so sure that the Japanese share his steak zealotry, he has taken the bet that they do not even care about chairs.

In October, Mr Ichinose will turn 73, an age when some might decide that a life’s work peddling rib-eye, sirloin and (Japanese) wagyu was complete. His original all-seater steak chain, Pepper Lunch, has more than 200 branches in Japan, Asia and North America. Shares in the listed company, Pepper Food, reached an all-time high towards the end of July. But the stock fell hard this week when talks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have cheapened beef imports to Japan, stalled.

Mr Ichinose has another remarkable act of beef evangelism left in him, in the form of Ikinari Steak, a chain of stand-up restaurants. For the second time in his career, he says, he has observed the value-led, connoisseur-driven and increasingly solitary way modern Japanese consume, and applied that to slabs of meat. Japanese stand to eat noodles and bar food but Ikinari is the first time they have stood to eat with a knife and fork.

The first outlet of Mr Ichinose’s new chain opened in Tokyo’s Ginza district in 2013; now there are 53 branches nationwide and another 30 will be added this year. Tokyo’s office districts have a vast choice of places to eat, but on weekday lunchtimes, the queues for Ikinari represent a 45-minute wait.

The concept, he says, is to yoke speed and quality in an environment where, despite the market euphoria of “Abenomics”, wages have risen only tentatively. Consumer spending is cautious. But Japan has been wealthy for long enough to create high-end tastes. Ikinari, which means “sudden”, exists to satisfy an abrupt craving for a high-quality steak with no fiddly trimmings. Or, as Ikinari’s slightly tin-eared English slogan has it: “This is the very steak.”

Customers stand at 1m-high tables and order the precise number of grammes desired. The cost — Y5/gramme for rib-eye to more than Y10/g for sirloin — gives customers what Mr Ichinose claims is a vital sense of control.

Everything is calculated for speed of throughput and optimal use of limited ground floor spaces in key city locations. The height of the tables, Mr Ichinose demonstrates by jumping up and miming, has been calibrated so that diners are unlikely to put their knives and forks down between mouthfuls. He pulls out a smartphone, which funnels him real-time CCTV footage of all the restaurants, to show this happening.

The innovation of which Mr Ichinose is most proud, however, is the “beef mileage card” — a loyalty scheme that tracks the cumulative weight of the steak consumed by its members, and ranks them by gluttony in a mobile phone app viewable to all. This creates competition between steak lovers and should lock customers in, he says, when inevitably, the concept is copied.

Despite Mr Ichinose’s passion for steak, he ranks far from the top of its 100,000 members. Since the scheme’s launch in July 2014, he has eaten a mere 17,108g. The current all-Japan leader is a diner with some 37,000g to his name.