The Squid City

I’m at a street festival in a city known as the Squid City, and within the hour the citizenry will be enthusiastically performing the Ika Odori (translation: Squid Dance), a lively dance dedicated entirely to squid, at nearly every street corner in the city.

But none of the food stands at this street festival are serving squid.

They’re serving fried chicken. They’re serving okonomiyaki. They’re serving a staggering array of greyish-looking meats on sticks. And of course, they’re serving bananas coated in chocolate and decorated with candy to look like cute cartoon characters. But not squid. No squid anywhere.

This has been my experience all day. Okay, there’s squid at the Asaichi Morning Market, but much of it is served as a ‘dancing’ dish (confoundingly ALSO named Ika Odori) where the squid’s head is chopped off and its muscles contract in a morbid ‘dance’ as soy sauce is poured over it, usually accompanied by wide-eyed, madly Instagramming tourists, and I’m super not into that.

And, okay, there’s squid in most seafood restaurants, but as sashimi it’s too chewy for me. I certainly don’t want a repeat of that sashimi restaurant in Asahikawa where I lost all the face in the world by unsuccessfully covering up my unchewable octopus with an insufficient pile of daikon radish.

I just want some casual, cooked squid. Straight-up grilled. As tempura. Legs akimbo in a pile of soba noodles. Even on a stick, spiced so aggressively I choke on it (this happened in Hunan, China).

It takes me all day to finally find it, after many false starts, including being refused seating at an outdoor restaurant for not wanting to order alcohol. It’s in an alley paralleling the festival called Daimon Yokocho, and has no recognizable name, but on its window is taped a picture of a grilled, sauced squid sliced into perfect strips like a big fat squid-shaped piano.

I order the version with liver and organs intact, and wait. It comes out bigger than expected, perhaps three-quarters the length of a forearm. Its triangle-shaped head’s angles are curled and crispy from the grill, and it lies in a pool of liver-tinged sauce. It’s cut into rings, as in the picture, but since I ordered it with organs, it looks like it’s stuffed with paté. Ankimo (monkfish liver) is one of my favorite dishes to order in sushi restaurants, and this is like ordering two plates of it served inside a squid.

Some of its other organs taste and feel to-the-note like miniature mussels. Maybe they are. Maybe Hakodate stuffs their grilled squid with mini mussels. Maybe they FEED their squid de-shelled mussels. I don’t know how Japan works, or how squid works, or how any of this works, but I know I like this squid and I like its organs. I wish some of my paté-loving relatives could try this, in the same way I wish they would try balut, which also tastes a bit like paté. A liver is a liver is a liver, even if it’s a squid liver, a monkfish liver, or a fetal duck liver.

Full, pondering squids and livers, I wander back to the street festival, where a crowd has gathered around a Hakodate-Singapore Friendship Float, all ready to dance the Ika Odori. We’re all dancing the Squid Dance, but I might be the only one dancing the Squid Dance literally full of squid.