Photo/Illutration “Noto-buta haikara-don” features Noto pork and seasonal vegetables. (Mamoru Nagaya) The person in charge of the food hall MINIE, right, and others try “Noto-don” made by Fumie Hyuga, center. (Mamoru Nagaya)

The Noto Peninsula earthquake threatened the survival of a popular rice bowl dish made of locally grown rice and local seafood and meat products.

However, restaurants in Noto cooperated in opening an eatery in Fukui in April to keep “Noto-don,” short for Noto “donburi” (rice bowl dish), on the menu. 

In the various gourmet bowls, rice grown in Noto is topped with crab meat, pufferfish and beef that is pulled from the sea off the peninsula and from local farms. 

The ingredients come from the four municipalities (Wajima, Suzu, Anamizu and Noto) in Okunoto, the northernmost part of Ishikawa Prefecture.

Wajima-grown rice is served in a vermillion-colored Wajima lacquerware bowl. In one offering, Noto steak and sukiyaki beef are placed deftly on top.

“This is pretty sumptuous, right?” asks restaurant operator Fumie Hyuga, 65, with a smile.

The “Noto-gyu zeitaku-don” (Noto beef sumptuous rice bowl dish) has been a signature dish at Ki no Koe, a cafe that Hyuga ran in the Machinocho district of Wajima.

The eatery also served a rice bowl dish featuring Noto pork that offered the appeal of Noto food that went beyond seafood.

The cafe building, however, collapsed when the earthquake hit on New Year’s Day. Hyuga moved to Kanazawa in mid-January and then to Tokyo where her second daughter lived.

At the end of January, she moved into public housing owned by Tokyo and lived as evacuees with her husband and eldest son. Even then she kept thinking about Noto-don.

Noto-don was originally conceived when the number of tourists declined after a previous Noto Peninsula earthquake with a maximum seismic intensity of upper 6 struck in March 2007.

The restaurants formed a cooperative association of businesses involved in Noto-don, made a pamphlet introducing each restaurant and worked together as a team.

A total of 42 restaurants served the rice bowl dish before the earthquake hit on New Year’s Day.

“There was one restaurant that became so popular that it sold thousands of them a year,” says Keisuke Mizumoto, 46, secretary-general of the association.

When the earthquake occurred on Jan. 1, one restaurant burned down in a fire and gave up hope of rebuilding, while another started making boxed meals at the evacuation centers and has not reopened.

Now, only two restaurants are in business and a sense of crisis was spreading.

Seeing their predicament, an operator of MINIE, a food hall that opened in a redeveloped building in front of Fukui Station to coincide with the extension of the Hokuriku Shinkansen from Kanazawa to Tsuruga, contacted them.

The food hall is a two-minute walk from the west exit of the station and the area is bustling with tourists from the Kanto and Kansai regions thanks to the bullet train line extension.

After discussions, the officials of the cooperative association decided to rent a restaurant space to spread the appeal of Noto-don again.

If each restaurant took turns operating the eatery for a month, they can serve a variety of offerings. The first in line is Hyuga and three restaurants are to follow.

Since procuring the cooking utensils and paying for accommodation during the stay can add up, they are considering seeking support through crowdfunding.

“We simply have to do this to preserve the brand we worked hard to create,” says Hyuga, looking to the future. 

Noto-gyu zeitaku-don is priced at 3,800 yen ($24.50), while “Noto-oki kaisen-don” (Off the coast of Noto seafood rice bowl dish) costs 3,000 yen and “Noto-buta haikara-don” (Noto pork stylish rice bowl dish) is 1,850 yen.

All prices include tax, and the rice bowl dish comes with a small side dish and soup.

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