Tendon 天丼

Also called tempura bowl, tempura rice bowl, tempura donburi, ten don

Tempura on a bowl of rice with a sweet soy sauce. Tokyo’s cheap, fast lunch since the late Edo period.

Tendon is short for tempura donburi, tempura on a bowl of rice. The sauce, don tsuyu, is soy sauce, mirin and sugar cooked down until it’s thicker and sweeter than tentsuyu. Served in a lacquered box instead of a bowl, it’s called tenju.

The old Tokyo way is to dunk each piece, fresh out of the oil, into the simmering sauce and then lay it on the rice. Most of Japan just pours the sauce over at the end. A standard Tokyo bowl has prawn, squid or kisu, a small kakiage of baby shrimp and scallop, and a vegetable or two like shishito or eggplant.

It started as street food. One story credits a soba stall in Edo that opened in 1831. Another credits Sansada in Asakusa, open since 1837 and the oldest tempura shop still running. Either way it was cheap: 3 sen a bowl in 1887. Japanese comedians even call a repeated gag a tendon, supposedly because the soba-shop version always came with the same two prawns.

At Kaneko Hannosuke everything is fried in sesame oil, and you can smell it from the line outside. At Asanuma the course ended with a choice of tencha or tendon. I took tencha, saw everyone else’s tendon, and wished I hadn’t.

See alsoTentsuyuTenchaKuruma-ebi