Pepper Lunch ペッパーランチ

Pepper Lunch　ペッパーランチ  is a very popular place for the lunch crowd and serves the same good food all the rest of the day as well. 

Maybe the popularity is due to the novelty of your meal sizzling before you on the hot plate, and the fact that it's tasty certainly helps.  Located just off of Blue Street. Check the location on the blog map or by clicking on the location link at the bottom of this post.　The next closest one is in Kamakura or Yokohama.

I've learned some interesting things about Pepper Lunch. One would think that perhaps they're serving Wagyu beef from Japan, however, their main beef supplier is from a meat processor in Kansas City. Also, their specially made plates are heated to approximately 570 degree F in about a minute and then will stay above 170 degree F for at least 20 minutes.  More on this process later. The company claims this is much more efficient than other methods and better for the environment. It also uses a plastic resin chopstick, in another effort to protect the environment by preventing deforestation.

The owner's concept was developed in the early 1990's and Pepper Lunch was officially launched in 1994. His restaurant chain (prior to 1994) was growing and he was having a difficult time controlling all the chef's that needed to be trained in the proper way of cooking his dishes, and some of them did not want to listen to his advice and left. So he wanted a system to where the employees simply would take prepared ingredients and put it onto a hot plate, eliminating the need for trained chefs. Plates are then delivered to the customer so they can finish the cooking right in front of them.

Your dish will come seasoned with salt and pepper although you could probably tell them not to if desired. Two other sauces are available at the counter. Butter is also available which we all know makes anything taste better. They pride themselves on each restaurant freshly grinding the pepper to start out each day.

Pepper Lunch is rapidly expanding and adapting to each location's cultural style. For instance, rather than a counter, many other restaurants have mostly tables for family style seating.  Below is a photo of one of  their restaurants in Vietnam where they have tables. They also serve fish and pasta dishes at some locations to take into account local religious sensitivities.  Word has it they are even expanding to North Korea in 2014. But this is based on questionable Wikipedia information (hey my daughter's teachers say you can't use it). But if true, and they can tackle the North Korean market, they can survive anywhere.

Pepper Lunch - Vincom Center - Vietnam

Pepper lunch uses a ticket system where you purchase your lunch first then provide the ticket to the server.
Most people that come here know what they want, but there is always that first time. So most of the items I've labeled. Other Pepper Lunch locations will vary.

Further reading below, and at the Yokosuka-Ichiban site.

Salad part of the set

Chicken 

The sizzling plate allows you to cook your dish to your liking. With the food coming out raw, you control when it's done. A paper place-mat can be used to keep the splatter off your shirt as desired. Or you can go back to work smelling like Pepper Lunch, which is not a bad thing.

Something I learned at the Yokosuka Ichiban site is that YOU can specify the temperature of the plate. Say you like your steak rare, well you don't need your plate heated to 300C then do you? You can tell the staff, 200C please.   Isn't this great? You can control the temperature of your plate. How they can do this is explained a bit further below. If you still want your steak rare, but don't want to attempt telling them a lower temperature for your plate, then you also have the option of just removing your steak from the hot surface shortly after it's delivered.  I don't know where you can put it except in your mouth or on top of the veggies or another empty bowl.  Life is full of problems. But I have to wonder that if you want to remove your steak and eat it rare, why are you coming to Pepper Lunch at all? The whole premise of the place is to cook your meat on this very hot plate.

One of the original founders of Pepper Lunch was a man named Kunio Ichinose. Pepper Lunch came only after a long, interesting, and difficult path in the restaurant industry. He was born in 1942. After high school he started working at a restaurant called "Kitchen Naples" which was a  Western style shop. He then began work at the "Sanno Hotel" which was a club for mid to high grade U.S. military officers. It was here he learned western cooking techniques and became thoroughly familiar with beef.  Many of you are saying that the hotel sounds familiar. Well, it was the precursor to the "New Sanno" hotel.  The privately owned Sanno hotel opened in 1932 and was frequented by high ranking military and government officials. It was bombed during WWII, but was rebuilt by American occupation forces following the war. It then served as housing primarily for VIPs and Officers. Eventually the original property owners wanted their land and hotel back and the Japanese government eventually allowed this, after finding a location for a new hotel. They then built the New Sanno hotel in 1983 at a cost of 39 million dollars.  Pepper Lunch and the New Sanno - connected through Ichinose-san.

Steak before

Steak after

A hand holding a phone

Friendly and helpful staff - don't be afraid
 to ask for their advice

Read on only if you're interested in how they heat up the plate. This is a detour from food blogging's unwritten rules.

Pepper Lunch has worked on developing and refining this plate for many years. The current version is an iron plate with an aluminum interior. The aluminum made the plate lighter. Aluminum's high thermal conductivity allows the heat from the bottom part of the iron plate to be transferred quickly to the iron on the other (top) side of the plate.  It also helps to ensure even heating of the entire surface both top and bottom.
The area of the pan where the heat is generated is actually a fairly thin layer near the bottom surface of the pan. It is then transferred to the other surfaces of the plate through conductive heating.

Pepper Lunch uses the same induction heating process that is available for home cooking using induction cook-tops.  You can see the Pepper Lunch induction cook-top set up in this link here where they discuss quality control and testing.

Induction heating uses a very high frequency. Your normal 50Hz or 60Hz supply must be converted to a much higher frequency in the range of 30,000 Hz. This makes the transfer of power (from stove to pan) more efficient and allows fewer turns of the primary coil (a smaller, lighter, cook-top)  and allows using a simple small pan as the secondary coil, if you will, using transformer language.

At the common household frequency of 60Hz supplied by the electric company, much larger transformers are needed to change the voltage. You can see these large cylindrical transformers on electrical poles all over a city, where they step down the high voltage from the transmission line to the voltage used in your house. They are very large and very heavy -  unpractical for home use. So the use of a very high frequency allows the cooking surface to be a reasonable size and weight.

Essentially the cook-top itself is the primary side of a transformer, and the plate the secondary side of a transformer. The secondary side in this case has the equivalent of only one winding. The number of windings control the voltage produced in the secondary - where Voltage (secondary) is proportional to the number of turns of the secondary divided by the number of turns of the primary (Ns/Np). Another way of looking at this process is through a generator principle, where a conductor (the plate) is placed into a changing magnetic field (produced by the cooktop) will produce a current in the plate.

Therefore, with the plate acting as the one secondary coil the voltage remains quite low. This voltage generates eddy currents in the plate which then encounter the resistance of the iron. Current through a resistor produces heat. An electric stove burner uses exactly this principle and you can see the resistor (coils) glowing red.

The very high frequency used in induction cooking causes what is called the "skin effect," where the current in the plate is forced to flow in a very thin layer near the surface of the plate. This increases the effective resistance of the metal producing even more heat.

Hysteresis loss heating also plays an important part of the heating process but I don't feel like getting into a discussion of hysteresis at this point.  In the end, what matters is that you have a very hot plate produced in a very short period of time with your food on it.