Kabukicho’s Gourmet Hosts: Feeding Hearts and Palates

There is the fall of sports, fall of reading, and fall of art, but Kabukicho hosts are focusing on the fall of appetite.

Knowledge about food directly affects the sales of hosts.

 

Kite (pseudonym, 26), a host who has been hosting for three years, is a successful host who takes care of many of his junior hosts.

He also buys host meals (teppanyaki restaurants where the hosts take their female clients) for the junior staff at affiliated restaurants, cast members who he thinks have been working hard recently, and cast members who are hungry after business hours. It is an unspoken agreement that the more successful and higher-ranking hosts teach their juniors about such restaurants.

The more successful a host is, the more chances he has to eat with women outside of the restaurant, so he is familiar with the restaurants in the Kabukicho area.

 

“When I was first starting out, my representative took me to all kinds of great restaurants. The girls who worked at night were bought expensive food by male customers, and the women who worked during the day, who spent a lot of money, were also earning a lot of money and were gourmets.”

“At the time, I was just hustling and bustling, saying, If I sell, I can eat this kind of food every day! But I told my juniors, that in order to keep good customers, they need to learn about restaurants and bars so that they can ask them out smartly.”

In Kabukicho’s host clubs, the hosts basically pay for the meals of their female customers once they leave the club. The hostesses are always willing to pay for the meals of their female customers once they step out of the club. The hostesses feel that the price range of the restaurants they take them to is their own evaluation of themselves.

 

Recently, an increasing number of hosts are competing with their own cooking. This is due to the increase in the number of former chef hosts.

Restaurants were hit hardest by the COVID-19 crisis, so maybe there are a lot of hosts in the restaurant business, too.

Miyuki (pseudonym, 22), a hosiery fanatic girl, says that one of the hosts she had been working with was a young man who had drifted to Kabukicho as a result of the Corona disaster.

“He was aiming to become a chef, but his sense of smell had been dulled by the after-effects of Corona. The beef stew and salad he made for me were delicious, but the head chef kept telling him that no matter how many times he made them at the top restaurants where he trained, they didn’t smell or taste the same, so he gave up.”

“I think I have met other hosts who said, that their family’s restaurant was in debt because of the COVID-19 crisis, and that they became a host to rebuild the restaurant, or that their apprenticeship as a chef was so thin that they couldn’t stand it, or  they were working at a high-class restaurant where rich people gathered in Minato-ku and was scouted by a chef.”

Some of the former chef hosts have reported that they were so craftsman-like that they were hated for simmering soup for hours and taking pictures of their food for social networking sites, while ignoring the women in their lives.

 

The major host group Shinsuyu Group holds various championships to recognize hosts with special skills.

“At the end of August, the group held a Cooking King championship, in which current hosts presented homemade dishes according to a theme. The group’s executives score the dishes, and the winner is awarded the right to have his or her own restaurant as an affiliate of the group. This year’s first place winner, Kisaragi Shu, was originally a cook for the Maritime Self-Defense Force,” said a Shinsuyu Group employee.

Every day, the hosts train themselves to capture the stomachs of the women. However, they are sometimes cut off by picky eaters who say, “I don’t know anything about that kind of food, and I only eat gummy bears.” The female mind and the autumn sky are unpredictable.

 

Sasaki Chihuahua
Born in Tokyo in 2000. After attending an integrated school in Tokyo from elementary school to high school, she went on to Keio University, where she has been living in Kabukicho since she was 15 years old and has a wide range of personal connections. At university, she is studying the sociology of the downtown area, including Kabukicho. His book, “ Pien” to shakai” (“The Disease of ‘Pien’: Consumption and Approval of the SNS Generation”), is now on sale.

 

From the October 27 , 2023 issue of FRIDAY