The most delicious food on the planet does not come from a Michelin-starred restaurant. It does not come from a street vendor who has been serving the same item—optimized through rote production, experiments, experience and accidents—for 40+ years. It does not come from a family member who has imbued an heirloom recipe with new love and updated heritage.

No. The most delicious food on the planet comes from Sarku Japan.

While there are standalone restaurants, they are the 1%.

Most Sarkus exist inside the commerce relic we know as “Malls,” bolstering my claim that it is the food of the proletariat. Accessible, affordable, able to be devoured on a lunch break (even ones truncated by travel time).

The Sarku in my city’s mall has been there a long time. I don’t know the the exact year it opened because the Simon Mall management team did not entertain my random phone call challenge to go on a quest to find this information for me.

But, I do know that it was not one of the original restaurants in 1988 when they converted the closed Upton’s department store into a food court (though the Chick-Fil-A and Sbarro are still there, Orange Julius sadly not), and that it appeared some time circa 1992 after my sister worked at The Great American Cookie Company where my mother would push me in the stroller past her while on the clock to wave and embarrass her. That still puts it at a possible 25 years.

I’ve been eating there for nearly my entire life. My praise for its cuisine is not tied to nostalgia. I didn’t meet my wife or lose my virginity at Sarku (the answer to both of those is a Ruby Tuesday bathroom); it wasn’t the first time my nubile Caucasian taste buds encountered true flavor (that would be the fish stew at a Stuckey’s next to a gas station). And I am not alone in this opinion, as evidenced below by the world’s foremost food critic.

You can find copycat recipes online of almost any fastcasual entree. But none of the ones for Sarku are any good or even come close. It’s actually very funny, and extremely rare, to see a recipe site that is the number one organic search result for sarku/mall chicken teriyaki have to offer a mea culpa.

[UPDATE 6/19/2016: After receiving some comments from readers on this recipe, I recently revisited and retested it. We’ve since made some adjustments!]

It does not matter what adjustments you made. The complex taste of Sarku Japan chicken teriyaki cannot be replicated “using just 9 ingredients (10, if you count the steamed rice you’re going to serve it on top of!).” It can only be achieved from finding a genie lamp and using all three wishes asking for the knowledge of the infinite, how to cook, and an old pot with nearly 30 years of stock flavor coating its metal.

There is only one known true quasi-account of how they make their chicken, and it is not feasible to recreate at home for a single meal. keitaro427, whose only 6 postings on ChefTalk are about Sarku Japan. My favorite part of of his post is this passage (emphasis mine).

"Massage" your chicken every few hours, and allow it to marinate in the fridge overnight. Yes, overnight. You didn't think something so wonderful was going to be made up in 5 mintues, did you?! Plus, the path to making good teriyaki sauce is long and tedious - so you will need that day to contemplate the chemistry of SAUCE.

Permission to go home, lie down and watch some TV, and rest up so my face isn't beet red when I contemplate the chemistry of SAUCE tonight?

And while making a stock isn’t complicated, I do love the idea of “BROTH OF LIFE” being like unicorn blood and that it somehow contains everything but tastes like nothing.

TRUE Sakkio sauce was composed of only five components. That's right. Just five. The problem there lies within the fact that ONE of the ingredients is extremely complicated to make and nearly impossible to duplicate: the soup base. You read correctly, folks - the ultimate secret ingredient in Sakkio sauce is a complex soup stock simmered in a GIANT sauce pot overnight. The soup itself was a myriad of ingredients, many of them scraps, from the Sakkio kitchen. Beef trimmings and bones, carrots, onions, cabbage pieces, pulverized ginger fingers, smashed whole garlic bulbs, and more stacked into the pot - which was then topped off with water. The result, after a nights worth of simmering and straining - was a somewhat fatty golden-colored BROTH OF LIFE, packed with nutrients and a distinctive flavor, which, like so many other Sakkio items, carried untertones of many things but the flavor of nothing. The stock itself made a glorious breakfast when simply poured over rice, and gave the lucky diner a days worth of energy.

Though she has since grown out of it, miraculously, when my youngest daughter had a life-threatening dairy allergy (needed epi-pen if you had Chick-Fil-A nugget grease on your hand and touched her) for the first five years of her life, Sarku was there for me and my family. While most places tout themselves as allergen-friendly and that they take precautions… they don’t… not changing gloves between making our food and hers, forgetting not to use butter when cooking on grill, etc. The only items on the Sarku menu that contained dairy at the time was the chicken egg roll, which is prepared and cooked back in the kitchen. They use oil to cook, not butter or margarine (which some brands contain milk!) so there was no cross-contamination or having to special request the grill be thoroughly cleaned. We could safely have Sarku around my daughter and not have to ever worry. It was truly a godsend. Whenever I order Sarku now, she asks me to share. Each bite tastes like relief. That when everything around us was trying to kill her, there was always respite in this rice.

I know the cashiers. When I walked up, they already have my order typed in. If I show up without my friend Tim, they inquire about his absence.

“Running solo today so ‘shhh’ please don’t tell on me.”

I know which chefs cook the food the best. I was elated when a prep guy got promoted to running the grill on a Tuesday lunch shift. He hadn’t gotten the extra chicken portions down pat yet and filled the styrofoam container to its max load capacity.

For as long as I can remember, Sarku has had stamp cards. Once you bought five meals, you would get one meal free. They were not stingy about these either. They did not care about expiration dates on the cards, and would happily combine cards for you. When I lived in a different city for a few years and moved back, my home store let me transfer those stamps onto theirs. It was a beautiful symbiotic relationship with zero friction. I come out here to the mall and give you money for delicious food, and at some point in the future I will not have to pay on one visit. If capitalism could work in any form, this would be the only viable model. I have a more contentious relationship with my CPA than I do with Sarku Japan.

Much like a recipe site, now is the part where I diverge from the unnecessary narrative and set up and tie it back to the ambiguous, curiousity-inciting post title.

Alas

A few months ago, they introduced their own app, spun out of necessity of the pandemic and the potential increased business opportunity that food delivery apps could provide. I could see the vision, but I couldn’t see that this was the beginning of the end for me and all that I loved.

Sarku was the only place I risked COVID for. Double K95, go right in at 11am when the food court opened, order, and out in 5 minutes (they start cooking the chicken 10 minutes before 11am so that its ready), and I was always first in line. And I made sure to get my custom “SJ” stamp. Those free meals aren’t going to pay for themselves.

When they began delivery through Grubhub, I would order Sarku while working in the yard and magically have it brought to me via the gig economy. However, something was missing… my stamps… how will Sarku know I am still loyal? What if the workers begin to resent me? How will I not have to pay in the future?

I couldn’t do it. I needed to go in person. Convenience could not ruin these connections forged over decades. I needed to see them. I needed them to see me. And, above all, I needed to get my fucking stamp. So, I made the trek, and stood in line and ordered by food, and got my stamp.

However, once we beat the pandemic and everyone was free from masks since viruses as a whole didn’t exist anymore, the mall became very crowded. I could no longer get in and out in five minutes. There is no way to order ahead by calling. You simply have to show up and stand in a line while an entire landscaping crew in matching neon green long-sleeves flank you breathing heavy from working in the 80º heat all morning.

I downloaded the Sarku app because they gave me a $5 coupon for my first order, which is reason enough to use it once. The app itself is largely awful. The bare minimum as far as accomplishing the funnel of placing an order for food. For instance, all of the modals are transparent in night mode. It’s kind of like the peg game at Cracker Barrel: have a little fun and frustration before you get your food.

One of the reasons I didn’t want to use after that first time? You guessed it. No rewards component. No way they can see that it is me, their favorite and best #1 customer of all time, ordering this food. No way for me to get my fucking stamp.

I went in-person last week to redeem my free meal. But was not given a new card. I chalked it up to error. I went again yesterday to order in-person, and was not given a stamp card. There was no stack of cards on top of the cash register anymore. No tiny SJ stamp. There were no more rewards. No more free meals. No more hope.

With no more stamps, how will I be rewarded for my patronage? With 250 locations no longer offering stamp cards what will happen to the business card companies? The stamp makers? The ink suppliers? When Staples folds Q1 of 2022, everyone will ask what could have caused this? But you and I will know why. This is the harbinger of the darkness to come.

Technology was a mistake. It has stolen years of our lives looking at words and images from strangers we would never care about. Neglecting ourselves and others with each thumb flick and double tap. It has robbed us of the things we were used to. It has robbed us of our stamps. Steve Jobs melting in hell does not mollify my despair. I have nothing left. Nothing to stop me from returning to the sea from whence we came. Perhaps there is where we can build anew, where every sixth meal is free.