13 JANUARY 11-17, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | There’s No Place Like Domo GAKU HOMMA’S RESTAURANT IS BACK! BY GIL ASAKAWA Gaku Homma, the owner of Domo Japanese Country Restaurant, is working the grill in a crowded kitchen about the size of a food truck, where three chefs are cooking while several other employees drop off orders and pick up dishes for customers out in the dining room. Homma makes it look easy, searing thin- sliced meat on the teppanyaki grill, then adding various vegetables as he separately scorches squares of fl attened rice for Okoge Butanabe, a new dish that his downsized menu notes is “from DOMO Executive Chef’s Hometown.” The grilled proteins and veggies are simple; what makes the dish unique is the burned and crisped rice. Since the introduc- tion of the electric rice cooker (invented in 1950 and popular by the 1980s in Japan), it’s become less and less common to have kogeru gohan, or burned rice, a common outcome of rice cooked in iron pots over fl ames. So he’s re-created the experience with this new dish. He calls out commands to the staff as they spin and pivot around him. “Hai, Gatsuri Beefu!” he says as he drizzles sauce on a bowl of thin-sliced beef over rice, complimenting one of his sous chefs, who immediately steps in and cleans the teppanyaki grill as Homma steps away to start his next dish. He’s been working with this sous for nine years, and the operation looks amazingly smooth and choreographed despite the inherent chaos. Outside the busy kitchen, the spacious dining room is peaceful, with about fi fty din- ers. No customers are waiting to be seated; there are no lines outside. It wasn’t always this way. In recent years, Domo was struck by a double blow that almost ended the 26-year-old restaurant. Like many small businesses, Domo had already been hit hard by coronavirus shut- downs when a TikTok video showing Domo and its unique country decor and Japanese garden went viral in the summer of 2021. The next morning, hundreds of curious diners were already in line when Homma opened the restaurant. Soon, people were waiting for up to two hours in lines that stretched from 1365 Osage Street to West Colfax Avenue. With a short- age of staff, Domo wasn’t equipped to deal with the explosion of business. Homma scrambled to explain what had happened on the restaurant’s Facebook page and posted signs apologizing for the long waits. He called the police when frustrated would-be customers got in fi ghts or became unruly. Finally, Homma closed Domo temporar- ily in January 2022; when the restaurant reopened, it was with capacity restrictions and shorter hours. But the workload was still too much, and he worried about the quality of both the food and the service. “Tsukareta,” the 72-year-old told West- word. “I’m tired.” In September 2022, he closed the restau- rant — for good, he thought. As Homma recalls his formative years and discusses decades of work at Domo, he uses the word “binbo” — pronounced “beenbo” — several times. The word means “poor,” and that’s how he describes his childhood. His father was a high-ranking offi cer in the Japanese Army in Manchuria during World War II, so he wasn’t exactly enthusiastically welcomed back to Japan during the U.S. occupation of the country in the years after the war. He supported his family, including son Gaku, who was born in 1950, by working hard at menial jobs and making do in Akita Prefecture in northwest Japan (yes, where the famous curly-tailed dogs are from). That work ethic led Homma to embrace the martial art of judo, and then aikido, at a young age. When he was fourteen, he was sent by his father to study aikido with the founder of the discipline, Morihei Ueshiba, at his dojo in Tokyo, and then Ueshiba’s compound in Iwama, a small town north of Tokyo. Homma describes his life before he was accepted as an uchideshi, or live-in student, as mostly that of a servant: cleaning, attend- ing to the master and the senior students, and cooking meals for them. When he became an aikido sensei, or teacher, himself in the 1970s, Homma began instructing members of the U.S. military sta- tioned at Misawa Air Base in northern Japan. As his students rotated out of the service, he was invited by some to visit the United States. Homma arrived in San Francisco at the tail end of the anti-war hippie era and was talked into buying a beat-up van for a cross- country drive. In a fl ip of the common story about young people heading from the East Coast to California whose cars broke down in Colorado, Homma’s van broke down here as he headed east. He decided to stay. Homma launched Nippon Kan, his aikido dojo, in 1978; he originally shared space with a judo dojo before opening his own place on East Colfax Avenue. Inspired by his own days as an uchideshi cooking meals for Morihei Ueshiba and his charges in Japan, he started offering dinner to some of his Denver students after class. When the dojo was damaged by a fi re, he moved into what was then a relatively run-down part of town, in an old warehouse space just blocks from the then-new Auraria campus. He created a studio for training, as well as space to house uchideshi. Soon he added a cramped kitchen and dining room for a restaurant that could support Nippon Kan and help pay for the international students’ training. ”Dojo tabe ni — the restaurant opened,” Homma says, explaining that “for the sake of the aikido dojo,” he opened Domo. From the start, it was important to Homma that a meal at Domo not be a typi- cal restaurant experience. The property, which backs up to railroad tracks, was already fenced in and included an outdoor area with a Japanese garden complete with koi pond; he put seating there. The building attached to the dojo had more seating, and he added a Japanese farmhouse museum with artifacts, implements and a replica living and cooking space around a charcoal burner on the mat fl oor. “When I was working on the interior of the restaurant before the opening 26 years ago, many people asked me why I was spending so much time and effort [on elaborate designs and embellishments], as they thought having a few Japanese posters on different walls would suffi ce,” Homma recalls. “I had had a vision and forged ahead with the vision because I wanted the place to be somewhere for people to feel as though immersing themselves in Japan, even for sipping just a cup of water. It makes me feel pleasant, honored and humbled to know that many people have made their fond memories at this place.” The unusual tables — stone slabs pulled up from the fl agstone sidewalks alongside Osage Street and balanced on thick tree trunks — took a lot of labor to create, but they refl ected Homma’s “binbo” mentality, since the materials were free. The trunks support- ing the tables, as well as those covered with padding that serve as seats, were all recov- ered from Colorado wildfi res or pulled out of Cherry Creek. So were the gnarly wood pieces wrapped with Japanese newspapers that serve as funky chandeliers. All of the artifacts that adorn the din- ing room and museum were collected by Homma during trips to Japan or donated to the dojo. When he traveled with delegations of students, he made them bring back the artifacts in their carry-ons. For years, Homma displayed hundreds of shallow ceremonial sake cups in glass cases in the museum, but they were not from Ja- pan. He collected them from garage sales and antique shops here in the U.S. These were wartime souvenirs left behind by teenage boys who were conscripted at the end of WWII to fl y suicide missions as kamikaze pilots; they were given a fi nal toast of sake before they took off on their fi nal fl ights, and the cups were brought back by American GIs after the war. During the pandemic, Homma donated them to the Heritage Museum in Higashinaruse Vil- CAFE continued on page 14 FIND MORE FOOD & DRINK COVERAGE AT WESTWORD.COM/RESTAURANTS Gaku Homma reopened Domo late last year. EVAN SEMÓN
