FROM BROOKLYN TO TOKYO: CRAFTING A BBQ LEGACY
It’s a quiet Sunday morning in Tokyo and much of the Nishihara Shotengai shopping street is still asleep. New York-born pitmaster Jeremy Freeman is waiting for us in front of his and his wife’s new barbecue establishment, Freeman Shokudo, to start his day.
All the windows and doors are open, allowing the intoxicating smell of smoked meats to waft into the street. (How anyone could sleep when the air smells like this is an absolute mystery.)
Jeremy owns and runs it together with his wife Maiko Sakamoto, the secret boss behind the scenes, who ran the award-winning Oni Sauce stand in Williamsburg’s Smorgasburg market. Famed for its rayu and onion sauces, as well as home-cooked Japanese dishes which have found their way onto the menu here and complement the barbecue perfectly. The couple moved with their children from Brooklyn, New York to Tokyo in 2017 with the dream of opening a restaurant in the Japanese capital.
Another name that shouldn't be left out when talking about one of Tokyo’s most promising new restaurants, is Sou “Blunt”. Sou is a Tokyo legend when it comes down to the realest BBQ of the metropolis. Having founded Hatos BBQ, he now joined the Freeman crew to add his BBQ skills, wisdom and passion to Tokyo’s take on “Brooklyn Backyard BBQ”.
When Jeremy published a blog post on how he was struggling and failing at his first BBQ attempts in Tokyo, Sou stepped in and provided help, knowledge, skills and ultimately designed the smoker Freeman is doing its magic in.
Having Maiko Sakamoto, Sou “blunt” and Jeremy Freeman under one BBQ roof is a deadly setup of passion, skills, dedication, good music and American-Japanese finesse, which will have a lasting impact on the neighbourhood and Tokyo itself.
Jeremy hasn’t taken any kind of traditional path one might expect to take towards running Tokyo’s hottest new barbecue joint, or life in general really. Before the move to Tokyo he ran a record shop called Deadly Dragon Sound System and was a DJ - barbecue was just a side-hustle reserved for the weekends. Far away from pitmaster culture, he forged his own path with unconventional ingredients and created his own recipe. Those weekend backyard barbecues eventually grew into big neighbourhood events drawing in friends, family and even strangers.
It’s a prime example of what can come from believing in your passions and interests and just following them. In addition to being the mastermind behind some of the most delicious barbecue we’ve ever tasted, he also happens to be one of the wisest and most interesting people we’ve had the pleasure of talking to.
Join us as we ruminate over food, friends, music and a life-defining moment realised while staring into the eyes of a goat.
Hello Jeremy, can you please introduce yourself to Sabukaru and our audience?
I'm Jeremy Freeman AKA Scratch Famous, Deadly Dragon Sound System. Born in 1968, Upper West Side at Beth Israel Hospital and basically lived in New York my whole life. I went to college in Chicago and spent 8 years there, on and off, and moved back to New York in 1997. I opened a record store in 2005 called Deadly Dragon Sound System, which was a sound system that I had formed in Chicago, and ran that for 12 years until 2016. Then my wife and I, and our kids, moved to Tokyo in 2017 with the dream of opening a restaurant here and we did! That's exactly what we did. We thought about it and my wife, an incredibly persistent woman, put it all together and gave me the best gift that anyone could give me which is this wonderful place and so that's my basic story.
You've described the food here at your latest venture, Freeman Shokudo, as the intersection of Japanese and American soul food. What does this mean to you?
Well I think originally, before I had met my wife, I had a very stilted idea of what Japanese culture and Japanese food was. I always imagined everything as this kind of minimal sushi-based cuisine and when I met my wife the things that she made at home reminded me, in a lot of weird ways, of Jewish cooking. There were very heart-warming stews and just the flavors were kind of much more long-cooked and thought over. The spices were different and the way of marinating things were different and the way of cooking things and slicing things were different but the taste had that same kind of soul-warming, nourishing aspect to it. There's no chef better than my wife, like I could go anywhere and really what I wanted at the end of the day was her cooking.
When I started making barbecue in New York it was in our backyard and I had like a little shitty grill and I wanted to figure out how to smoke stuff on it. I had a friend who lived in Pennsylvania and I was like, “Hey, can you get me some oak or some cherry wood or something?” and he ended up driving down with a car filled with wood. I was like, I guess I gotta smoke shit because he just brought me basically a whole tree. So I started playing around with stuff and making ribs and everyone that tasted it was like, “Holy shit, this is really good!”
Especially the spices that I was using, which I was borrowing a lot of stuff from my wife's section. Just certain different spices and kind of thinking about it like, I had always liked barbecue and I had gone to North Carolina and Texas and tried all these different barbecues. I took those regional styles that I liked and then created essentially my own flavors out of them.
When we opened here, I realized that I wanted to serve barbecue to a Japanese audience but I wanted it to be more like an izakaya than just like an American barbecue place. I wanted people to be able to come here and eat barbecue but also have a range of other things. I wanted them to be able to, if they wanted to, have like chūhai and not just focus on barbecue but focus on having a well-rounded meal. The things that my wife is putting on the menu and we're slowly developing, she does like her style edamame, her tebasaki. These dishes that complement the barbecue that we're doing. Everything that we're trying to present here is really about just making people happy and food that makes people feel good and is delicious. I wanted it to be unfamiliar to Japanese audiences but presented in a way that's familiar with the ability to share things. I think some places present American style or barbecue style dishes in a way that's very imposing. You feel like you can't really share it with your friends or anything like it's just a plate. We're trying to make our food so you can have an experience of sitting down and drinking and hanging out and sharing food with people and sharing an experience. It works with Maiko’s food and my food and not some kind of weird fusion cuisine but things that complement each other, does that make sense?
So it's like taking Japanese ingredients but using them in an American barbecue approach?
I use some things, like in my barbecue sauce I use Japanese pickled plums and different things like that but it's more complementary than fusiony if that makes sense. Like yesterday my wife made very traditional oxtail soup and to me there's nothing better than having barbecue and that oxtail soup. It's something that's immediately recognizable to Japanese audiences where they're like, “Oh that's great oxtail soup,” or, “That's the best tebasaki I've ever had,” and this is this new thing that actually complements it.
You said you taught yourself barbecue while you were in Brooklyn and they kind of grew into these big neighborhood events. Can you tell us more about that?
Yeah eventually I made my way from the shitty grill. At that point the record store, I loved it but I never made any money at it, it was totally for the love. Having two kids in New York and a wife that you're supporting, it just means that you have no money. So the record store meant that I was always just chasing rent constantly and I really wanted this smoker and it was like 800 bucks or something. I just couldn't save the money to get it and I was getting really irritated. My friend Xena was like, “I'm sick of this, I'm buying you this. It's my present, pay me back when you can but you need to have this because you love it.” So she bought it for me and I just started like on different weekends like doing ribs and pork and stuff and inviting people by. I'd bring out the turntables in the backyard and people would just play music and eat food. Gradually, from the smell of it, people would start just kind of coming in the backyard and you'd be like, “Hey, what's up?” and that worked out.
In conjunction with that, my wife opened a stand at this thing called Smorgasburg in Brooklyn. It was called Oni Sauce and she was doing fried chicken karaage and curry and beef skewers and gobo chips. Like she had always had this side hustle of selling sauces and she would do like rayu and onion sauce and kind of a teriyaki sauce and also make gyoza and a bunch of things. And like all the Japanese community in Brooklyn would show up at the house so she was constantly selling all this shit and the Oni Sauce thing kind of came out of that. So she was doing that, I was working at the record store and DJing but also on the weekends, like on my day off, doing barbecue and kind of getting better and better.
And are those dishes and sauces from Oni Sauce on the menu here in some form?
They are! The sauces that we have now like the onion sauce, we use for the tebasaki, that sauce we use. The rayu we're developing and we haven't figured out quite how to serve it yet but we're gonna do a Tokyo style hot chicken related to a Nashville style hot chicken but with rayu which is so good. Yeah, it’s really yummy and so we'll get that eventually. And I've been making fermented and roasted hot sauces so eventually when we get organized we'll start that realm of things.
How did you and Maiko meet in the first place?
Ahh... very good question. It's actually kind of funny, at some point my friend Jay and I were out at the bar called Von in the East Village. We saw Maiko and two other girls and my friend thought one of them was really cute and I thought one of them actually was a prostitute. They were with this guy that I knew, this guy Spirit. He was sort of the weed dealer, hustler, DJ guy. And I was like, “God, that's not the best guy for those girls to be hanging out with,” but as they were leaving Spirit was like, “Hey I'm gonna be DJing this afterparty if you guys want to come by later.”
So Jay and I went out and had a bunch of drinks and ate and I was like, we should go check that afterparty out and he was like, “Yeah that girl was cute, let's go.” So we went over there and I knew like five words in Japanese so we started talking to these three girls. One of the girls was Maiko's very good friend from high school and that was the girl that my friend Jay liked. So we were trying to help them communicate, Maiko and I, because Maiko spoke a little bit of English and I had my four words of Japanese. So we're trying to help them but then we realized that we liked each other. That other girl who I thought was prostitute was not a prostitute but definitely looked prostitutey.
So the guy was playing reggae and I was like, “Do you like this music?” to Maiko and she was like, “Oh yeah, I'm really into reggae. I really like Cocoa Tea and Jimmy Cliff and stuff.” And I was like, “Really? Okay because this guy, he's the worst DJ. I'm DJing next week and my shit is much better so you should come see me,” and she did and then we started seeing each other. That's how we met but what was funny was that she was totally lying about the reggae thing! She owned like one CD of reggae that she would say that she loved.
Happily it worked out yeah?
Yeah, fuckin’ liar!
So moving to Tokyo and bringing the vibes from those backyard barbecues you used to have in Brooklyn, what inspired that decision?
When the record store closed it was like a typical New York rent dispute. Like our building which we had moved into very early, it was in Chinatown. It was this great neighborhood and I loved it and then slowly it just had changed and gotten very expensive. There was one day I walked outside and there was an artisanal pencil store that opened next door and I was like, fuuuck me, that’s just the end of it. Like there's no way that we can be open with this. The building got sold and they wouldn't renew any of the leases and they wanted, I don't know, to rent it to NYU students. I liked having a record store, I liked being there. We kept a website open but to me it was useless, that wasn't the reason that I was doing it. I liked interacting with people and it was a community and I really loved that aspect of it.
So that happened and then there was a park near me where I lived in Brooklyn and my neighborhood in Brooklyn had totally changed too. The park was right near a school so all the kids would go there after school. There were a lot of projects around so it's like a mix of kids who would go, project kids and kids from the neighborhood. One day someone's ten-year-old son got his new iPhone stolen. Why in Brooklyn you would have a ten-year-old walking around with the new iPhone just pisses me off to begin with. Like you've got to watch your back in Brooklyn, always, you have to watch your back in Brooklyn. These parents were in an uproar and they put up posters like WE DEMAND MORE POLICE in the park and I just thought like, this is crazy. This isn't New York anymore. This is Indiana or some Wisconsin, this could be anywhere. Like I don't want my kids growing up with police in the park. So I wrote this whole missive and stuck it up in the park. I was like, why not introduce yourself to these kids? That's what I do. Like if there's a bunch of roughnecks playing basketball in the park and my kid’s playing, I go up to them and say, “That's my son Haru, I'm Jeremy. Just keep an eye on him, like watch out for him.” Then go and buy a pizza and be like, “Thanks for keeping an eye on him,” and everything will be cool. Your life will be great, you'll make new friends and your kid will be protected. That's all you have to do is just be like a normal fucking person. So I wrote this whole thing and immediately everyone knew it was me, and then Trump got elected and I was just like, this is not my world anymore.
I had always loved coming to Tokyo and I had this experience which was very moving. I had done a tour with my friend Screechy Dan, who’s a Jamaican artist who lives in New York and is one of my closest friends. We had done a tour of Hong Kong, Australia and Japan. And so we showed up in Japan and it was late at night and we both just felt really good. Like immediately when we got here, like there's just something. We're just like, everything is pretty great and we're feeling good. We got to my wife's parents’ house after this crazy drive to get there and they had all this soju and we're drinking and getting increasingly drunk. We went upstairs and there was their family’s kind of votive thing, with Maiko's grandfather's picture and grandmother's picture and Screechy was like, “What is that?”
I was like, “Oh that's for their ancestors, their spirit is in here,” and we're talking about Shinto stuff. I was explaining how when we got married, there in the marriage book in Nerima-ku, her family you could go back like 500 years. There is just like this register of existence. And he was like, that's one thing that we as like Jews and black people, we have stolen from us. Like we have no history going back, like everyone's dead or gone or history has been erased. I was like, “Yeah, you're totally right,” and we both got kind of weepy. Later in the morning we were walking out and he's Jamaican, I'm not from this little neighborhood, and everyone was so nice to us. The little old tofu lady who had seen me like maybe 5 times over the past 10 years was like, “Oh Jeremy-san, you’re back!” And I was like, “I am back!” I just felt very at home here and not in the way of like, oh it's so exotic and weird but like actually deeply at home. No matter how alien the culture is to me I felt a kind of comfort.
So when we were talking about getting out we were talking about Canada, we're talking about different things and I was like, “Let's go back to Japan. The kids need to learn Japanese and you've been away from home for 20 years.” And so we move back and Maiko is like, “There's a lot of Japanese restaurants. I think what you do is really unique and I think that we could build something that feels very different from other Tokyo establishments, while feeling like a Tokyo dining place.” And I give it up to her because she had great faith in me. She just said like, “You deal with the design and just put it together. I'm gonna trust you to do it.”
We had never done anything like this before and our son's weird friend, his father is a contractor so we got in touch with him and he basically built everything. We just laid out ideas but we just felt that if we could build something and serve good food, it would be at least something new for Tokyo and a good way to kind of give back to Japan.
This space feels like a uniquely personal combination of all of your life experiences as you can see from all the records and the sound system. It feels more like being at a friend’s house than a restaurant. Was this the kind of vibe you were going for when fitting out the space?
If there's one thing that I've learned in life it’s that it's really necessary to trust in the shit you like and even minor things that you do. If you really believe in them and love them then they're important to you. Like I have a lot of strong opinions and strong loves and I'm enthusiastic about them. I just sort of had faith that, in terms of this, like if I have faith in them at least people will feel like, “Oh someone really thought about this place and someone thought about what things were gonna look like and what's gonna be in here.”
I think there's a lot of places that you can walk into that it almost makes you feel nervous because you don't feel that anything is really put together with a mind behind it. You kind of feel like there's a lot of design impulses or someone's told someone like, you need to have exposed concrete. It makes you nervous, you feel like you're in this limbo land. I felt like if I just put it together in a way that felt comfortable to me, that I could only hope that other people would feel comfortable.
There's also like, it's silly but the three places that I've loved in life are Tokyo and Kingston, Jamaica and New York. So I was looking at all these pictures of all three places and the thing that I found in common was this blue and orange. In Tokyo you always see these blue zinc fences with kind of an orangey rust on them and it's all over the place and it's something that you wouldn't think of as Tokyo. Everyone thinks of Tokyo as like futuristic and all this stuff but you look in any alleyway and you see that blue rusted fence and it's the same in Kingston. So those two fences exist independently of each other, those colors. Then blue and orange is like the Knicks so I was sort of like, oh this is the color that I have to have, it has to be blue and orange. It was funny because when we did it, all of a sudden both Maiko and I were like, maybe we made a mistake. Maybe it's too blue and orange. And then we're like, no it's right, we'll do it.
The thing that is most cool to me is, just with everything, I’m really happy right now. Like I don't think I've ever been this happy in my life. I get to be here, I love this neighborhood, I get to work with my wife. My friend Sou who designed our smoker is working with us and he's great and my kids are happy and all these things. I look around and everything that's happening now has an absolute line to things that I did years and years ago. There's absolute pinpoints from different eras in my life of things that I thought were minor that have now blossomed. Like this guy Sou, who designed our smoker. The reason that I know him is because in 1991 I used to DJ at a place called Den of Thieves with this guy Jonny Sender, who is this sort of like wacky downtown musician who had been in one those bands like ESG or Liquid Liquid or something like that. It was this funny little hip hop bar that had like a Urei mixer that was on rubber bands and we'd play there and became good friends.
I hadn't seen him in years and he came to Tokyo two or three years ago and called me up and said, “I'm here, we should go to dinner.” So we went out and I said like, oh I'm thinking about doing this barbecue restaurant and he was like, “Oh that's funny, I met this guy Sou who has a barbecue restaurant in Nakameguro and you guys should meet up.”
At the time I was writing, and I still write it although I've been too busy, this blog that was called Oishi Gevalt, which was for me a way to process moving here. I had written a blog post about taking my wife's friend’s family, we went to some countryside place to do a barbecue and I totally failed, miserably. Like everything about it went wrong. So I was like, “The barbecue king has been deposed,” and I got an email from this guy Sou and he said, “I read your blog post and it was really fucking funny. You should come to my restaurant and I'll teach you about Japanese charcoal and the different cuts of meat and what you need.”
I went there with my son and I just really liked him and I liked the food so he then ended up designing our smoker and everything like that. So I look back and I'm like fuck, from 1991 doing these stupid DJ gigs with no one basically there. It was like me and six people and Jonny Sender just kind of making each other bug out about like weird b-sides. It led directly to this blog that I had been writing, that was really a way for me to process something, to meeting this other guy who is instrumental in creating this.
It's just like I always tell my son, just do things that you love because they'll work out. Just have faith in yourself in terms of your passions because otherwise life is going to be fucking boring for you. They'll work out, you'll meet people that share other passions and eventually things will come around. Nothing is forgotten and everything is important. I’d always thought that and this is really like the blossoming of that and good, because I'm 52. Hopefully I’ll be like my dad and be 91 at some point but the time is now for shit.
So all your interests have kind of led to each other and it's all just grown and gone in different paths...
I mean everything to me is related. Like love of music, love of food, love of people, it's a joyful thing to share. Like I've seen great technical DJs in my life but the most fun DJs to me were people that you could just tell they liked being there. I loved it when DJs fucked up because I could tell that they were trying to do something. Like maybe they messed up their mix or they were looking for a record and they couldn't find it but it created like a tension and a vibe, like they're really in it. And it's not that I'm such a vinyl snob, it's more that I'm a doing stuff snob. Like get in there, be involved, get dirty with shit. Like when they're playing on computer, I feel like they sat at home and created a playlist and their heart isn't in it in the same way. There's not that weird tension where you could make a mistake. I want dirtiness. Like that's why I hate porn, because I would rather have sex then watch someone have sex. Like strippers, if you're so horny get a prostitute! I believe in prostitutes, go! Knock yourself out. Fuck, get in there, get dirty, don't just watch someone! I don't know... that went crazy, (laughter) sorry about that.
Bringing it back to the space for a second, can you tell us a little bit more about the custom built smoker you had made?
Yeah it's great. So my friend Sou, he started Hatos Barbecue in Nakameguro. So when we were opening here I had asked him like, hey I've been looking at smokers to bring in from the US. Then my friend Linus, who owns a barbecue shop in Korea, was like, “I have this whole smoker and you could come to Korea and pick it up.”
But kind of because of COVID and all this stuff like that, the supply chain was all fucked up so I was like fuck, I gotta get this smoker built. So I went to Sou and I was like, I want to build this and I have exactly what I want but I need some technical know-how with this because I've never done this before. He had custom built the smoker at Hatos which was this small thing. So basically our contractor’s uncle has a metal shop in Saitama and so Sou came up with the design based on what I needed. It's a unique smoker because it can fit inside but our biggest concern was that you need good airflow for a smoker.
Essentially I think of a smoker like an amplifier, right? Like you have this amplifier and the coals essentially are electricity and the wood that we're using is like a graphic equalizer. So that's making the notes and the airflow controls, the vents, are like volume. So you're turning it up, turning it down and that's how it's all processing. So with the size of this space and where the ductwork is, to keep it not smoky we had to design a very specific shape and structure for it. So what we built essentially has three levels so we can do pork shoulders, like big cuts, chicken and ribs. So they're all basically being able to cook at an even temperature. We created a big water pan so that's creating a very even temperature and a drip pan so it makes it easier to clean. Then the bottom is where the coals go and we're cooking with Japanese oak and cherry wood so it's creating a very clean, easy burning smoke.
I was really nervous because the guy in Saitama had never built a smoker before. He was just amazing, he took a look at the plans and he made some really good suggestions about the thickness of metal and different stuff like that. And then he sort of disappeared.
I got really nervous because things were coming up to date and I was like fuck, is this guy for real? Like what's happening? I hadn't heard from him and all of a sudden he called me, and this is the beauty of Japan, is that he had something to do and he was definitely gonna do it.
There was no bullshit, no talking during the whole time. No saying oh I’m this and that and blah blah blah. He just had his deadline and it was what he was gonna do. He called me up and was like, “I'm done,” and it was actually a week early. We went up there and I got so happy that I hugged the smoker. I was like, I wanted to fuck it. It was so perfect and so beautiful. It's such a work of art and so personal, I loved it. He forgot to buff some of the things off so like some of the measurements were still inside and it just felt like such a reflection of this guy and of Sou and me and Maiko and it was just perfect. So that's our custom smoker.
How do you choose which products to use and showcase here, and which suppliers you decide to partner with?
I like spare ribs, and there's a lot of baby back ribs here but I've never appreciated a baby back rib. The reasons are probably to do with my own eccentricities but spare ribs are a much more variable cut of meat. Like there's fatty parts, there's thinner parts and a lot of people like baby backs because each one is exactly the same and they're very standardized. I kind of like spare ribs because I think that you can eat a whole rack of ribs and have many different experiences while you're going through them. There are some parts that are kind of dry and funky but I like them because they're really smokey and chewy and then there's parts that are just totally tender. So to get spare ribs was a bitch, to be honest, because Japanese pork is very good quality and is kind of too good quality for spare ribs. They really cut a lot of it for yakiniku, for pork belly and you just can't find them. So I found someone that's bringing in Canadian pork and getting that in made me very happy. I found a great guy who has these incredibly tasty Japanese chickens and he's a very small butcher. We get our charcoal from this guy in Ekoda who's had a charcoal business in his family for 150 years. I'd rather pay more to have this guy around because I love him. Like every time I go there, he's like 80 years old, he tells me about like the history of Japanese fire departments. I'd rather spend 5 dollars more for charcoal to get it from him than to get it delivered from Amazon. He now brings me my wood too, he got some oak wood for me.
And then the beers... I like beer a lot but my primary thing was that I like just cold beer. I was like if it's cold it's good. I know that there's great craft brewers, I just didn't really know about it. Sou has basically helped to educate me and has been ordering on the beer side. It's been cool because it kind of reminds me of having a record store. Like when I had a record store I thought I knew everything about Jamaican music and then some guy would come in and be like, “I only want records from 1969,” and you're like, “Really? That's it? 1969?”
But then you start to listen to his obsession and you start to hear like, oh this is what he's talking about. After a while I started to figure out what that sound was, that he was looking for, that he was interested in and it’s the same with craft beer. I'm learning about it as much and as customers come in they're like, “Oh I like a saison.”
I'm like, oh I know what that is now so it's been fun to learn with people. There's so many cool Japanese companies that are doing craft beer like these guys, Cranc Beer. I just happened to like their labels so I tracked them down and they have a little brewery in Ikebukuro and it turned out I was totally right! Like they're really cool and they’re super into reggae. At first they wouldn't deliver to me. They were like, “Oh we don't do deliveries, we just sell here.”
But then I kind of like charmed them, or maybe annoyed them, I don't know which one. They ended up starting to do deliveries for us and their beer is great and I really like it.
I've always liked wine but over the past couple of years I've been trying more and more biodynamic or natural wines. I feel like it's this realm where the aesthetics of it have not been determined yet. So what the tastes are, they're not like codified. As to, this is a pinot noir that tastes a certain way. It's all off the fucking chart so really all the great varieties and everything, it doesn't matter, you can just say whatever it is. You taste things that you're like, this isn't anything that I ever thought of as wine before. We're so lucky because this wine shop Flow, that's right over here, the guy is so cool and so based in education and has such a great supply and is so willing to share stuff with me. I've been really proud, like we're starting to build up a nice set of natural wines and stuff.
The next thing that I want to deal with is nihonshu because there's a lot of really amazing nihonshu that's coming up that are like wild fermented nihonshu. It's a lot of shit that I'm trying to do and I mean, I have a lifetime to do it. I don't have to do anything at once.
How did you initially discover pitmaster and barbecue culture? And what made you decide you wanted to do that yourself?
Well, I totally don't know anything about barbecue culture or pitmaster culture and in fact it kind of scares me. It's definitely not something like, if I go and see like competition barbecue or something, it totally bores the shit out of me. Literally the idea of like making presentation ribs and doing all that shit, like no interest in any of it. What I do appreciate is the work that people put into it and that it's a very unique food and everyone's barbecue tastes different. What you put into it and what you get out of it is really an incredible thing.
The first place that I ever really tasted barbecue was in Chicago. When I first moved to Chicago it was rapidly changing and there was this street called South Clybourn Street. It was kind of bordered by wealthy white neighborhoods but obviously it had been like a lower class black slum for a long time. The first time I ended up walking over there I was totally terrified because it was like this industrial wasteland with guys burning shit. I was like holy shit, where am I? How did I get lost in this? Being from New York it was just a very different kind of ghetto. Like New York ghettos I was fine with but I was like, I don't know this ghetto. I'm on this street and I could smell barbecue and I was like huh, I wonder what this is? I went in and it was called Edith’s and there was an older woman in there. She had like a smokehouse off this little shop and the food was just phenomenal. Like her ribs were incredible and in Chicago they do also this thing called rib tips, which are essentially when you get a big slab of ribs, it's the excess shit that people would throw away but they make a special barbecue out of it. I really appreciated how this cast off food that was supposed to be garbage and things that people would throw away, got transformed into this incredible product.
So every time I'd go travel, I would eat barbecue and try these different things. I really admired the culture of turning crap into gold, essentially. I mean, this exposes some sort of kind of crazy thing but like, barbecue was really started by slaves, in America. The white barbecue culture came later. It was basically food that was cast off that slave masters didn't want to eat. It was long-cooked and the spicing was stuff that people brought in from West Africa. Like those types of foods that probably derive from the Caribbean and from Africa were used in making barbecue sauce and barbecue and stuff like that. I admire that later on, you know like Texas barbecue, there is a lot of German influence. So a lot of Germans that had moved there, they would do a very severe kind of smoking, just salt and pepper. But all the spices and all that stuff came from earlier kind of black culture. It's not even black or white or whatever, it just comes from poverty and comes from turning something that people had thought was garbage into something wonderful by labor and hard work and that part of the culture I really like. The whole competition part, I think it's bullshit and I have no interest in it.
Previously you mentioned that your three favorite places would be New York, Tokyo and Kingston, Jamaica?
I wouldn't say favourite, I would say most important. I mean Kingston, I definitely don't want to live there but like most important in my life. Yeah and New York, I don't want to live in anymore.
Would you mind touching on the time that you spent in Jamaica and why it was important in your life?
When I was getting involved with reggae and really liked reggae, I basically didn't know anything about the music business so I went to this label in New York. At the time they were putting out what I thought were the best records and it was called Signet Records. I went over to their offices and just showed up and was like, I don't know, what can I do? I'm good at writing.
So I wrote all their press releases and bios and I used to drive all the artists around to dubplate studios and radio stations. This is in ‘91 so it was a fun time getting to know the actual business of records and how to do stuff.
Then at that time I got invited to go to Jamaica to go license records and that was the first time. I went there to license stuff from King Jammy and that first visit was really a mindfuck. It was so chaotic to me, like getting there and the airport was filled with people grabbing you and all this stuff, wanting to carry my bags and I couldn't figure out anything. It was super busy and crazy but I kind of got a feel for it.
Then later on I opened up a record company called Scratchy Records and we were doing more licensing in Jamaica so I'd take trips there and go back. But I still didn't really feel at home there or have any real connection, it was more just like this certain kind of business. When I moved back to New York I was doing some PR stuff and some music writing stuff and different things. I lived like way downtown near the World Trade Center and I had like 5 or 6 accounts so I was just making some money, whatever it was but when the towers went down my building got cut off. So there's no electricity and they wouldn't let us there because the roof was covered in body parts or something, it was disgusting and horrifying. So I was locked out and I lost all my business, like everything. I couldn't do anything for like a month and everyone was like, “Oh sorry, I know that this happened but we have to pull our funding from you.” I didn't have any form of income so I had started just selling some records. I had always gone to buy records from different people and then people would always be like, “Oh if you're getting one copy, get two copies.” But that was kind of a pain in the ass because you're always chasing people around for money.
So I thought, oh I should just go to Jamaica and I can pick up all the stuff from the distributors, so I started doing that. I met this guy named Sammy who I bought a bunch of old records from. He would let me stay at his house in Spanish Town and we'd just go and rent a car and drive all through St. Ann's in the hills and I started to fall in love with it. Being up there and just going, you'd see some old people and just say like, “Oh do you happen to have any old records or anything?” And they’d lead you to like a chicken coop, and in the chicken coop would be like this pile of records and you’d sit there and clean and then you would find some great record. Everyone would be happy and you’d pay them well.
When we opened our shop and I started going down more and more, I met this guy named Bertram Brown who was a producer and owned a label called Freedom Sounds in Greenwich Farm, which is downtown Kingston and kind of a very war-torn neighborhood. It was very split politically so it was famously in the midst of a lot of interesting fighting and kind of a dangerous place. He invited me to come down and I went to his house and it was pretty basic in terms of living conditions. I was like, wow this is fairly rough but I said like, “Oh I'm here, do you know any place I could stay, like a hotel or anything?” He was like, “Oh stay here,” and I really didn't want to because I saw the conditions but at the same time I was like, man what a pussy I am. Like he lives here and what an insult it would be to turn him down and to be like, “Oh I can't stay in your crappy house.”
So I just ended up staying and I ended up going there like 5 times a year and becoming like the weird member of this community. It was sort of a funny thing, it was like this extended family.
Sou, in the background: Tell ‘em about the goat.
What?
Sou, repeating: Tell ‘em about the goat.
Oh yeah (laughter). Bertram, he was an incredible character and he knew everyone in Kingston. He knew from wealthy people to serious, dangerous old ghetto people. At some point he took me to this one neighborhood and as kind of entrance into the neighborhood I had to go speak to the Don so that I would be safe to always walk in there. We went and the Don was a cool and dapper guy and basically we were like, oh we'll have a party and we'll do like a curry goat for all the kids and everyone and get some beer. So we went there and then they were like here's the goat, here's a fucking knife and I was like, “Woah woah woah, what are you talking about?” It was ceremonial like, “You gotta do it, you gotta kill the goat.” So in a moment where I really felt like my Jewish ancestors were like, “What are you doing?! We never expected to see you doing this.” And so I had to put the poor goat to death and eat them, which was delicious! So every year we'd do a big curry goat for all the kids and stuff like that and bring down stuff and it was a great neighbourhood.
Bertram got murdered in 2008 or 2009 and they never found his body and that really broke my heart. That killed the joy of Jamaica in a lot of ways for me. He was such a funny person and one of the great people to drive around a city with and spend hours waiting for shit because Jamaica’s all about soon come, never come. Like you're always waiting for something and he just was an endless source of funny conversation and knew everything about everything. He was such a mischievous character and I miss him dearly.
Rest in peace, Bertram.
Yep, Bertram… Mr. B.
What a story to end on and we're very, very grateful for your time. Do you have any last words for our readers?
I hope everyone just is happy and healthy and does cool stuff. Just believe in cool stuff. Do your thing that you find interesting and if you find yourself hungry in Tokyo and want to listen to good music and hang out we'd love to have you, come drink with us.
I love that. Thank you so much for your time.
Jeremy can be found cranking out some of the best barbecue in Tokyo here:
Freeman Shokudo
2 Chome-27-4 Nishihara, Shibuya City, Tokyo 151-0066
03-6317-7262
https://maps.app.goo.gl/pk6GdqWMwLYXGsDT7
Website: http://freemanshokudo.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freemanshokudo/
His aforementioned blog, Oishi Gevalt, is also a fantastic read. Not many people possess a storytelling ability as compelling and profound as Jeremy does. He moves effortlessly between light-hearted and contemplative in such a way that pulls you in and doesn’t let go. We could have sat there listening to him tell tales and learn lessons from his life for hours more. If you’re in Tokyo we recommend paying a visit and having a conversation with the man himself but if that’s not possible then his reading his blog is the next best thing.
He can also be found DJing under the name DJ Scratch Famous at events in Tokyo such as GOT TO BE A LEADER at Reggae / DUB club OPEN in Shinjuku. Keep an eye on his personal IG for details on upcoming gigs.
Some of the Sabukaru Tokyo team, and a few of our friends, made it out to Freeman Shokudo during their soft opening where we feasted upon a full repertoire of their barbecue, soul food, craft beer and natural wine offerings. It was a delicious, long and merry meal that ended much too soon. Such are the time-warping properties of laughter, revelry and great conversation. Tokyo is a city where you can have some of the best dining experiences of your life and this is undoubtedly a truly special place that deserves a spot at the top end of any Tokyo dining destination list. Incredible food, fantastic people and a deep appreciation of life all coming together in an intimate neighbourhood joint, what more could you ask for?
As the night of the soft opening came to an end, Jeremy presented us all with a beautiful booklet filled with photographs from his life leading to the establishment of Freeman Shokudo. Bookending these photos in both English and Japanese, one on each side, is a brief summary of all the influences and inspirations which brought the place into existence. It all ends poetically and succinctly with this line:
Food. Kindness. Bittersweet memories. Friendship. Family. It is all there really is.
We couldn’t put it any better ourselves.
Credits:
Text & Interview: Phong Chung, Natsuki Ludwig, Adrian Bianco
Photography: Natsuki Ludwig
