TOKYO

IN New York or Los Angeles, fans of Japanese cuisine can rattle off orders for uni and o-toro, or urbanely express a preference for soba over udon. But what about “Napolitan,” cooked spaghetti that is rinsed in cold water, then stir-fried with vegetables in ketchup? Or “menchi katsu,” hamburger covered in bread crumbs and deep-fried? Or “omu rice,” an omelet lying over a mound of ketchup-flavored rice?

At once familiar and alien, these dishes may make Americans feel, with some justification, that they have wandered into a parallel culinary universe. All are standards of a style of Japanese cuisine known as yoshoku, or “Western food,” in which European or American dishes were imported and, in true Japanese fashion, shaped and reshaped to fit local tastes.

Today yoshoku is thoroughly Japanese. It is a staple of television cooking shows and mainstream magazines. The lines outside venerable upscale yoshoku restaurants here in Tokyo are as long as ever, mostly with older Japanese for whom yoshoku provided a first taste of a Western world they had not seen. Yoshoku restaurants are also a requisite of the trendiest new shopping districts, like Midtown and Roppongi Hills, where they cater to younger Japanese whose mothers made the food at home.

And yet it is virtually unknown to foreigners. The first Michelin guide to Tokyo, published in the fall of 2007, listed 150 restaurants; not one was a yoshoku establishment. Indeed, visitors to Japan seldom enter the places where yoshoku is served: homes, chain diners, family-owned neighborhood restaurants or upscale yoshoku establishments of long standing. Outside Japan, yoshoku is rarely seen except in former Japanese colonies like South Korea and Taiwan, which were introduced to Western cuisine through Japan.