Faux Feast

There is an estimated multibillion-dollar market in Japan for life-size food models. The craftsmanship can be extraordinary.

Photographs by Kyoko Hamada

Text by Tejal Rao

A perfect replica requires imperfection. Take a grilled fish: Uniform all over, flawless in color and texture, it tells you nothing. But let’s say its silvery skin is marked with bubbles of assorted sizes, delicate crinkles and slightly uneven washes of carbonization. Let’s say the fish’s eyes are clouded over from the heat. And its markings, when you look closer, suggest it was flipped over the charcoal, showing you, under the gloss of its own rendered fat, a hot spot, where the heat on this nonexistent grill was more intense. Then, yes, maybe you want to buy that fish. Well, not that fish, which is made of plastic, but the fish it represents — the fish on the menu inside this particular restaurant.

The popular life-size food models known as shokuhin sampuru, displayed outside countless casual Japanese restaurants, function as promotional materials first, a way to boost sales. But the craftsmanship of a food model can be extraordinary — a fish so ridiculously crammed full of detail, so obsessively recreated, that you want the replica itself. No two fish look exactly the same at Ganso Shokuhin Sample-ya, a top-of-the-line shop in Tokyo operated by Iwasaki-Be-I, which displays the kinds of pieces the company makes for restaurants but also carries trinkets for tourists: cut bananas at varying stages of ripeness, bowls of pork cutlets on rice, sushi pieces and grilled fish. Some are better than others. That’s because each sample is made by hand — the work of 68 artisans across the company’s six factories.