Where is Doria from?

Visiting restaurants in Japan that serve Western style foods, particularly Italian, you tend to see a lot of doria (ドリア) and gratin （グラタン） on the menu along with pizza and pasta. You can also find doria on the menu at many local Japanese restaurants that have a western food feel to them.

Doria is a rice and butter based dish which typically has chicken or prawns, and some vegetables mixed in, with a creamy white sauce (maybe cheese) on top. For my lunch today I had a hamburger in the doria, very Japanese style. It included broccoli and carrots.

I always thought that doria was actually a Japanese dish that just had a an Italian name、but apparently (checking with wikipedia) it is originally an Italian dish that was made in Paris, and included tomato, cucumber and eggs (whites), for the three colors of the Italian National flag.

In 1925 it was introduced to Japan in Yokohama at the New Grand Hotel where it was cooked by as French cuisine by the Swiss chef who was visiting. It was made with small prawns.

Yokohama 150
Yokohama is currently celebrating 150 years of opening its Port to the West. The doria does not go back to that date, but 1925 still makes it a good 84 years ago. A long enough time for a foreign dish to gain its own cultural status in Japan.

Cookpad website
Here is a link to a Japanese website that has 132 recipes for Doria with what looks like 703 photos of Doria people have cooked. mmmmm. tasty.

There are many different recipes for Doria as can be seen by this website. If you search for Doria recipes in google you are likely to find many of them, most from Japan.

For those that are hungry after seeing the above, here are the menu choices from today’s lunch

The only thing they were missing was pizza!

Now I am wishing I could go back for dinner and get that カツカレー　(Curry with pork cutlet)