Looks delicious, but you can’t eat it: The art of Japanese food replicas comes to London

A room has been filled with tasty food from all across Japan, but none of it will ever go stale, nor can it be eaten — as it’s all fake food.

The idea of creating fake food started in 1917 when Nishio Shōjirō was hired to create replica food for nutritional lessons but set up a small sideline in making replicas for restaurants to show off. A few other people made replicas after that, but in 1932, Iwasaki Takizō set up the first company to mass-produce replica foods specifically for sale to restaurants.

The impetus was the combination of a rise in eating out and importing foreign foods. Customers could look at the replicas and know what to order. Ever since then, replica meals in restaurant windows have been as commonplace in Japan as a menu card would be in the UK.

Now, they’ve come to the UK – in an exhibition examining the art of replica food.

For this exhibition, Iwasaki, the world’s leading food replica manufacturer, has been commissioned to create 47 brand new food samples, representing each of Japan’s prefectures.

It’s a visual and slightly mouthwatering feast laid out on low tables with signs indicating what each of the meals represents. It’s mostly made up from completed meals, but there are examples of individual fruits and vegetables, which are still mainly used in nutritional lessons as they were originally intended.

There are also teaching examples, used in schools to teach how to prepare food — such as the long carrot strip laid out to show the varying grades of how finly chopped it needs to be for different receipies. Much easier than having a teacher showing you every time.

Some of the meals look obviously fake up close, but as they’re usually seen through windows, I doubt it matters that much. However, some of them are quite remarkable and difficult to believe they’re not actual meals—especially the onions in their own bowl, which look as if they came straight from the farmer.

There’s also a display that lifts the curtain on how they achieve the effects, with a series of plastic steaks evolving from what looks like a steak gone off in the fridge to something you would want to eat. It’s quite an art — with each item hand painted and finished to give them their tasty appearance.

In recent years, wax has been replaced with resins, which has allowed a far wider range of replica foods to be created that are ever more realistic. The exceptionally tall “earthquake-proof” beefburger might leave fans of  Jenga with heart palpitations.

The exhibition Looks Delicious! Exploring Japan’s food replica culture is at Japan House London on Kensington High Street until February 2025 and is free to visit.

Although most of the exhibition is in the basement, there’s a few bits on the ground floor, and related, but do look for the lunchboxes sold in railway stations — in the shape of trains. A nice idea that really should be replicated in the UK.