MORE FUSION FUN

You know how it is, sometimes you do something of a food-related nature, and you can’t help asking yourself, ‘Have I just created a paradigm shift or have I done something really stupid?’

I was in Waitrose, looking for something for dinner, and feeling uninspired, and I bought a pack of sushi, actually nigiri, and I knew this wouldn’t quite be enough, and as I was heading to the till I passed the pork pie section so I picked up one of those and then I spotted a tub of potato salad and I bought that too, and then I made my purchase.

I could see that display would would be important with this meal, and I arranged it to look like this:

orderly without being exactly minimalist, a bit of fusion with just a touch of Carl Andre:

The pork pie was a better example of the breed than the sushi, maybe the paradigm hadn’t shifted after all.

GEOFF DAYDREAMS OF SUSHI

I was walking in the afternoon, more or less in the neighborhood, trying to keep the Black Dog at bay, when I suddenly felt an urgent need for some supermarket sushi.  I don’t suppose it absolutely had to be from a supermarket. If there’d been a perfect ten-seater sushi restaurant nearby I’d probably have gone there, but I knew a Gelson’s supermarket was nearby, and that was my only reasonable hope.  

In fact I’ve been eating some pretty reasonable sushi of late.  This plate was at Kombu Sushi in Silverlake, and yes, some of it’s sashimi.

That’s definitely saba (Japanese mackerel) at the back – there was also Spanish mackerel on the menu and I wanted to do a compare and contrast, but they’d run out of the Spanish.  I wouldn’t want to swear what the other two were – presumably yellowtail on the left, and I suppose octopus on the right - but I wouldn't put money on it.  It was all pretty good though.

The last supermarket sushi I ate, put on as a treat by my hostess when I did a reading/event at Glendale Community College, a little while ago now, was actually not bad at all - note the veggies:

It appears to have come from the Nijaya market, a pretty reliable Japanese chain.

And so this afternoon, while out walking, I strolled into Gelson’s and bought a box of “Nigri assorted sushi” (not as assorted as all that, as you can see) and took it home with me.  It was good enough – yellowtail and salmon, I think, though the label was very confusing.  And there’s a ton of rice lurking under the fish.  Obviously you don’t have to eat if all, but just as obviously you always do.

-      And the Black Dog? Oh, he's never far away, sometimes it’s the walking that helps, sometimes it’s the sushi.  And maybe the Sapporo helped a little too, but only a little.

DESERT ZUSHI

So I was in the desert in Yucca Valley at the weekend, and I went to the Kimi Grill, which is where I always go, a pretty decent Japanese restaurant – and an AMAZINGLY decent Japanese restaurant considering that it’s in the desert in Yucca Valley.

When I’m there I look around the really quite huge dining room and it always seems to me that 90 percent of the people in the place are eating giant rolls like the one below, and in general I hate rolls with a hard and gem like flame.

And I’m not dissing anybody for having different tastes than me, but really guys, this place has excellent sashimi and sushi, and I don’t think there is any standard by which a dense cylinder of rice coated sticky glop is preferable to yellowtail or octopus.

I suppose I can’t be the only person who orders the raw fish, since they keep offering it, and I know I should be glad that it’s there at all, and the menus isn’t all monkey balls (yeah, I had them once), but obviously I’m in a minority.  Sometimes apparently the sushi comes in a boat – this pic and the couple above all come from Yelp.

Now, it so happens that there’s a curious and crammed and vaguely chaotic bookstore in Yucca Valley called The Sagebrush Press Bookstore.  It looks like it’s struggling, so I always buy something in the interests of supporting indie business, but in fact it’s looked that way for a very long time so I guess they’re doing something right.  And the owners do run a Baja Bug.

And there in the cookery book section was this: Japanese Cookbook (100 Favorite Japanese Recipes for Western Cooks) by Dr. Aya Kagawa.

It’s dated 1963 and was published by the Japan Travel Bureau, based in Tokyo.  The list of other titles at the back, tells us they published a lot of titles designed to explain the Japan to westerners – books on Japanese history, wood cuts, gardens, etiquette and so on, even one on Japanese humor.

The book is a fine little historic volume, interestingly and curiously illustrated – also interesting that in places (though not throughout) there are references to something called zushi. 

But my favorite recipe is titled “Small Birds Broiled Whole” – the list of ingredients consists chiefly of six small birds (along with sake, mirin, shoyu and powdered Japanese pepper).   An explanatory note tells the western cook to use “Quails in spring, the sparrow in autumn, the wild dove in winter, etc).” It’s the “etc” that seems especially mysterious and somehow threatening.  Do they mean robins, humming birds, the lesser goldfinch, budgerigars?  There’s no illustration of the end result, though the book does contain this very fine ad on its last page:

IT'S A DRY HEAT

Things are changing in the old Mojave desert, especially in Yucca Valley, but maybe we knew that already. Hell, I’ve been going there long enough that I remember when the food options were pretty much limited to a Sizzler and a gas station hot dog.  Now there’s fine, or at least hipsterish, dining. Up in Flamingo Heights there’s now La Copine Kitchen serving beignets and flax and whey English muffins but I wasn’t feeling quite strong enough for that.

Parry and Harriet’s in Pioneertown remains my idea of a good time in the desert (that's Harriet and Pappy above).  I remember the first time I went there, 20 some years ago. I saw all the pickup trucks and bikes parked outside and thought it looked kind of scary, but I braved it and went in, and of course it was just fine.   I seem to recall I had a steak sandwich and quite a few beers.  It felt good – and there was a band playing that had a kickass lead guitarist.  There often is.  This is Giant Sand with Pappy and Harriet's as a backdrop.

 Returning there this weekend for an early Saturday lunch with a couple of Anglo-Dutch pals who are driving across the States in a rented RV, there were more bikes and bikers there than I’d ever seen, and it wasn’t even noon.  I guess the boys were having their brunch-time brews before hitting the road.  Before we were settled and served, the place had emptied out.

The Pappy and Harriet menu featured, would you believe (well yes, you probably would), kale salad.  I didn’t order it, obviously.  I had the Desert Burger, which you see here. (That stuff on the plate that looks like an explosions of cheese and fries, is in fact cheese fries.)

 There was no band playing at that time of day, though there was a gently decaying taxidermy moose right above our heads:

And there is the wall of fame, photographs of musicians who’ve passed through the place at one time or another.  There’s Peaches and Robert Plant – side by side but in separate frames – something symbolic in that, no doubt.

But the most impressive change in recent years in Yucca Valley has been the arrival of the Kimi Grill, an honest to goodness good quality Japanese restaurant, attached to the Travelodge motel on the west end of town.

The sushi looked like this – the squid with caviar was my favorite:

The sashimi looked like this – the salmon was the knock out:

I think they get through a lot of flowers.  And of course you may ask yourself, how does a restaurant in the middle of the desert get sushi-grade fish?  And I suppose the answer is they get it the same way that restaurants NOT in the desert get their sushi-grade fish.  I think we all know by now that freshness is no virtue whatsoever when it comes to sushi.

Elsewhere, only the very smallest change has affected the Route 62 Diner, which is now Carla’s Route 62 Diner.  Décor and menu remain the same, the latter featuring dishes named after rock and roll stars.  I had the corned beef hash and scrambled egg – pretty standard diner fare, but I felt better for knowing it was named the Buddy Holly.

Wisest to avoid the Chubby Checker, I thought.

EATING IN TRANSLATION, AND IN THE ORIGINAL

I have been in Tokyo and I have been eating, of course.  There are reckoned to be 80,000 restaurants in Tokyo (for a population of 37 million), and everybody tells you it’s very hard to find a really bad one, and I didn't try.

  

As with so many things Japanese, there’s something simultaneously very alien and very appealingly obsessive about much of the food and the eating culture.  Another thing people tell you is great about Japanese restaurants is that they specialize, sometime minutely.  Whereas a western restaurant will offer a menu of meat and fish, pasta and a vegetarian option, a sushi restaurant in Japan will only serve sushi, perhaps only eel.  People were also talking about a restaurant that specializes only in tomato. 

I ate sushi, of course.  This is ark shell:

This is flying squid, and no I’m not exactly sure what that stuff is in the middle of it, squid stuff, I suppose:

 

There were oysters, eaten at a thoroughly Japanese restaurant with the unlikely name of Ostrea; those giant ones are Hirotawans, from Rikuzentakata in Iwate Prefecture:

Elsewhere there was fugu, or puffer fish.  Here are some live ones seen on the street:

And here’s the stuff I bought from a supermarket:

In Food Sake Tokyo Yukari Sakamoto’s guidebook to Tokyo food she tells us “It is rare to be poisoned in restaurants, but not unheard of.”   I weighed the risk of death against the bragging rights and decided in favor of the latter.  And no, it didn’t have a lot of taste, and I tried to convince myself that I was experiencing some tingling in the tongue and lips and but I’m not really not sure that I did, and I’ve since learned that if the fish was farmed then I wouldn’t have tingled anyway.

And most memorably there was naizo – offal, nose to tail eating, at Shinjuki Horumon – a smoke-filled, rough and ready place, behind a metal door and not much frequented by gaijin as far as I could tell (though I did later find out, to my chagrin, that it had appeared on some ludicrous tv show), but the staff were welcoming if slightly amused by our presence.  It was a party of three and it no doubt helped that one of us (not me, obviously) spoke Japanese.

To be honest I can’t tell you absolutely everything I ate – and I'm pretty sure it was all beef offal, but don't shoot me if you recognize some non-beef parts in these pics.  I know there was tongue sashimi, marinated and made very, very tender and I think the best tongue of any sort that I've ever eaten:

And there was heart:

And there was whatever the things are on this plate:

I know there’s some udder and some intestine and that thing on the back of the grill that looks like a sliced penis, yep, that’s a sliced penis – actually “sao” to the locals. 

It tasted pretty much the way you’d imagine, i.e, not actually all that tasty but very, very chewy.  And as we reeled out into the night one of these two lads said, in English, “See you again tomorrow.”  And I did think we should have gone back the next night, but there were other adventures to be had.

One of the interesting issues about finding somewhere to eat in Tokyo is that the indicators that signal a good restaurant in the west, seem not to apply here.  Notions of ambiance or atmosphere or mood lighting really do go out the window, if there is a window, which often there isn’t.

Restaurants that look as brightly lit as MacDonald’s turn out to have amazingly good food, grubby-looking little ten-seater establishments turn out to be wonderful.  In places like that, you can see the chef and the chef can see and this bolsters intimacy and trust, or at least I think it does.  There was a certain amount of looking at the incomprehensible outside of a restaurant and just plunging in, like this one:

The deep fried squid legs (yes, that's piped mayonnaise!) and the boneless pork toe were knock outs:

 There are many restaurants in the subway stations, most famously in Yurakucho there’s  Sukiyabashi Jiro, (seen in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi), a Michelin 3 Star with a 30,000 Japanese yen tasting menu (that’s about $250), and word is you’re in and out in 20 minutes.  Needless to say, I didn’t go there.

And of course, as everybody tells you, the department stores are amazing resources for food.  The basements have food halls, and there are generally restaurants up on the top floors.  The store Takashimaya in Shinjuku has 20 or so full-on restaurants, including Katsukura, a place I was told I must go for the tonkatsu – that’s Kyoto-style pork, coated in panko and deep fried, served “Rosu” juicy, fatty, tender, sublime.  And in a department store.

The most extraordinary space I ate in was a restaurant called The Moon, part of the Mori Art Museum on the 52^nd floor of the Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills – a futuristic, slightly dodgy, and I dare say Ballardian urban development where the likes of Apple, Google and Goldman Sachs have their headquarters, and where people live in high-rise “residences.”

The food at The Moon is pretty odd – hybrid Japanese-French nouvelle cuisine of the “have I eaten yet?” variety, that looks like this:

Or this - that's battered bamboos shoot and a cup of sake, and I couldn't work out what the other thing is:

These are the restaurant’s photos not mine.  And sure, it was all tasty enough but way too fancy for its own good.  Or at least for mine.  Still, I could console myself with the view across Tokyo, and the knowledge that somewhere down there are at least 79,999 other restaurants.  Maybe you'll stop at one of them on your way home.