And so to Japan House in Kensington to see ‘Looks Delicious’ an exhibition of replica food, the kind of thing you see in the windows of certain Japanese, and indeed Korean, restaurants, clueing you in about what the food you get inside is going to look like. The Japanese terms is shokuhin sanpuru, I understand.
Of course these replicas don’t convey what it’s going to taste like but then as is often said, we all to a greater or lesser extent eat with our eyes.
To be fair, most of us would be rather alarmed if real world examples of some of this food was brought to our table but that’s all part of the fun. The more extreme examples on display are, as I understand it, winners of various competitions held by The Iwasaki Group.
This not quite earthquake-proof tower of burger:
A horsehair crab with two glasses of beer.
But others looked completely convincing. These sandowichis:
These oysters look good enough to eat:
This octopus looks pretty much like the real thing.
Though in fact the last octopus I ate was at the Zuzu Bistro Bar in Stratford looked like this: which is rather different, and arguably not looking quite as good.
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| photo by Caroline Gannon |
Now, it just so happens that as I was wandering the paths of my neighborhood I happened to come across a small rock that looked, to me anyway, very much indeed like a lamb’s kidney. Here it is with the real thing for comparison
The cooked kidney looked like this:
The rock has remained raw. The world is full of simulacra, but you wouldn’t want to eat all of ‘em.
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