PIZZA POWER

I was in a big supermarket in Cornwall just before Christmas and I saw a very large man peering into a freezer cabinet.  And in incredible excitement he called to his wife, standing maybe ten feet away “Look! Look! Look what they’ve got!.”  The wife came over and looked, and so did I.  What they had were frozen pizzas.  The man chose one, and his wife chose another.  This made them very, very happy.

Now, I’m not a man to criticize other people’s food enthusiasms but this man was as excited as I’d have been if there were zebra steaks in the freezer.

I suppose the fact is I really don’t GET pizza.  This is no doubt a personal failing, and you may say (as people do) that’s because I’ve never had REALLY GOOD pizza, and this may well be true.  In general pizza is what I have when I can’t think what else to eat.  And by now I know two things, 1) it’s always a disappointment, and 2) it’s usually better the next day if I have a leftover slice for breakfast.

So I was surprised to find myself strangely excited by this picture that appeared on Instagram a few days ago.

It’s from Wylie Dufresne who used to run the restaurant WD-50, in Manhattan, a damn fine establishment: molecular gastronomy but not offensively so.  These days WD-50 is closed and Dufresne runs Du's Donuts & Coffee in Williamsburg, and frankly I don’t really GET doughnuts either, but that’s just another of my failings.

The Instagram image suggests Dufresne is teaching himself to make pizzas, and this one looked great, although closer inspection reveals that it’s something called a potato pie which seems in every way more desirable than a ‘real’ pizza – and those fried green onions really do look good.

In fact I was so moved by the picture that I decided to have a pizza.  Not a really good one, obviously.  I bought a very cheap and not very cheerful base, fried up some Cumberland sausage and green onions, put them on the pizza, added some black olives, and you know in the end it really wasn’t all that good.  The base was the real problem.  I scraped off all the topping and threw most of the base away.  I didn’t even bother saving any for breakfast the next day.

I was going to say ‘a lesson learned’ but I don’t think I learned anything I didn’t already know.  But then the next day, Instagram being what it is, Mitsuru Tabata once of Acid Mothers Temple who describes himself as ‘Guitarist, bassist and vinyl junky. Aka burger man. Also curry addict.’ posted an image of a pizza he’d made:

 It looked good.  And then another one:

Once again I was tempted (I’m hoping that 'powder cheese' is just a dodgy translation of grated cheese) but I know myself – I’m resisting.  For now.

ACID MOTHERS BUFFET

It has come to this: blogging about Facebook. 

There’s a book, by Margaret Mason, titled No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog, essentially a series of “prompts” to make your blog more interesting.  I do think there’s a amount of certain wisdom in that title, however I’ve recently become a Facebook friend of Mitsuru Tabata, who in lives in Nerima, Tokyo, and is currently second guitarist in the psychedelic Japanoise band Acid Mothers Temple (the guys I want to play at my funeral).  He’s also a sometime member of The Boredoms and Zeni Geva.  That’s him at the top of this post, a happy soul as you can see, and yes that is a hamburger shirt.  To be fair he doesn’t always look like that.

And the fact is, Japanophile that I am (with some slightly half-baked plans to go to Japan early next year), I find I’m deeply fascinated by what he has for lunch, and for dinner too.  Fortunately a fairly high percentage of Tabata-san’s Facebook posts feature food, both home-cooked and eaten in restaurants.

Certainly some of the food he has at home looks very much the way you’d expect Japanese home-cooked food to look: simple, elegant, exotic in a way but not at all outlandish, and not at all the kind of thing you'd find in a western Japanese restaurant: 

And here’s what he eats at his mother’s house (not an acid mother necessarily), which looks even better: gorgeously stylish and appealing.  She had me at "stewed smoked herring."

But then, who would think that a Japanese noise guitarist would be eating spaghetti alla pomdoro for lunch?

Much less a BLT?

 Tabata is evidently a great fan of curries, and we know that the Japanese do a good curry, it having been taken there, I gather, by the British who imported it from India.  Wikipedia tells me that the Japanese navy was introduced to curry by the British Royal Navy, and now every Friday is curry day in the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force.  This may be true, but my dad was in the Royal Navy and he’d have thrown himself overboard rather than eat curry.

In any case curry is now a thoroughly international dish and so Tabatha eats in various curry houses in Japan. Some apparently have more Indian influence than others.  This one looks like it could be had in any could English curry house.

This one less so:

But of course again it’s the odd unexpected “fusion” food that really catches the eye, like this one:

Yes it’s easy to believe the Japanese eat hamburger steaks with rice, but this one appears to be varnished with some kind of glistening gravy and those two semicircles of carrot really do look out of place.

Tabata is an international touring musician, and one of his latest posts has him in Holland eating or at least posing with, something called a Lucifer. 

And finally he gets to England and gets a curry, in Ramsgate, a place not known for its simplicity, elegance and quiet exotic.

I sure hope that curry tastes better than it looks.  The English, they’re so inscrutable.

Meanwhile, unconnected with Tabata-san, the website rocketnews24 - “Bringing you yesterday’s news from Japan and Asia, today” - reviews a restaurant called Maruhachi Sushi, located in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture.  The most spectacular item on the menu is something called Sexual Harassment Sushi.  Yep, really.  It looks like this:

It’s a single octopus tentacle and blood cockle wrapped in seaweed.  The reviewer, named Kuzo “liked the unique combination of textures in the octopus and shellfish. The seaweed also had a pure taste that was exquisite.”  Hey, it takes more than that to sexually harrass anybody I know in the Psychogourmet set.  But it does look wonderful.