A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [71]
Their streets may be noisy, riotous Möbius strips of flashing lights, screaming jumbotrons, rank after rank of tightly constrained, identically dressed humanity (this year, all young women will dye their hair red!), their TV variety shows insanely over the top, hysterical assaults by break-dancing reindeer, hyperactive hosts, cloyingly cute, fluffy, pyschedelic-hued animal characters and doll-eyed cartoon heroines, their porn some of the ugliest, most brutal, and most disturbing on earth, their popular sexual obsessions may make even the Germans look well adjusted, and they may indeed teach their school children that all that nasty World War II nonsense never really happened, but from a cook’s perspective, who cares? I was there to eat. When it comes time to sit at a table, or take a long weekend relaxing in the countryside, no one on earth has figured things out so well or so thoroughly as the Japanese.
It’s all about fish, fish, fish, daddy-o. You like fish? You’ll love Japan. They’ve scoured the world’s oceans looking for good stuff to eat. And they’ll pay anything – anything – for the good stuff. (I watched my friend Taka at Sushi Samba in New York unhesitatingly pay over eighty dollars a pound – wholesale – for a hunk of o-toro.) I actually get high walking through their fish markets; my pulse quickens even thinking about them. I missed a lot last time I was in Japan. I wasted a lot of time working and wandering blindly about. Early on, I’d been intimidated by the strangeness, the crowds, the different language, I’d been reluctant, at first, to throw myself into it, to plunge right into packed noodle joints and businessmen’s bars. This time, I was determined, at the very least, to miss less. My quest for ‘the perfect meal’ would be put on hold. This was Japan. I knew I’d be getting a lot of perfect meals here. That’s what they do.
It was a packed flight out of JFK, and I was too excited to sleep. After three movies, three meals, and fourteen hours to Narita, with the plane’s engines droning on and on, it reached the point where I yearned crazily for that telltale change in the engine’s pitch, that moment when velocity slows, the plane begins its final descent, every ticking second of monotonous hum a fiendish form of torture. They ought to issue rubber chew toys in coach class. I needed one by the time the flight attendants started strapping down food carts and checking to see that our seats were in the upright position.
I was staying at the Hotel Tateshina in Shinjuku, a tacky businessmen’s lodging on a side street. My dollhouse-sized room had a hard but comfortable bed, cheap bureau, a TV set, and a pillow that sounded and felt as if it were filled with sand. The walls were thin. Outside the room was a bank of vending machines selling my brand of cigarettes, coffee, Asahi beer, and plastic cards for the porno channels (Cherry Bomb). I showered in the hermetically sealed bath pod, dressed, and walked in the rain to Kabuki-cho, taking a hard right off a neon and billboard-lined street, ducking through a quiet Shinto shrine and into a bustling warren of pachinko parlors, hostess bars, pantyless coffee shops, yakitori joints, and whorehouses. Turning onto the Golden Gai, things were even narrower and the streets were bordered by tiny one- and two-table bars. Above, through a tangle of fire escapes, power lines, and hanging signage, skyscrapers winked red. Welcome to Tokyo. I squeezed into a phone booth-sized place, passed a bank of glowing hibachis, sat down, and ordered a draft beer.
A hot towel arrived with my beer. I ordered pickles and crudités with miso paste, a bowl of onsen tamago (a soft-boiled egg with mountain potato and seaweed), cooked collar of yellowtail with radish, some chicken wings, stuffed shiitake mushrooms, and some roasted gingko berries. Life was good again. The grueling hours in cattle class, knees pressed to my chin, staring at Mel ‘Fucking’ Gibson and Helen ‘Two-Expression’ Hunt