The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [123]
The first time I tried this, fate quickly carried me beyond the scenario sketched out by the Tokyo YWCA. When I tried to lift the lid from my soup bowl, the entire bowl rose from the table. This is not unheard of: if you waste too much time arranging your chopsticks, your soup cools down and forms a vacuum under the lid. So I grasped the bowl firmly with one hand, I don’t remember which, and tried to dislodge the lid with the other. When that failed, I squeezed the bowl with both hands (lacquered wood is flexible), imagining that the lid would pop right off. Then, praying nobody would notice, I lodged the bowl in the crook of my right elbow for extra leverage and tried to wrench off the lid with my left hand. Finally I wedged the bowl between my knees and used both hands to tear it open. This worked like a charm. But the lid slipped from my hands, flipped over, and plopped into the bowl, splashing the thick white soup in a perfect circle over the tatami mat, the gleaming table, the flower arrangement, and me. I shelved my book of Japanese etiquette and thenceforth played the bumbling Westerner with no knowledge of local manners. I simply tried not to offend.
They used to say that it is impossible to get a bad meal in Paris. They were wrong. But try as we might, we could not find a truly bad Japanese meal in Japan. (We did find a wide variety of mediocre Western meals without even trying.) You can eat amply and well for six dollars a person at a noodle shop, for twenty dollars at a place serving everything grilled on skewers, for sixty dollars for a seven-course dinner in a private room at a handsome restaurant in the provinces, and for four hundred dollars a person and up at the most refined kaiseki banquet in Kyoto, probably the most expensive restaurant food in the world. The setting, the cost of the ingredients, and the level of artistry may differ, but concern for freshness and the urge to do one’s best seem nearly universal.
In Naha, on Okinawa, known as the Hawaii of Japan for its beaches and tropical climate, the cooking shows a Chinese influence in its rich sauces and enthusiastic use of pork and peanuts—a crunchy Japanese version of shredded pig’s ears with cucumbers, peanut tofu, and a delicious pig-tripe soup. In Kagoshima, on Kyushu, called the Naples of Japan by someone who has never been to Naples, we were introduced to delectable sardine sashimi with a mustard sauce, and raw chicken breasts and gizzards—thinly sliced, attractively fanned, nearly tasteless, and almost too chewy to swallow. At least there is no sign of salmonella in Japan.
Hiroshima is famous for, among other things, its oysters and its perennially last-place baseball team, named the Carps. At Kakifune Kanawa—a converted barge anchored in the Motoyasu River at the edge of the Peace Memorial Park—oysters are served ten ways. Our oyster banquet included seven: raw, huge, and icy on the half shell; skewered and grilled; crisp juicy tempura; baked in their shells on a bed of salt; raw and marinated in a little cup of vinegar and soy (our favorite); stewed in a miso broth; and panfried, chopped, mixed with rice, and arbitrarily called risotto. A half-mile stroll upriver from Kakifune Kanawa through the graceful park is the skeleton of the one prewar structure remaining in a city that has otherwise been completely rebuilt. It stood at ground zero on August 6, 1945.
If the meals we ate before arriving in Kyoto seemed better than most of