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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2280 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 26, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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As a man who's lived in Japan 25 years, and who goes to sushi restaurants regularly, but does not eat the sushi that is served in these restaurants, I do not know. I do know that the people around me who eat sushi and enjoy it have various levels of quality in mind to rate sushi and sushi restaurants, and sushi restaurants outside Japan are always relegated to "not really sushi" by these people. Even in Japan people are finicky. There is a conveyor-sushi up the road from me where we sometimes go, and if my father-in-law ever is up to visit and goes there with us he will either not eat or eat one or two pieces grudgingly and you can see he is trying to hold back his disgust. (Edit: Because he thinks their sushi is shit. He only goes to places he thinks have high quality sushi.)

Japanese tastes are not my tastes. Fatty tuna or マグロ maguro (see the correction to my innacuracy in this below from /u/bonsaii ) is generally held to be a delicacy. But then so is Kobe beef which I find interesting but it doesn't feel like eating beef to me when I eat it. More like something you would eat on another planet where they bring out something and say "We have tried to create something that is similar to your earth-food, but we feel we have improved upon the taste and texture" in their alien language that you can understand for some reason. You then eat the wagyu Kobe beef and you see what they mean, but you know that you will enjoy more that tenderized beef off the grill at your buddy's house more. A lot more. And where are the baked potatoes? Not in Japan, I will tell you that right now. I won't even get into chawan mushi or natto or namako or the many other foods that I see people eating and enjoying as if they are all part of an elaborate prank to get me to also eat it and rave about it. I refuse.

I recently went to Japan (at long last) and decided to give a conveyor-belt chain place (I think it was Hama Sushi?) a try. It was shockingly mediocre - the best things I could say about it is that the automation was cute, the food was obscenely cheap and Japan being Japan I did not need to tremble in expectation of certain food poisoning. In terms of flavour, you can do much better for not too much money in any medium-sized Western city if you look hard enough. In the end this was the second worst meal of the whole trip.

I always feel poignancy when I think about how most people in Japan have never had a good American-style inauthentic burrito before.

All they've had is taco bell, at most. I ate there once and found it to be extremely strange. Every random tacqueria I go to is similar to each other, even if they vary in quality, and taco bell was very different. In a not-good way.

Out of curiosity what was the worst?

Sausage curry with cheese omelette at a highly-rated lunch café near the Hirayu Onsen bus terminal. The cheese (of which there was a lot) was disturbingly flavourless, the salad on the side made me wonder how you can even grow tomatoes to be so pale in a place where you are constantly fighting off sunstroke, and the curry I can only describe as what I'd expect to happen if you took packaged curry base and kept it simmering with no added vegetables for a day while periodically adding water. To add further injury to injury, their coffee was doing the "no flavour apart from bitterness" thing that I am told some salarymen like because they want their coffee break to be a microcosm of their life. (That final misfortune befell me repeatedly as I was trying to figure out what shops would not do that, but on their own I don't count those events as meals.)

(I have no beef with Japanese curry in principle, and in fact had a great pork kakuni one at a hipster shop in Yoyogi later on.)

All in all, the trip was an overwhelming success in terms of food; the curry encounter would have amounted to an everyday gastro dud over here. If you were hoping for a proper tale of culinary gore, I did pass through China for a few days on the way back...

Sausage curry. I am imagining small little deep fried wieners, three maybe, laid crosswise the curry and rice. It's really hard to screw up curry and rice, though not, as your account gives testament, impossible. Interesting food write-ups in the links, thanks.

Your mental image is on point. I see you are indeed familiar with the lay of the land.

Maguro usually refers to tuna cuts as a class. Fatty tuna is either otoro or chutoro depending on the specific cut, in contrast to the standard red akami. Akami in particular has a bottom heavy quality distribution, with average and below quality akami having a grainy, stringy texture with a bland flavor.

Maguro yeah is just the word for tuna, with toro the belly or fattiest bit. Thanks for the correction.

I think that sushi is enjoyable in occasional doses. I wouldn't eat it all the time. I do find the taste of the sushi rice pleasant, and some fish are tasty when raw. I also think that, as someone else said, sushi rolls are quite nice with the different textures and flavors you can get.

Also, as with all things, us Americans have taken sushi and converted it to our tastes so you can get some stuff here which I would imagine would never fly in Japan. For example, here's a roll they serve at a sushi joint in Denver: "Cream cheese, California mix and smoked salmon, tempura fried and then broiled in a spicy Japanese aioli and drizzled with sweet soy". I'm sure that if he saw this, your father in law would spontaneously manifest a grave just so he could roll in it, lol. But it is good even if it's the least traditional thing you could possibly get in the realm of sushi.

I'm with you on fatty tuna though. I tried it once because I know it's highly regarded, but it was pretty meh. I didn't hate it, but I don't think I'll ever order it again. Not really very good, and way too expensive on top of that.

I'm a chain conveyor belt sushi pleb, although I will say quality varies greatly depending on location. As with most things in Japan, it's all better up in Hokkaido imo.

I have to push back on the chawan mushi, it's absolutely delicious in the winter. My mother in law makes it with chestnuts and chicken, really hard to beat. Natto-maki is the best way to eat natto.

I'm glad you like it My wife and one of my sons, do, as well. I was given a cup of it once and bad things happened. I remember choking most of it down politely, or what I hoped was politely. I suppose part of it is what they might put in it, because presumably that can vary. But I have doubts and I have no real interest in revisiting chawan mushi. I'd have to be one hungry dude to go there again.

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