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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2399 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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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.

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