Modern Conveniences

A counter restaurant's main visual feature is, not surprisingly, the counter, a long bar of wood that guests sit at while the chefs work directly across from them. Although we have tables and a tatami room too, the counter is definitely the focal point. Unlike Western cooking, where the atmosphere of a nice restaurant is concentrated on providing a sterile environment where servers melt in and out bringing dishes from the magical faraway realm of the kitchen, counter chefs work right in front of you, trying to accomplish inherently messy jobs with elegance. One of the reasons for the popularity of this system must be because so much Japanese cuisine is served raw or with minimal preparation.

One common denominator on both sides of the Pacific is the fantasy that chefs prepare all the food from the dirt/ocean up; guests like to imagine chefs visiting farms and selecting individual vegetables, buying whole fish directly from the fishermen, creating all the sauces from scratch. The reality, which sometimes needs to be concealed to keep up our cool image at the counter, is that all restaurants rely at least partially on pre-prepared foods. I was let in harshly on that fact back in the States when I went on a hunt for the recipe for my favorite restaurant's best dessert sauce, only to find out it came in a bag.

Japanese cuisine is no different. One of the things that surprised me was the fugu situation. Fugu requires careful, time-consuming preparation by a licensed chef, and it's not practical to do it yourself when you're putting out the volume we are. It turns out you can order your fugu already disassembled and skinned with all the little bits wrapped up and boxed. Each fugu has a license number (in case we end up killing someone after all), and all we have to do is get it out of the box and cut it up the way we want it. We just take care to unpack the fugu when nobody is in the restaurant so the guest can still imagine his chef choosing each fugu carefully at the fish market and we can actually get our work done, and everybody's happy.

Washing the Octopus

...will be the name of my band once I learn an instrument.

Processing a raw octopus is a laborious task and unless you get your octopus from a fish market you're going to be getting a pre-boiled cephalopod. Raw octopi are grey-blue but turn purple-red when cooked. But before you get all excited about firing up the pot, you first have to work off the slime and dirt that gets stuck in the suckers and tenderize it by kneading the octopus in a bowl with either grated radish or salt for about an hour. When you're on a tight schedule in a kitchen with a limited number or chefs, taking one of them out of the game for that length of time isn't really an option, especially when your boss orders two or three octopi in secret so you get 24 tentacles worth of surprise right before your lunch break. Fugu Senpai cleaned out the innards and beaks and vanished with them, only to come back 45 minutes later, announcing that the laundry was done. I assumed I was misunderstanding the Japanese at first, but it turns out he actually laundered the octopi in the washing machine to tenderize them, proving that modern technology can be employed in the most surprising circumstances.*

*Japan Chef in no way endorses the use of unauthorized and untrained laypersons to engage in the activities described in this blog post. The actions here were executed by professionals. Please do not try this at home. **

**Or if you do, just leave out the laundry soap and remember to run an empty cycle afterwards so as not to cover your next laundry load in octo-goo.

黒マグロ (Kuromaguro)-Bluefin Tuna

I listen to a lot of food podcasts from the States, and one of the big issues that's being batted around the food world is sustainability, especially for fish. Fish farming techniques tend to result in inferior product, and most Japanese food encyclopedias include descriptions and pictures in each entry on how to distinguish the two at the market. Farmed fish are usually fatter and have softer flesh and less flavor than their wild, hard-swimming cousins, and this is especially pronounced in muscular fish like tuna. American sports fishermen used to throw their bluefin tuna catches away until Japan started importing it, but now the worldwide sushi boom has depleted stocks to the point of the bluefin about to become listed as endangered.

One of my spouse's fellow flower-arrangement students comes from a tuna-fishing business and she lent us a DVD that followed the issue to a sushi competition in Britain. The whole program's tone was that of indignation that bluefin was not served there and that the whole issue is an attack by foreign countries on a Japanese way of life.

Interesting points:

1) The whole point of the sustainability argument, i.e. the fact that if bluefin is fished at this rate, it will disappear within a decade. Rather, it was repeatedly stated that this was a direct attack on a Japanese way of life and that the Japanese have a right as citizens of the country that invented tuna to claim priority on world stocks which are being 'stolen' from them by other countries (even if the tuna is imported from said countries).

2) The program's tone was derogatory towards those who avoid eating bluefin because of the conservation issues surrounding the fish, but Japan in general maintains the contradictory feeling of being the victim of the worldwide sushi boom driving down bluefin stocks and causing prices to jump. Shouldn't Japan be happy that people are avoiding consuming something seen as being Japanese for the Japanese?

3) Other types of tuna are not presented as an alternative to bluefin, so most people think that if bluefin becomes unavailable, all tuna is out.

My spouse pointed out that the average Japanese's opinion is shaped mostly by media (like the average citizen in any country) and that the media surrounding bluefin fishing in Japan is mostly likely controlled tightly by the fishing companies and the government officials receiving payout from them. I agree, but it's scary how such a relatively cut-and-dry issue has become so patriotic.

There is a push for Atlantic bluefin exports to be banned. I think this article is a pretty good example of the tone that I'm talking about.

(Note-I'm not blameless on the bluefin issue myself. I eat the scraps of bluefin we get thrown at the restaurant and I eat tuna other places too. But writing this entry may have been the final push for me to make my stand and ask if what I'm getting is bluefin or not and stop putting out cash for a vanishing species.)

An Osechi New Year's

When the end of the year rolls around, the Japanese restaurants are swamped, not only by

忘年会 (bonenkai, 'forget the year parties' for groups of co-workers), but also because they begin gearing up for the iron chef cooking marathon that is お節料理 (osechi ryori). Osechi is traditional Japanese cold food arranged in boxes, meant to last and be eaten from Jan 1st-3rd, thus giving Mom a break in the kitchen over the holiday when everyone is supposed to abstain from work. Families who actually do this are perhaps one in a thousand. Most families buy or perhaps prepare a couple of their favorite osechi dishes; the richer families order them from restaurants. I say richer because osechi is extraordinarily expensive. A cheap one-tier box can may be had from the bento place down the street for $100. A nice three-tiered box set will run $400-$1000 or more. Our three-tiered sets were $700.

Since the food has to last for three days, it's nearly all partially preserved; no fresh sashimi here. The food also usually has symbolic meaning. Some restaurants will start prep as early as October, gradually getting more and more intense until the night of either the 30th or 31st, depending on when the pickup date is for the osechi, and the cooks will pull a 24-36 hour shift straight (by which I mean, one, maybe two meals and no breaks at all) finishing, arranging, and wrapping the boxes. More details about the food later, right now I'm barely starting to recover from the ordeal.