お見上げ: Gift-Giving

Giving gifts of food is a pretty standard part of the Japanese society of 10 years ago and before. Recently it's tapered off, but if you go on a trip someplace and don't bring back a box of edible treats, preferably a famous brand specific to that region, then you're a tool. You also give or receive food gifts on the occasion of weddings, formally meeting new people, when moving into a new house, etc. The Japanese restaurant business is firmly entrenched in tradition and is built up on knowing people. This translates into tidbits or delicacies always laying about or being served up at meals, and unlike your average bean-filled bun or dry cookie, the people in the biz know good food and so give the best. Since I've started 5 weeks ago I've had eel sent from an eel farm, incredible 煎餅 (senbei, rice crackers), cakes, cookies, homegrown tomatoes and cucumbers (the cucs were like nothing you've ever had), various fish, and tonight some really freakin' good yakisoba, even though I normally don't touch the stuff. People also purchase stuff from the restaurant to give: sushi, ayu, soba, etc. A perk of the job is that you can impress the socks off someone by giving them a gift like a box of ayu and rice (that would normally cost $30 per fish) for cost. I did exactly this for my mother-in-law.

鮎- Ayu (Sweetfish)

...are freakin' awesome. They are smallish fish traditionally caught by trained cormorants. The fish are attracted to fires lit on the boats. They are also very territorial and another method to catch them is to hook a live ayu and fish with it as bait; other ayu will attack it. That's pretty horrific, though I think the main way of getting them commercially now is by traps.

Anyway, they are a summer fish and usually salt-grilled. You see them at festivals on sticks, and are supposed to eat the whole thing, head, bones, innards and all. They are always skewered so it looks like they are swimming.

My restaurant does a different method, involving grilling and steaming and simmering and making the ayu super-soft, then serving them over flavored rice mixed with sauteed burdock and carrot. The leaves are tade, a bitter leaf that is often made into a violently green vinegar sauce. One of the best dishes I've eaten in my life was a single perfectly salt-grilled young ayu, so soft that the bones barely crunched, so well-shaped that it didn't lay flat on the plate but stood up on it's breast fins.