Last weekend, to celebrate a new job, we went to a sushi restaurant. One of the tips we have read several times is not to stick your chopsticks in the rice bowl so that they stick up. I have no idea why a person would do this, but it seemed to be stressed (although it seems fine to stick them in your hair to hold a bun).
Some other tips I would like to add.
It seems seems that better restaurants serve sake other than Gekkeikan, it can be served hot or cold, and a large sake is not sold in a tea pot. When served sake it seems that the neighboring tables get annoyed when the head of the table “toasts” with,
“when I say sake you say Bomb!”
“Sake!”
“BOMB”
“Sake!”
“BOMB”
Some restaurants give you a spoon with your miso soup and others do not. I still have not figured out which is the correct way of eating it.
If the waitress says that they only serve green tea, it may be Genmai, ar something else with some tea leaves in it.
Taco is not the same as tako and if the waitress says that the nigiri you are eating is like tako, chances is that it is not.
If all you have left is some mackerel sushi, don’t ask for a doggy bag.
Mmm, damn it, I already went and got a salad for lunch before I read this.
I only like mackerel raw, preferably as nigiri, but that way it’s one of my favorite sushi items.
If you haven’t tried toro, the rich exquisite meat from the belly of the tuna, you seriously haven’t lived. It’s one of my favorite edible substances. If you ever want to lay a trap for me, just dig a hole and put a plate of o-toro sashimi at the bottom of it, with tamari and some fresh wasabi, and maybe some grated daikon on the side for textural contrast. Yum, god almighty yum.
What I have been told from Japanese family members is that the “Hashi upright in the bowl” is part of funeral ritual. Same goes with two people picking up the same item at the same time with hashi. Something about how bones are picked out of cremation ash.
Death and food don’t mix.
Oh a similar thing.
Never give a gift or serve anything in “Fours”. Threes and fives or two twos but never four. The number four can be spoken as “Shi” which sounds as the same word for death.
Miso soup?
Generally no spoon. Especially if it is in a small bowl and it usually is.
Its expected to pick up your bowl and drink from it and shoveling the tofu and what have you with your hashi.
I was told it was lazy to not pick up your bowl.
Large bowl dishes like ramen/somen/udon/ is served with a spoon but you can also pick it up too. I’m not sure where that sits on the “table manners” scale though. I’ve seen it done both ways.
Thats because thats the way chopsticks are positioned when the food is used to make offerings to the dead/ancestors. You don’t do it for Chinese food either because they make rice offerings to the dead the same way.
Drink directly from the bowl without a spoon, use chopsticks if you want to stir the miso if it has settled or if you want to pick up ingredients in the soup.
Its not likely to be genmaicha unless they specifically say so. Its most likely common green tea aka O-cha.
If you’re a first timer to o-toro especially, do try it lightly broiled (tataki) or seared with a blow-torch. The surface of the meat caramelises to form a wonderful aroma and the tuna fat drips over the sushi rice. Its good stuff. Personally though, I tend to avoid otoro though as I think the price I’m paying is a huge extent due to the hype and demand of it. There are many other seasonal fish that taste as good if not better, they’re usually priced less exorbitantly and in my opinion more interesting. But Otoro should be tried at least once though.
Incidentally I just started writing an infrequent food blog and my first entry was a famous sushi restaurant in Singapore.. http://themmmblog.blogspot.com
I really wish there were someplace close to my building to get some sashimi for lunch.
My favorite Japanese restaurant doesn’t open until 5pm, and my next favorite is all the way downtown (I work at the other end of the valley).
If anyone’s ever in SLC, and wants some fine Japanese food, check out the Mikado at 67 W 100 S or Mizumi at 8391 South 700 East. There are a couple others, one a high-end place, but these are my favs.
Realistically speaking, the high end joints aren’t much better than the mom n’ pop restaurants, and in many ways are inferior to them.
YMMV
Yes, although it seems a practical enough thing to do while you’re giving your rice a break, the funereal association makes it a major faux pas. You also don’t want to point with your chopsticks, especially at someone. Bad form indeed. (Which reminds me that there’s a local Asian restaurant with a bowl of rice with upright chopsticks stuck in it as its logo, of all things. Giving the customer the finger, maybe? Or else an ignorant Westerner is in charge of the marketing…)
When I was a student in Japan, a young fellow, my group’s clown, came to the table with a bowl of stew for one of us. Just before he set the bowl in front of the fellow (a genial man of quiet strong character whom we all loved and respected - completely understandable if you assume that would have been me, but it wasn’t ), for all to see he jammed the chopsticks upright into the bowl with a sort of “All right then, there you are”-type dismissive comment. You should have seen how big everyone’s eyes got! It was enough of a shock that we all gasped involuntarily. Of course, we all laughed our butts off, then, big time, and the funny guy stood there with a big grin on his face. But that’s the sort of thing you can get away with in a small tight-knit group of friends in the Japanese scheme of things. He would never have done such a thing for humor’s sake among people outside our circle. Of course, that wickedly brilliant stunt was only good for once. If he would have repeated it ever, we’d have seriously wondered if maybe he was mentally ill.
I didn’t think to ask if the reaction would have been different if the bowl had actually been rice instead of stew. Certainly the stew made some difference, I’m guessing.
To practice his English, our clown would compose jokes, usually about a fellow name “Gary”. Geri in Japanese means diarrhea. And the jokes were often pretty good for an ESL student, actually.
I recently went to a sushi-making workshop at the U of Idaho put on by the Asian American, Pacific Islander Association. It was taught by a Japanese Hawaiian. For only $10, I ended up with far more sushi than $10 would buy in a restaurant, a rolling mat and the left over package of sushi wraps. The woman teaching the class said that it is ok to experiment. I have been.
I like to make a mixture of ½ rice, ¼ wild rice and ¼ flax seed and I found just quick oats works well, too. I put various combinations of ingredients in, including sauerkraut, tuna, wild miners’ lettuce, dried Mexican shrimp power, Tillamook Special Reserve extra sharp cheddar, home made green salsa, sautéed wild Agaricus mushrooms, dulse, peeled, cleaned peppers and whatever else sounds good at the time. I figure if it is ok to put just about anything in a sandwich, then I can put most anything in sushi. I would like to make sushi wraps out of dulse, some time. I wonder if you used dulse as the wrap, with oats around haggis, if that would count as Scottish sushi?
Speaking of experimentation, I used to make makizushi with brown rice. It wasn’t bad, but a bit chewier than one usually expects from standard sushi rice. Visually it was sort of appealing, what with the pale brown border encircling the white interior of the grains exposed by the cutting.
I’ve never tried Japanese food, until recently there was just nowhere around here to get it. There’s now a restaurant in the city centre and apparently a sushi place buried in the indoor market (like the “dirt mall” they go to in mallrats after being kicked out of the good mall) somewhere but I never have the chance to go find it.
I need to find a reason to go that restaurant really.
Um…just to clarify, this is a word on its own, unlike the example yoko-geri in which keri (“kick”) undergoes eclipsis in a compound formation and in no way refers to a self-defense tactic of sideways-directed…um…ejecta.
The best and most flavorful Japanese cooking, I think, is good old home-style, working-class fare. It can be marvellously satisfying. If you’re staying at a Japanese home and are asked what you’d like to eat, ask for home cooking: it’s not only good manners, really, but sushi’s relatively expensive and you really only go out for that, usually, unless your host is a chef and insists. Otherwise you stand a chance to miss out on some really good eats. Sushi (meaning other than Rod Sprague’s forays into the nihon-ryōri Twilight Zone ) is another thing altogether, and often so delicate and subtle-tasting as to be regarded as bland and boring by some. Not everyone takes to sushi for that reason. The oilier fishes other than salmon tend to give out more up-front flavors, which I personally like.
Of course, there is vegetarian sushi, and not all non-veg types are seafood, much less invariably raw. Eel, egg, and almost all shrimps are cooked.
There was a time when the fancier Japanese restaurants around here would be open for lunch, but didn’t do the sushi or fancy grill acrobatics. Instead you just got a bento box lunch with rice. There were all sorts of flavours and textures of seafood and vegetables in it. It was much more to my liking than any of the fancy stuff in the evenings. Noodles are great, too. Noodles in soup is even more better still.
Why wouldn’t the Japanese open lunch bars here with this kind of food instead of that sushi crap? I know I’d be there every day if they did.
I hear you. There used to be a couple of Japanese restaurants in Minneapolis that offered only the well-rounded, real, heart-of-Japanese cuisine here in town, but that is a bygone era. The fare was not only unpretentious and tasty, it was affordable and many dishes were downright generous. Nowadays just about everyone thinks Japanese food = sushi and that’s it. It’s a shame, really.
There might be some such restaurants yet, but if they’re not otherwise languishing away in suburban strip malls, I don’t know where they are.
I think that if someone seriously tried bucking the trend it might find favor again.
I can’t agree that sushi is crap at all unless there’s a quality issue, but teppanyaki cooking I have no time for whatsoever. Might as well have it be a Blue Man Group act. I don’t dine to be entertained - something I loathe - and they don’t do that in Japan. Well, if they do, now, it’s been imported from the West.
It was entertaining, but the portions were so miserable and it took so long for the “act” to play out that you had to make sure you had eaten before you went (sort of a self-fullfiling prophecy about Japanese food).
My family’s idea of a night out for Japanese dining is the teppanyaki experience. Then again, they’re into dinner theater, too. sigh
I agree that the portions are appalling, and the cooking itself moreover is careless. I go along just because it’s an opportunity to get together with them, and I smile and make sure not to ruin their experience with my own issues about it all.
Hey, pretty close! I must check it out, although the setup still looks like it’s geared toward the aesthetic more than the gustatory. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The places I used to frequent were, basically, just restaurants in the Western sense of the idea, nothing especially “Japanese” about them other than the food, and it was tops.
BTW, the original Tampopo is a really hilarious movie comedy about food. If you haven’t seen it, do. Trust me.
I’ve always wondered what the copyright laws were on that sort of thing, i.e. ripping off the name of a movie to label your own shop (I liked the movie Tanpopo (Dandelion) by the way.).
e.g.
What if I wanted to open a business that sold fans (floor fans, ceiling fans, desk fans, window fans, etc.) and I wanted to call it “Gone With the Wind”?
What if I wanted to open a business that sold live corals for aquariums and called it “Reefer Madness”?
Can I get away with that and not incur copyright restrictions or penalties from the owners of the rights on the original movies/books of those titles?
They might be off the hook by spelling it with the “N” instead of phonetically with the “M”, which, as I recall, was how the movie title was spelled. Either that, or it’s gonna be a new name for 'em.
Japanese food is so much more than just noodles, miso, and tonkatsu (granted, I’m a noodle freak, big time); for instance, there are the donburi (big rice bowl) class of dishes: gyūdon, sauteed marinated beef slices heaped atop Japanese rice with the juices seeping into it…yum; oyakodon, sauteed chicken and omelette slices (oya = parent, ko = child…would that be unkosher?); and tendon, tempura-fried veggies and maybe shrimp as well. A meal in a bowl.
), for all to see he jammed the chopsticks upright into the bowl with a sort of “All right then, there you are”-type dismissive comment. You should have seen how big everyone’s eyes got! It was enough of a shock that we all gasped involuntarily. Of course, we all laughed our butts off, then, big time, and the funny guy stood there with a big grin on his face. But that’s the sort of thing you can get away with in a small tight-knit group of friends in the Japanese scheme of things. He would never have done such a thing for humor’s sake among people outside our circle. Of course, that wickedly brilliant stunt was only good for once. If he would have repeated it ever, we’d have seriously wondered if maybe he was mentally ill.