Nadeshico Sushi restaurant in Tokyo is filling a long-standing gender gap with panda bear and frog face maki, crafted by the first-ever all female sushi chef lineup (WSJ, via VV).
Kazuya Nishikiori, the middle-aged owner of Nadeshico, says he wanted to create a new model for working women in Japan. But he later explains he'll only hire women who are between the ages of 18 and 25 to work behind the counter. "After all, our slogan is 'fresh and kawaii,"' he explains, invoking the ubiquitous word for "cute." "If someone wanted to work here and was 30, I'd put her in the back." [WSJ]
This culinary tour de force is "one floor below the massage parlor that promises 'total relaxation'" in the Akihabara district, the tech geek wonderland rife with maid cafes and pillow girlfriends.
I like that they're so distinctively waxy, crisp and bitter--when an endive snaps in your teeth, it can be mistaken for little else. The separated curls of each leaf are sharp little gondolas for all manner of things runny and rich: Soft cheeses, fondue, crab or artichoke dip.
Think celery but more fay, and meaner. Or if bok choy had light-deprived, bitterly-ankle-biting midget cousins.
I tend to slice them into 1/2-inch cuticles and toss them with crumbled blue cheese (hullo, Cabrales!), chunks of green apple or pear, honey, and black pepper. Pungent, sweet, crunchy and spicy, there's nothing chaste or clerical about it.
Cooking endives is something I've never done, but am muy curious about; the French tend to make them into gratin, which sounds silky-sexy-comforting.
I think that even Thomas Lux may concede in this case: Nothing is so irritatingly twee that it can't be made delicious by covering it in rustic pig and cream. Some time ago, the effervescent Matt Armendariz posted a simple but gorgeous recipe for Braised Endive that has lingered in the recesses of must-try: Winter project? NodNODnod.
Good 'ol EST jetlag made snapping up in bed at an ungodly wee hour relatively easy--not that it would have been hard anyway, since Soft-Spoken Feisty Lady and I were about to embark on one of my long-coveted foodie dreams. We strapped on knee-high combat boots and wellies respectively, and padded out into a barely stirring Tokyo.
Some foodies dream of El Bulli and The French Laundry, of vintage wines and caviar, of green-chile cheeseburger trails, cross-country pie conquests, and sniffing out the most authentic Maine lobster roll. And while I'm game for any of the above, I wouldn't trade any of them for the 2 mornings that I had at the Tsukiji Fish Market.
Cremebruleed, a dearly trusted foodie who I'd not been in touch with for YEARS, had just moved back to Tokyo, and was all too happy to meet us for our first tryst into the edible aquatic wonderland. It was her birthday, after all--what better birthday breakfast than the freshest sushi in the world?
Even though it was early, cold and rainy, we 3 were in great spirits, and Cremebruleed laughed aloud as I danced in little circle of fishy anticipation. Without ado, she yanked us into the bustling, living hive of commerce.
As with much of Tokyo, my noggin was flatly unprepared for the intensity and scale of Tsukiji. The infamous international tuna auction has been closed to tourists, so we were making a beeline to the heart of the market (rows and rows of seafood and Japanese longshoremen), and working our way to the outer rings (produce markets, pickle stands, kitchen hardware stores, street foods, and minuscule restaurants favored by the longshoremen once they were done with work).
Basically, if you needed live cuttlefish, a sharkskin wasabi grater, a fresh root of wasabi to go with it, and a giant bowl of spaghetti with fresh Hokkaido crabs, this little city within a city is where you'd go to get it all.
BTW, some haters would scowl at the closing of certain areas of the markets to tourists, but let me tell ya: The market-proper is a full-powered, dangerous place, and if you don't have your wits about you, you'll probably be mowed down by one of a thousand forklifts pinging in a million directions at worst, or catch a face-full of fishy hosewater at best.
NYer walking/dodging/perrying skills definitely helped us from dying or stopping vital business, and even we got annoyed at the congestion-causing telephoto-lensed momos wandering haplessly into certain disaster.
Cremebruleed led our little duckling line through the damp, endless rows of piscine jewels and treasures--crabs of every imaginable size, shape and feistyness:
Bitty rock crabs, alien Hokkaido crabs, Alaskan King--every one alive and kickin'. If it can't poke your eye out, it ain't fresh.
But you're here for the food, and so were we. By 9 AM, we'd worked up a hearty appetite sidestepping splatter and gawking at swimmy critters, so Cremebruleed inched us toward the outer ring of the market. She strolled down a row of tiny sushi places, past all the tourists and nationals waiting in hour-long lines at Daiwa and Sushi Dai, and stopped at the last sliding glass door.
The sushi master greeted us warmly as we inched our way into the clean, lilliputian space; bags went in a rack directly over our heads, bottoms on stools, backs against the wall, knees under the sushi bar. Scale: Subway car, if that.
With a hot towel and a quick flip of the picture-oriented menu, the 3 of us each chose the 14-piece, 1 roll omakase (3,700 yen, I think...definitely under 4,000, or $40 USD), in which we would choose the last two pieces of nigiri. SSFL and I were grinning and bobbing like kids on Christmas, and Cremebruleed was smiling like...well, a lady in-the-know at a fab birthday breakfast.
First four pieces of nigiri--(L to R) maguro (lean tuna), toro (fatty tuna), hata (grouper) and tai (red snapper).
Each tuna cut was rich, fatty, and distinct; the grouper was meaty and almost creamy, and the snapper sparklingly saline; all were so clean and fresh that you could practically hear their offers for three wishes melting in the slightly warm rice.
I didn't fully realize where I was in the world until the moment that
1st piece--maguro--broke apart on my tongue. It was the reverse of Proust's madeleines,
the distillation of the immediate and fleeting, a pulse that slows and
gives one rare focus--this tuna, on this birthday morning, could not
have happened anywhere as it has happened here.
It was about now that the lovely man handed us bowls of the best miso soup I've ever had. Maybe it was just nice to be sipping something savory and steaming on a cold day. Or maybe it was because it was stare-back soup.
But seriously, the amaebi (deep sea shrimp) heads impart a subtle sweetness and tomalley oomph that ups the unami ante to near-infinity. Cremebruleed translated that we could have as much soup as we wanted, but we practiced restraint and saved room for the arriving feast.
Well...'twas time to go to the Motherland, wherein I was greeted with beautiful weather, great friends, and a bevvy of mui-expressive foods of the pastry-kind. Chekkit!
Manapua Monster was the quintessential Hawaiian char siu bao: HUGE, and crammed with BBQ pork of the leaner, shredded variety (think less saucy, more red-pulled-porkish). He and the Half-Moons (stretchy-glutinous skinned, filled with minced water chestnuts, pork and dried shrimp) play out their ancient battle every day at the Island Manapua Factory.
Yepyup, I like Char Hung Sut better, too--but we were on our way to Manoa Falls, so convenience won out over dimsum particularity.
No visit home is complete without a (few) visit(s) to Leonard's. Call me old-fashioned (go ahead, it's not something you'll be able to say very often!) but I don't really care for the baroque new malasadas, with the addition of cinnamon sugar, stuffings of various custards, etc. A fresh, just-fried-HOT Portuguese doughnut tumbled in sugar is an untinkered thing of beauty, and no one does them as well as Leonard's.
That said, lovely BFF Alli has always been one to try new things, so she bravely sampled some of the newer malasadas--one filled with pina colada custard, and another with mango custard.
>MMMfph< Mango HORK!
"Tastes like sunscreen," sayeth Alli (of the pina colada one). As for the mango? "Tastes like...mango sunscreen."
No worries, we had standard malasadas at the ready for her, just in case.
Like anyone else, I’m kinda given to cooking ruts. My inclination is to slap steaks, chops, pasta, and variations of green beans and tomato salad in front of peeps, and nobody complains, so I rarely deviate. But it makes for FN boring cooking (and FN boring reading about cooking, natch).
So when I blew up my router vacuuming (don’t ask), and a trusted friend of mine popped in remotely and fixed it lickety-split, I figured I owed the man some eats, and told him to name his dish.
We were chatting online, so I couldn’t see him, but I could practically hear the smile spread across his face. “Toad in the Hole,” he said. “Con Curry.”
A little background on this guy--Japanese-style curry is his lube/eats-cornerstone of choice. For Curry Fiend, there is no food that can’t be improved with a cloak of spicy brown, and there is no meal he’d prefer over a steaming plate of katsu curry.
His request was not as strangely fusion-disastrous as it sounds...Toad in the Hole is browned sausages enveloped in Yorkshire pudding, generally served with squishy peas, mashed potatoes and onion gravy. Topping it with curry and pairing it with rice seemed a bare half-step from its Brit comfort food origins, and given the rapidly apparent fall chill, it felt totally seasonally appropo.
I'd like to think I'm slowly getting better at taking appetizing piccies of eats, to ultimately provoke the lot of you into mid-day, mid-cubicle hunger.
He's a little misunderstood...and apparently, as curious about you as you are of him!
More importantly, he's darned tasty! Billed as "Espresso Ice Shot", Many-Eyed Affogato Monster is a caffeine-bathed balm on your summer-sapped senses--vanilla bean soft serve, chocolate-coated crispies, and a shot of espresso.
He's a bit heavy on the soft serve to be affogato proper, but if you want less ice cream, I'm sure the affable (if overwhelmed) purveyor of sweets would be happy to oblige.
You'll find him at the ChikaLicious Dessert Club (right across the street from the original ChikaLicous Dessert Bar on E 10th St) in the company of some good-lookin' cupcakes (including an INSANE toasted-marshmallow-topped s'mores specimen), cookies, puddings, smoothies, and a rotating sorbet.
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