Author: Matthew Amster-Burton
Quotes of Author: Matthew Amster-Burton
Finally, let's talk about those Kit Kat bars. There is no flavor that can be embodied in Kit Kat form and sold in Japanese stores. Green tea. Black tea. Miso. Cherry blossom. Soy sauce. Toasted soybean powder {
}. Chile. Orange. Melon. Only a few are available at any given time, and right now, evil geniuses at Nestlé are coming up with new flavors. I'd like to suggest okonomiyaki flavor, which would consist of a bag of assorted flavors {ginger, squid, mountain yam, egg} that could be combined in the proportions of your choice, just like a real okonomiyaki. Sauce and Kewpie mayo optional.
We bought a SkyTree orange Kit Kat, was a regular orange Kit Kat in a preposterously long box, and the Yubari melon Kit Kat, which tasted exactly like melon, was sold in a fancy gift box, and cost $200. Two-thirds of that is true. book-quotejapanfruitykitkatsJapan is obsessed with French pastry. Yes, I know everyone who has access to French pastry is obsessed with it, but in Tokyo they've taken it another level. When a patissier becomes sufficiently famous in Paris, they open a shop in Tokyo; the department store food halls feature Pierre Herme, Henri Charpentier, and Sadaharu Aoki, who was born in Tokyo but became famous for his Japanese-influenced pastries in Paris before opening shops in his hometown. And don't forget the famous Mister Donut, which I just made up.Our favorite French pastry shop is run by a Japanese chef, Terai Norihiko, who studied in France and Belgium and opened a small shop called Aigre-Douce, in the Mejiro neighborhood. Aigre-Douce is a pastry museum, the kind of place where everything looks too beautiful to eat. On her first couple of visits, Iris chose a gooey caramel brownie concoction, but she and Laurie soon sparred over the affections of Wallace, a round two-layer cake with lime cream atop chocolate, separated by a paper-thin square chocolate wafer. "Wallace is a one-woman man," said Laurie.Iris giggled in the way eight-year-olds do at anything that smacks of romance. We never figured out why they named a cake Wallace. I blame IKEA. I've always been more interested in chocolate than fruit desserts, but for some reason, perhaps because it was summer and the fruit desserts looked so good and I was not quite myself the whole month, I gravitated toward the blackberry and raspberry items, like a cup of raspberry puree with chantilly cream and a layer of sponge cake. book-quotefrenchtokyopastriesBut Tokyo offers cat cafes, a commercial solution to the problem of wanting to commune with cats but being unwilling or unable to have one at home.Iris's favorite cat cafe is Nekorobi, in the Ikebukuro neighborhood. When I first heard about cat cafes, I imagined something like Starbucks with a cat on your lap. Wrong. Nekorobi is what you'd get if you asked a cat-obsessed kid to draw a floorplan of her dream apartment: a bathroom, a drink vending machine{free with admission}, a snack table, video games, and about ten cats and their attendant toys, scratching posts, beds, and climbing structures. Oh, and the furniture is in the beanbag chic style.Considering all the attention they get, the cats were amazingly friendly, and I'd never seen such a variety of cat breeds up close. {Nor have I ever spent more than ten seconds thinking about cat breeds.} My favorite was a light gray cat with soft fur, which curled up and slept near me while I sat on a beanbag and read a book. Iris made the rounds, drinking a bottomless cup of the vitamin-fortified soda C.C. Lemon and making sure to give equal time to each cat, including the flat-faced feline that looked like it had beaned with a skillet in old-timey cartoon fashion. book-quotecatsjapancat-cafeFor my first home-cooked meal in Tokyo, I took an assortment of beautiful Japanese ingredients and did what came naturally: I made Chinese food. I stir-fried some beautifully marbled {Berkshire breed} pork with bok choy, ginger, and leeks, sauced it with soy sauce, mirin, and vinegar, and served it over rice, sprinkled with seven-spice mixture. This seemed like a reasonable act of Japanese-Chinese fusion. I made some quick-pickled cucumbers on the side. This was before we discovered that anything you do to a Japanese cucumber diminishes it. I should have known this; once I interviewed a Japanese-American farmer who grows more than a hundred Asian vegetables in Washington state. Naturally, I asked him about his personal favorite. Cucumber, he said."How do you prepare it?" I asked."Slice and eat."The whole meal was about the same as something I'd make at home, but I cooked it in Japan. It was like the SpongeBob SquarePants episode where SpongeBob has to work the night shift at the Krusty Krab, and he keeps saying things like, "I'm chopping lettuce... at night!" I was slicing cucumbers... in Tokyo! book-quotejapanese-foodcucumbershomecookingThe most obvious difference between Japanese and American ice cream bars is that if the Japanese bar promises something crispy, it will damn well be crispy. The Haagen-Dazs Crispy Sandwich, for example, is a slim bar of ice cream between two delicate wafers. How do they keep the wafers from getting soggy? Is it a layer of shellac? Maybe it's best not to ask. Crepes, soft but not mushy, are also a frequent player in ice cream bars.Near the end of the month I discovered my single favorite ice cream treat, the Black Thunder bar, a chocolate ice cream bar on a stick filled with crunchy chocolate cookie chunks. I also tried its sister product, the vanilla White Thunder, but in the immortal words of Wesley Snipes:.Iris and I also became mildly obsessed with Zachrich, a triangular Choco Taco-like bar that looked like a run-over sugar cone, coated with chocolate on the inside and filled with mint ice cream. And Iris often selected Coolish, a foil canteen of soft-serve that you warm with your hands until it's just melted enough to suck out through the spout. {All of these names, incidentally, are in English; I'm not translating them}. book-quoteice-creamice-cream-sandwichesDairy Chiko, in the basement of Nakano Broadway, is a surrealist ice cream shop known for octuple-decker soft-serve cones. You can also order a smaller cone with less than one billion calories, but the draw at Dairy Chiko is watching how other people eat their towering cones of vanilla, yuzu, milk tea, matcha, ramune, orange, strawberry, and chocolate {flavors may vary}. Walking while eating is taboo in Japan, and Dairy Chiko has no seating area, so people loiter near the stand, two to a cone, drawing spoons up the sides of the ice cream, trying to forestall the inevitable. Old ladies, meanwhile, usually order a small matcha cone and eat it with a spoon, avoiding the shame of a green milk mustache. Near Dairy Chiko is a cafe with a public seating area and a very angry-looking drawing of an eight-layer cone with the international NO symbol superimposed on it. book-quotetokyoice-creamjapanIf a Tokyoite knows anything about Nakano, it's likely to be Nakano Broadway, a shopping mall with several floors devoted to Japanese comics {manga} and animation {anime}. It is geek central. I found most of it incomprehensible, but I did enjoy browsing at Junkworld, which sells useful electronic discards, like old working digital cameras for $5 and assorted connectors and dongles and sound cards. In the 1980's, when William Gibson was padding around the streets of Tokyo and inventing the world of , Japan was the place where the future had already arrived, where you could find electronic toys that wouldn't hit American shelves for years, if ever. For a variety of reasons {blogs and online shopping, advances in international shipping, the fact that the coolest mobile phones are now designed in Silicon Valley and Seoul}, this is no longer true. While it's still fun to go to Akihabara at night and shop all seven floors of a neon-lit electronics superstore, you won't bring home any objects of nerdy wet dreams. book-quotejapanelectronicsmangaGo out the north exit of Nakano Station and into the Sun Mall shopping arcade. After a few steps, you'll see Gindaco, the {octopus balls} chain. Turn right into Pretty Good #1 Alley. Walk past the deli that specializes in {steamed sticky rice with tasty bits}, a couple of ramen shops, and a fugu restaurant. Go past the pachinko parlor, the grilled eel stand, the camera shops, and the stairs leading to Ginza Renoir coffee shop. If you see the bicycle parking lot in front of Life Supermarket, you're going the right way.During the two-block walk through a typical neighborhood, you've passed more good food than in most midsized Western cities, even if you don't love octopus balls as much as I do.Welcome to Tokyo.Tokyo is unreal. It's the amped-up, neon-spewing cyber-city of literature and film. It's an alley teeming with fragrant grilled chicken shops. It's children playing safely in the street and riding the train across town with no parents in sight. It's a doughnut chain with higher standards of customer service than most high-end restaurants in America. A colossal megacity devoid of crime, grime, and bad food? Sounds more like a utopian novel than an earthly metropolis. book-quotetokyooctopustakoyaki
