little bitty girl

I don't know whether you know this about me, but I just love to eat. So much so that I plan almost every day by the meals I am about to eat and every vacation is planned over how good the native food in that country is. That's why even though everyone tells me that I should go to Cuba, while it is still in its time warp, I just can't bring myself to do it. I heard the food there is quite dismal.

My ultimate gastronomic trip would be to go to Japan. I once wrote a paper on Japanese design and how nothing, and I mean nothing in Japan is done without extreme creativity and thought. This obviously translates to their food.

As I was reading a Vanity Fair article written by Nick Tosches on the fish markets in Japan, I stumbled upon this:

First, a course of monkfish liver, vinegared baby eel, which seems to have been filleted, and a jelly cake of crab and vegetables....Then slices of raw bluefish tuna, raw bluefin toro, raw hamachi, raw hamachi toro, raw tilefish, steamed octopus, ama-ebi (sweet shrimp; the sweetness is in the meat of the brain), a raw Kumamoto oyster, and a fragrant spray of shiso flowers. Then a clear soup of seawood, whitefish cake, bamboo, and asari(a sort of Spring time Japanese littleneck). Then grilled black cod from Toyama and crisp-toasted mild green peppers. Then halfa lobster (served with a spoon to blend the soft, dark meat of the head into the white tail meat) and shiitake and oyster mushrooms. Then a miso soup with straw mushrooms and seaweed. Then minced grilled eel, tilefish, and bonito steamed in a mixture of botan rice and sticky rice, wrapped in a large, salted houba leaf.

I don't know about you. But that sounds like a damn fine meal. Luckily for me, he got this meal at Sugiyama, a restaurant in NY. You can be sure I will be making a reservation the minute I know that I am going to be in town next.