Doesn't TaZte Like Chicken

Some people say you are what you eat.  Or as Brillat-Savarin famously said, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”.  Wow, if things could really become that simple, who would have the need for psychiatry?  Should Jeffrey Dahmer’s diet have clued off those around him as to his serial-killing proclivities?  Or should the food a young Al Capone liked to eat have tipped off the Feds as to the criminal kingpin he would become?  Or maybe the particular type of kimchi Kim Il Sung ate should have been warning enough for Stalin to not install him as North Korea’s dictator?  Hmm…perhaps food could be used to predict the predilection of people to do wrong – imagine an alternate version of Minority Report where the predictions were based on what the pre-criminals ate instead of the visions of three bald psychics.  Or maybe not.

I think that a truer and less ambitious statement is “you eat the things you can stand to look at”.  That’s why most people have no problems eating fish, chicken, pork, or beef – because it’s not hard to look at a fish, chicken, pig or cow and imagine yourself eating it.  But it becomes a lot harder when you start to look at other viable food types such as snakes, crocodiles, insects, rats, etc, doesn’t it?

In fact, even elongated fish, looking suspiciously like snakes, present challenges for some people.  For tourists, passing by a jellied eel stand in London and deciding to have a taste is like walking by a large-holed pencil sharpener and deciding to stick your finger in; you don’t do it, because you know the consequences wouldn’t be particularly pleasant.  The problem is jellied eels still look like eel, just chunked up.  And well, how’s that different than chunked up snakes in jelly?

The Japanese eat a lot of eel.  And they do so by making it look highly sophisticated and appetizing.  Like the below.  Who wouldn’t want to have a go at that?

  
And there’s no better place to eat unagi in Japan, since the eels are mostly caught in the seas of Japan.  Japanese eels have better texture and less bones, which makes for a much more pleasant eating experience than the Chinese eels more commonly seen in Vancouver.  The fantastic dishes above were eaten at this restaurant in the Osaka Daimaru on Shinshaibashi.

I logged into Doesn’t TaZte Like Chicken this evening and realized that our last post was made in July sometime.  That’s a rather long time…

…and if I had to be honest, the reason we haven’t posted anything lately was because we had become pretty bored with the Vancouver food scene. Yes, we have heard all the superlatives.  Yes, we have heard that Vancouver has the most variety in the land when it comes to cuisine types.  Yes, we have heard that many a mom-and-pop from elsewhere have settled in Vancouver to grace us with their lovingly cooked food.  Yes, we have heard that Vancouver is home to the best Chinese food outside of China.  Yes, we have heard that Vancouver is the foodie paradise of North America.  And so on and so on…

Yet why then, are our experiences in many of the local restaurants so mediocre?  It’s not that the food is outright bad.  It’s more that we are hard pressed to find anything that particularly stands out in taste or service.  There may be a large number of restaurants here, but if you classify them across cuisine types, they all pretty much end up with the same items on their menus.  If I were playing a “what if” game, I would imagine that if When Harry Met Sally was filmed in a Vancouver restaurant, Meg Ryan would have faked an epileptic seizure instead of an orgasm, and the entire movie would have been a flop.  Such was the level of our jadedness.

I’ve developed a theory that I call The Shampoo Theory of Food.  You know how it is that if you use one particular brand of shampoo for a long time, it loses its effectiveness on your hair?  My theory is simply that if you spend too much time eating in one city, your tastebuds effectively loses their ability to taste anything.  So, per my theory, my wife and I would have to take a trip and eat meals in different places for our tastebuds to come right back to life.  And that’s what we did.

I have a friend who religiously travels to Japan for holidays every year, and I used to joke that he has probably been the single largest individual Canadian contributor to that country’s GDP over the last little while.  Turns out that I shouldn’t have laughed, since my wife and I have been bitten by the Japan bug as well.  For the second year in a row, Christina and I went to Japan, to Osaka (with side trips to Kyoto and Nagoya) this time.

Why?  Well, the people are unfailingly polite, even when clumsy gaijins are clueless about the lingo and have a tendency to drag huge luggage cases onto the trains, slowing them down.  Everything is clean and the trains are always on time. (I love trains!)

Honest non-haggle pricing.  That’s a big one.  I am not fond of places where I am expected to haggle when I want to buy something.  I never know how much to knock off – too little and I feel ripped off, too much and you get that mouth-agape, eyes-wide about-to-faint look from the vendor, “…wah, that is less than my cost, you want to bankrupt me ah?”  None of this nonsense in Japan.

Culture, and food culture, which has evolved over centuries. Much longer than Canada has been a nation.  Think about that for a second.  Takoyaki originated in Osaka, and this red devil chain is a popular vendor.

Beautiful Architecture, both new and old.

Interesting supersized neon.  C’mon, who doesn’t like this stuff?

A cool aquarium which our little penguin really enjoyed.

And did I mention the food?  Different food, food that will jump start our tastebuds and un-jade us.  Osakans are famous for living to eat, and eating central is right here in Dotonbori.

And of course, shopping.  Shopping central being Shinshaibashi.

It’s been over a month since we last put an entry on the blog. Time flies when life gets in the way, doesn’t it? Work, travel and other hobbies have been making much demands on our free time, and we’ve had to oblige lest we go stir crazy from lack of variety. Certainly, food is one of our interests, but we decided to take a short break from writing about cooking and eating so that we could get a new (and perhaps fresher) perspective on the kind of material to put on this blog.

Going back and reading through the entries on this blog, they could best be described as a collage of procedural articles on cooking or play-by-play descriptions of where and what we’ve eaten. And that is really quite different than how we had originally envisioned our posts to be. Christina had started this blog with the intention of sharing different out-of-the-ordinary experiences with other people. She wanted to not only describe the food, but also relate it to memories or experiences that others could identify with. This is of course easy to conceptualize but a lot harder to execute. Banging out post after post with “meaning” in relatively short order did not come easily or naturally, and we soon found ourselves falling into the habit of writing a diary about what we cooked and where we ate. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it just isn’t what we had started out to do.

Those of you who watch Top Gear will know who Jeremy Clarkson is. For those who don’t, Clarkson is an English television personality and auto journalist with a carefully cultivated polarizing personality. You either love to hate him or hate to love him. Mostly, it has to do with him being a right prat on occassion, which is pretty much in keeping with his act of being a 12-year old trapped in a 50-year-old 6′4″ body. He is also a bloody brilliant journalist. He is supposed to write about cars, but if you read his work, you will find that he does just about anything but. Most auto journalists follow a standard formula when writing an article – they describe the car, describe the features/options/prices, describe the drive, etc etc. It’s all very informative and very technical and chock full of information. In fact, it’s everything except entertaining. Clarkson on the other hand, couldn’t care less about any of the stuff the other journos get in a huff over. Sure, he might give a perfunctory description of the features in a car (usually in the context of something he finds silly), but what he mainly does is to write about the car against the backdrop of a larger, funnier metaphorical story. For instance, how could anybody relate poor eyesight to a Citroen C5? Clarkson can, nonsensical though it may be. We enjoy his humor (and studied insults) – take the following two paragraphs for example:

In two short paragraphs, he manages to slag off an English town and diss three cultures while making (rather effectively) a point about the car’s shape and quality. No, Clarkson’s not Hemingway. His articles are by no means the height of intellectually stimulating or thought-provoking writing. In fact, Clarkson’s articles are sometimes downright silly. But they are always good for a light, entertaining read.

That “entertaining” quality is something that we are working hard to capture in our future posts. No, we don’t have the comedic writing talent of Clarkson, but that’s no reason not to try. If our attempts don’t come off well, the only people suffering will be you, our readers! No skin off our backs really. Maybe it will work out, maybe it won’t, but we’re sure going to give it a whirl. Watch this space…

Christina & ET