Tag Archives: dinner

Japanese food

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Typically, when Dan or I first speak to someone who knows (or finds out) that we’ve just returned from Japan, their first question is:

“Did you love it?”

This is an easy question to answer:

“Yes!”

Surprisingly, the almost universal second question is:

“What did you think of the food?”

The answer to this question is much more complicated. First, from a visual design perspective alone, the food is stunningly beautiful. Beautifully made, beautifully arranged, and beautifully presented.

From a taste perspective, the food is not always as accessible. Much of this, I’m sure, is cultural. The Japanese eat many more kinds of things than Americans do. See, for example, the menu pages below, which were photographed in a restaurant window, notable in part because the names of the offered items were in some cases written in English, and in other cases diagrammed quite clearly.

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I, for one, am not much interested in trying grilled tuna larynx or simmered tuna head. This doesn’t mean that they’re not good; it just means that we Americans have a cultural bias away from some of the things that the Japanese have learned to savor. Also, the Japanese appreciate subtleties of taste and texture to which we Americans have largely been unexposed. In other words, when it comes to Japanese food, we Americans have a decidedly uneducated palate. This is no doubt why the question about Japanese food invariably comes up so early in the conversation.

Dan and I had hoped that a trip to Japan might educate our palates as we were exposed to the real thing. Disappointingly, this didn’t quite happen.

On our fourth night in Tokyo, for example, we made a reservation at an elegant Japanese restaurant near our hotel for a kaiseki dinner. This is a formal dinner of many courses made of seasonally fresh ingredients prepared and served in the most time-honored and elegant Japanese tradition. Some care is taken to ensure that the menu is acceptable to the diners, and so, for example, the restaurant made sure that our dinner did not include the meat of any mammals, which Dan and I do not eat. We are shown to a private room, furnished in the Japanese manner with a low table and two chairs. Here is the menu of that dinner:

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It looks like a wonderful culinary adventure! Not everything is clear, examining the menu–I mean, for example, “Narrowing morphism boiled conger of chrysanthemum turnip”–but we’re game to try! Here is what the table looks like when we sit down to eat.

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Our lovely and gracious waitress removed the tops of the pottery dishes to reveal:

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It’s not really clear what all of this is, exactly, but it’s certainly lovely. And we can determine, for example, that the green things are vegetables, almost certainly peppers, and that the light-colored squarish things are almost certainly fish. We’re not sure about the rest of it, but I especially like the <whatever it is> that looks like a turning-color autumn maple leaf. Anyhow, not being able to identify our food by sight turns out not to matter because almost none of it tastes or has the texture we expected from looking at it. Some of it is quite tasty. Some of it is decidedly, er, chewy.

We eat it all, and our waitress, who speaks very little English (but in all fairness more than my Japanese), comes in to reveal the next course by removing the lids of the boxes in front of us.

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This is very beautiful, but it’s about at this point that we entirely give up trying to map our meal to our menu or to identify any of it by sight. We set aside the things that don’t appear to be food, and we eat the rest of it. Some of it, we enjoy. Some of it, we are seriously wondering what it is, because we don’t want to mistakenly order it again anytime in the future.

It’s about now that Dan discovers the following mysterious object on our table:

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We are beginning to feel a lot like the apes in the beginning of “2001: A Space Odyssey” scratching their heads in wonder as they examine the mysterious black monolith. When our waitress comes in next, we ask her about it. It turns out to be a call button for her. But, alas, the help we need with this dinner goes way beyond what her English can handle. On to the next course and the next!

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We eat everything that we can and much more than we should. We are glad for the experience but a little bit uneasy about the dinner we will have the following night. We’ve ordered half-board at the ryokan (inn) where we will be staying, but we can’t believe we’ll ever be hungry again.

To be continued . . .

mmm — Milliways

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It doesn’t happen very often that Dan and I dine in a restaurant so extraordinary that we are put in mind of Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. (For those of you who don’t already know about Milliways, the best short description of it can probably be found here; scroll down to ‘M’.)

But tonight, we were very, very close.

The name of the restaurant is Tidal Raves, in Depoe Bay, Oregon. Okay, so we didn’t deposit a penny a million billion years ago to pay for the meal, but even with wine and a martini, dinner for two came to less than a hundred dollars. The service was outstanding. The food (fresh wild coho salmon with dungeoness crab risotto; wild Pacific snapper with smoked salmon potato cake; summer vegetables; salad with berries and shrimp) was superb. And the view…

Well, that’s what makes Milliways Milliways, isn’t it?

We sat at a corner table by the windows and looked out over the Pacific ocean as the evening descended.

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And there were grey whales breaching in the waters just outside. It just doesn’t get any better than this.

Usenix 1985

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I didn’t get it right when I told this tale the other day, but it’s all coming back to me now.

The events in this story occurred in the winter of 1985 at the Usenix Conference in Dallas, Texas. I was working for a company in Cambridge, MA called Mirror Systems (a wholly owned subsidiary of the Times Mirror Corporation, a major publishing conglomerate). I was the Vice President of Technical Development. Our IS group, under my management, comprised two people: our operations manager and our systems programmer. We used the UNIX operating system, and so the Usenix conference was an important event to these people and to some of the developers as well. The company sent perhaps eight people to the conference. I went too. I went because as manager of a UNIX shop, I felt the need to know as much as I could about the technical environment.

Now, like many subsidiaries of major corporations, Mirror Systems, despite its small size, was subject to intense financial controls by the parent company. And like many technically oriented companies, especially in Cambridge, its internal culture resisted such control. The people who attended the Usenix conference were among the most technical of our staff and therefore in general were among the most resistant to the financial bureaucracy our parent company imposed. And among the technical staff, none was more resistant than our systems programmer Franklin, Unix wizard extraordinaire.

Mirror Systems employees were subject to limits imposed by the parent corporation on how much we could expense for a breakfast, lunch, or dinner. And expenses over a certain amount (perhaps $25) had to be accompanied by a receipt. Wanting to have one dinner at a particularly good (and expensive) restaurant in Dallas, those of us traveling to the conference agreed that we’d skimp on dinner expenses for the rest of the conference in order to afford this one splurge of a meal.

Eight of us were present for dinner. The meal was great. The wine was excellent. When the bill came, Franklin picked up the tab and put it on his credit card. This surprised me—he wasn’t much of one for dealing with finances—but he assured me he wanted to do it.

When Franklin’s expense report crossed my desk the following week, I saw at once the amusing pattern that had prompted his eagerness to pick up the check. For the entire duration of the conference, he had expensed only $5 for each meal—probably less than he had actually spent. There were no accompanying receipts for these expenses, none being required. And for the one dinner, he had expensed the entire tab for a meal for eight at a pricy restaurant—perhaps $600. It made me laugh. I approved the expense report and submitted it to our comptroller for processing.

The next day, the president of the company called me into his office. The comptroller was there. He looked very upset, and the president no less so. “What is the meaning of this expense report?” asked the president.

“I know it’s a lot for one dinner,” I explained, “but there were eight of us there. See, Franklin has listed the attendees. We all ate very inexpensively all week long so that we could have this one meal. Look at all the expense reports, and you’ll see.”

“That’s not the problem,” said the comptroller. “I can’t submit this to corporate.”

“But why not?”

“This will stand out like a police car with its lights on. If we submit something like this, we’ll get audited for sure. And that will be more work for me than you can imagine.”

“Why would they audit us? The expense report is legitimate. If anything, Franklin has cheated only himself by understating the amounts he actually spent on meals.”

“That’s exactly the problem! Who spends exactly $5.00 on every meal, all week long? It looks too suspicious. You have to tell him to vary the amounts.”

“You mean, submitting $600.00 for one meal is okay; it’s the $5.00 meals that are the problem? And if he submits some meals for $5.00, some for $6.50, some for $8.95, that would be okay, even though it would cost the company more?”

 “Yes!” Relief shone on the comptroller’s face.

And so I had to tell Franklin that the pattern was really beautiful, but that we needed random numbers here. And so it was done.

And no, we didn’t get audited.