Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeff6845 | Hacker News Reader

I spent quite a few years growing up in Japan back several decades ago, and my experience is that Japan is about efficiency. Most common foods were served in a bowl, not in smaller, highly decorate plates, and more of them. Food was always served prepared, meaning one did not need a knife or fork. One had to learn to use chopsticks, and for rice as well.

There were establishments that look close to the pictures if one searches the usual search engines, but I observed most food was eaten in the home, or packed in lunch boxes.

View on HN

> Most common foods were served in a bowl, not in smaller, highly decorate plates

Kaiseki ryori is not 'common food' (a good kaiseki meal in a major city is easily 30-50,000 JPY or more) so what the article is writing about and what the average Japanese meal is are two very different things.

定食 is usually served in five or six small dishes, and that’s definitely everyday food in Japan. The tableware is not often special, though.

This article is backward to me. I’ve lived in New York and Japan long enough to know that the best food in NYC is average in Japan. NYC is stuck on a weird old-fashioned idea that French cuisine is the pinnacle of dining out. I’ll take any 4+ Tabelog rated kaiseki restaurant in Kyoto over Le Bernardin or any other Michelin-rated celebrity chef vanity room every single time.

It's almost certainly personal taste, but I found kaiseki to be rather unappetizing when I visited. The presentation was absolutely wonderful, most of the food didn't align with my palette.

It turns out some simple, wholesome curry really does the trick.

>It turns out some simple, wholesome curry really does the trick.

Japanese or Indian curry? :) I was reading about Japanese cuisine recently, and saw that they have some dishes they call curry. But IIRC it was somewhat different from Indian "curries" [1], which are again very different from what passes for "curry" in the West (generally, though I'm sure there are places that do not use that term generically like that).

[1] There is no such thing as an Indian "curry", though many Westerners seem to think so (being misinformed by whoever, from West or East). It is an umbrella term that means a variety of dishes that are usually somewhat wet or with gravy, that is the only common point. Other than that, a curry can contain anything, be hot or not, veg or non-veg, etc.

Update: Checked the Wikipedia entry for curry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry

That article says something a bit different from what I said above, i.e. that "Curry was adopted and anglicised from the Tamil word kari meaning "sauce", which is usually understood to mean vegetables and/or meat cooked with spices with or without a gravy."

So the article emphasizes the spices, rather than the gravy, as I did. Could be. But the biggest thing to understand about India is that a lot of words / terms (not just in the area of food) are used quite loosely and with sometimes widely different meanings.

And then you get into differing meanings of 'gravy.' When I was on the Subcontinent, it meant what we in America would call a sauce; we use 'gravy' to mean a particular kind of sauce made from meat drippings.

Very weird at first for a Westerner to see vegetarian food described as having a gravy!

Ha ha, good one. And it emphasizes the point in my last paragraph, about the meaning of words. Yes, though curries are basically dishes in some sort of sauce, the word gravy is used here for that instead of sauce. It's probably only in a few high-end restaurants that they will call it a dish in a sauce (of some kind), on the menu, and when explaining it to customers. But another difference between Western sauces and gravy in India (the kind I said, used in curries), is that (as I understand it - not familiar with the details of Western cooking) the Western sauce is poured on the dish, or used from a saucer on the side, but in curries, the dish is cooked in the gravy - so the gravy is an integral part of the dish, not an add-on or pour-on.

Japanese curry! It may be one of my most favorite foods.

Cool, I must try it sometime :)

>NYC is stuck on a weird old-fashioned idea that French cuisine is the pinnacle of dining out.

How is this weird or old fashioned? French food is by far my favorite.

I'd agree it's not weird, but it definitely is old fashioned. The French invented haute cuisine (which is French for 'high cuisine') in the 17th century. In the west (and many places in the east) French food is considered fancy. I believe that's changing now, with the proliferation of well known chefs that come from all over the world. But, it's hard to shake tradition.

As someone who likes good French food a lot, I'd agree with the other comment that holding classic French cuisine as the ultimate dining experience feels a bit old fashioned. If someone handed me a wad of money in NYC and told me to go out and have a good meal, I might pick a more classically French restaurant but I'd probably be more likely to pick some more modern style of "farm to table" or whatever.

When I have French eating out, it's more likely to be a bistro-style restaurant. (Of course, that's partly because I rarely have really high-end meals in restaurants.

My original comment wasn’t very well written but spawned a lot of responses. I meant old fashioned in the Julia Child, two-sticks-of-butter-to-taste sense of French cuisine. Of course, real French food is as varied and worthy as any other food!

That's true--although I'd argue that there's still more of a set of specific rules, recipes, and techniques associated with most French cooking than with modern high-end cooking overall. In fact, I've heard it argued that one of the reasons that it's hard to replicate the best of French food outside of France is that such a specific supply chain exists for that particular cuisine.

We're probably splitting hairs at this point though. Once you go beyond classic French and bistro food (which do tend to have a fairly specific repertoire), the lines between where French ends and modern European or American begins gets pretty blurry.

Compared to other foods, I've found it's bland and expensive. Personally, if it's not hot, spicy, or savory, I probably don't care much for it. I find the same opionion in my 20-30 year old peers in NYC.

>I’ve lived in New York and Japan long enough to know that the best food in NYC is average in Japan.

It seems odd to deem the entire culinary culture of an international metropolis as being worth less than the mediocre fare of a country that puts corn and mayonnaise on pizza.

I'm not saying the best food in Japan isn't the best food in the world, but Japan's average is in no way better than the best in NYC. That's just silly.

...corn and mayonnaise on pizza.

That sounds amazing, and very vaguely like Mexican food.

There's no reason to believe that we in America have the final word on what pizza ought to be.

> There's no reason to believe that we in America have the final word on what pizza ought to be.

You might have forgotten an /s there at the end. Regards from Italy.

I'm amazed that at least three people bothered to downvote this. Pizza prejudice.

As someone who's also lived in NYC and been to Japan extensively, Japan's fast food and mid-level cuisine is a hell of a lot tastier and healthier than America's. Wrote a bit about Japanese fast food in another comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=15209105

That's a pretty bold and inaccurate brush you painted on Japanese cuisine. Yes western cuisine in Japan isn't that great, but who's eating western food in Japan? Funny you mention mayonnaise also because white Americans are stereotyped with eating mayonnaise sandwiches.

I'd agree with you comparing junk food to junk food, but the claim being contested here is that Japan's average is better than the best available food in New York, which is just an insult.

>Funny you mention mayonnaise also because white Americans are stereotyped with eating mayonnaise sandwiches.

I'm not even going to pretend that I didn't grow up eating fried spam sandwiches with mayonnaise and government cheese, on white bread no less. But that's neither here nor there.

If you read more favourably you can interpret OP as saying that the 'average' haute cuisine restaurant in Japan is better than the best in NYC. Which to me seems believable - at least the Michelin guide seems to somewhat agree. But I'm aware that I'm running into a no true scotsman fallacy there. Personally I don't have enough experience to say anything about haute cuisine, but I can say with certainty that at the low to mid end, Japan is in a completely different ballgame from the US.

In the US I essentially have a severe discoverability problem - there is great food, but you have to really hunt for it and do research to find it - sites like yelp are no help to me at all, a 5 star rating in the US translates to about a 2 star in Japan on tabelog, i.e. there's not enough resolution. Btw. in Europe the problem is usually the same, so that's not purely an American problem, more like Japan being an exception. There you can condidently walk into any place and get great food with about 70% success rate, and the other 30% is usually still good enough to not bother or even endanger you. A 3 star rating is standard, everything above promises greatness. Also, the accuracy with which Japanese can replicate (and often improve ok) Western food is surprising.

The mid-tier is far more consistent in Japan. The tradeoff is it mainly only includes Japanese food. Which is vast and amazing. But in my experience I'd say a "typical" Japanese restaurant is of higher quality than a "typical" Western restaurant. The tradeoff is that you have more variety and acceptance (and embrace) in the West.

Tokyo is better if you have 2 weeks. NYC is better if you have a year. At least today.

I don't think mid-tier only includes Japanese. Since at least the 80s it has become common for Japanese to train as chefs, pastry makers, bakers and cheese makers in Europe and NYC. They usually return and open up their own small restaurants in Japan. Tokyo is full of micro restaurants with 12-30 seats that have been started this way and their quality is very often top notch, so much that it is now often cheaper and better to eat certain dishes in Japab rather their original place. For certain things Tokyo has developed enough that Japanese can now learn it there just as well - Napoli Pizza or French pastry are examples. This goes all the way back to Tempura, a Portuguese import.

What is missing is the more exotic stuff. Latin American, Middle Eastern and African cuisines are underrepresented compared to Western megacities.

I've only spent limited time in Tokyo and was probably hunting for Japanese specific food so my observation is likely biased by that.

But yeah I think you're touching on my point which is there's just much more breadth in NYC.

I had thought you were saying that American food is better than Japanese food, my mistake. Yea as much as I love Japanese food, I wouldn't agree with the statement that NYC's best is superior to Japan's average.

I'm not quite sure what the OP meant, but I think that your rephrasing is not necessarily the same statement. It seems to me that "is average in Japan" is indicating that the eater would not consider it special. It doesn't imply that "average" food in Japan would be considered special either.

From my perspective, I think Japanese people would be impressed by the very, very top restaurants in NY. After all, Masaharu Morimoto (Iron Chef Japan -- as people were talking about Iron Chef...) was head chef at Nobu in Manhattan.

Having said that, restaurants in Japan (especially izakayas) have shockingly good food -- even (especially?) out in the countryside. It's pretty hard for me to think of a (non Michelin star) restaurant in a major North American city that has food as good as the local izakaya in my town (admittedly it is famous in the area). It would cost me a month's salary to eat the same quality of food in a fancy restaurant in the west. But there are factory workers who eat (and mostly drink...) there every day, without going broke.

I think that's probably true of a lot countries, though. I mean, is there a paella restaurant in Valencia that will not blow your mind? Or if you walk into any hole in the wall in Marseille, of course you are expecting one of the best seafood experiences of your life. Maltashen and sauerkraut in any random inn in Bavaria; Fish and chips in an authentic "chippy" on the coast of the UK. And let's face it: coal fired (don't hate me, gas lovers!) pizza shop in Manhattan.

I'll be honest, I don't think this is much to do with Japan. I think its more to do with the move towards glizty chain restaurants with mediocre food - dumbed down both for the audience and the preparers. To open a viable restaurant these days you need $2 million in capital and the risks are enormous. Especially in big centres like NY, London, etc, the costs of running a restaurant are so huge that you can't afford to run just a ridiculously good local pub, filled with local cuisine.

Why are there so many great izakayas and restaurants in Tokyo and (especially) Osaka, then? Because they are 3-4 generations old and the children of the owners are expected to (and groomed to) take over the shop. The shop is the entire life of a family for multiple generations -- no franchises, no sunny holidays in Okinawa, no merchandising, no fancy-pants buildings. Just making amazing yakitori (or whatever) every single day from the time you are 18 until you die. You are a fixture in your community and the people who live and work in that community love you. They visit you for dinner, for special occasions, or even just to chat. If the shop closes down, people practically have a funeral for it.

I think modern day western culture frowns on this kind of life. While I can understand that perspective, it's one the things I like about living in rural Japan. Like I said, though, I don't think it's just Japan. It exists everywhere in every culture -- it's just more obvious in some places than others.

OP here. It’s funny that you mentioned Morimoto. I’ve been to two of his restaurants in NYC—Morimoto and the ramen one. They were both just OK in terms of food by Japanese standards, and the service was atrocious by Japanese standards. Our waiter at Morimoto complained to us that he had to leave so we should close out our bill. If something like this happened in any restaurant in Japan, it would be eye-popping, jaw-dropping embarrassing. It kind of proves my point that what New Yorkers fawn over as their best restaurants are, by Japanese standards, maybe a begrudging C+.

I’ve eaten in so many “Emperor has no clothes” michelin-starred restaurants at this point that I would pass for something truly brilliant but not hyped at all. For example, udon at Kendon in Fushimi Inari, or tanmen at New Tamaya in Nagoya, hanbagu from Tsumugi Kitchen in Nagoya, gyuniku from Kuroushi in Handa, or even Italian from Pepe Rosso in Sancha, Tokyo. These places will melt your brain and I doubt any of them rates above 4 on Tabelog.

In Japan, you have to go out of your way to eat bad food and get bad service. In New York, it’s an effort to find both good food and passing service, even in the Michelin ranks.

I’ll throw a bone to NYC: Marc Forgione has a damn good restaurant in Tribeca, and Sole di Capri (also Tribeca) is amazing and under the radar.

> This article is backward to me. I’ve lived in New York and Japan long enough to know that the best food in NYC is average in Japan.

Not sure what you mean (as a former Tokyo, Paris and New York denizen myself). If you mean midrange and daily meals are better in Tokyo I'd tend to agree, though lukewarmly. Fast food? No way, a greasy katsu is as bad as a crummy slice of pizza,

But for the high end experiences described in this article (typically €1200/$1500/¥20,000 per person -- though Manresa is cheaper!) I'd say country has little to do with it. Though I find those experiences excessively fussy. If I'm going to spend five hours on a meal I'd rather the food and environment fade into the background so I can enjoy the company.

I much prefer Japanese fast food as it's significantly more delicious and healthier. Go into any convenience store and you can get a tasty and healthy onigiri for $1, or a little bento box style meal for maybe $3-4. Of course there's also ramen/udon/soba/yakisoba, curry, okonomiyaki, etc, and all can be had for $3-10 (no tip). Also Tokyo is more of a true 24/7 city, whereas in NYC your options after 11pm are generally limited to cheap pizza, hot dogs, and halal (unless of course you hit up some Japanese restaurants on St. Marks or go to Korea Town).

The thing NYC has going for it is variety. But overall, I still prefer Japanese food.

24/7? Name me a single place in Tokyo with a Michelin star that is open after one a.m please.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com