Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  Believe it or not, that last show, Kodoku No Gurume (The Lonely Gourmet), has been one of the most popular things on Japanese TV since its debut in 2012. Based on a bestselling comic and recently finishing its fifth season, The Lonely Gourmet has spawned hour-long specials, an iPhone app, and a series of collectible toys, all featuring its unlikely hero, European furnishings importer Gorō Inogashira.

  By Western standards, it’s confounding television. Essentially—and without hyperbole—it is pornography, with food in place of sex. It’s a drama held together with the loosest of narratives, one where our protagonist is grudgingly placed in some vaguely plotlike situation, and before the first act is even over… bow chicka bow—it’s tempura time.

  Here is a typical episode of Kodoku, specifically season five, episode six: Gorō arrives in the O-okayama neighborhood of Tokyo and walks from the train station to a business meeting. He’s tall, slim, and wearing a conservative navy suit. “If I’m able to land the deal today, it’ll likely be a big one,” he says in voice-over. He sits at a conference table with the boss, who has hired Gorō to refurnish the company’s office. Gorō presses him about the details: What kind of office environment are you looking for?

  “We just need to spend the rest of our fiscal year budget,” says the boss, typing on his laptop. “In the end, how much money you make is all that matters, right?”

  “I must decline,” says Gorō. He runs out of the office into the street, where he immediately gets hungry.

  It’s important to note that we are now only four minutes into a 30-minute show. Here we’ve come to the narrative pivot, as nonsensical as a hunky plumber appearing at the door. Gorō’s eyes lock. The loins stir with anticipation. The camera reveals a neighborhood fish restaurant. This shall be Gorō’s conquest. He steps in, takes a seat at the counter. He orders a set meal with sashimi and stewed fish, with side dishes of omelet, simmered tofu, mustard greens, and white rice. It is sultry in every way.

  Tenderly, graphically, Gorō inserts food into his mouth. Gorō eats, slurps, and moans, all the while maintaining a stoic exterior. But his inside voice speaks in utter satisfaction: “Delicious sashimi, soy sauce, and white rice. I’m glad I’m Japanese.” At one point the camera pans slowly over fish tartare while a song that sounds a lot like Yello’s “Oh Yeah” plays.

  And that’s how it plays out for the remainder of the episode. The soundtrack gets manic. Gorō, as if he can hear the music, eats faster. Groaning, he finishes off the meal without spilling anything on his tie. Finally, he thanks the staff and walks out, stuffed, muttering something about how a good lunch has washed away the gloominess of walking away from that big job. Roll credits.

  Here’s the even weirder thing: As a title card at the end of every episode reminds us, Kodoku is a fictional drama. Everyone who appears on the show—Gorō, the chef, the hostess, the old guy who sits next to Gorō at the restaurant and puts some of his sashimi into a Tupperware for later—is an actor. But the restaurants featured on the show are real, as is the food.

  Kodoku isn’t unique in featuring real restaurants on a fictional drama. Another recent hit show, Ramen Daisuki Koizumi-San, follows an eccentric, ramen-obsessed high school student as she visits actual ramen shops around Tokyo. But Gorō hits bars and diners, noodle shops and tempura places, which makes it a great introduction to the awesome diversity of everyday Japanese food.

  So what do people love about these shows, anyway? In part, Japanese viewers have an insatiable appetite for insatiable appetites, especially when the eater is improbably slim. A few years ago, the country fell in love with a competitive eater named Gal Sone, an adorable sub-100-pound woman who could put away 10 pounds of curry in a few minutes. Japan also has its own version of Korean Mukbang videos, the cultural sensation where a YouTuber calmly devours a massive meal while addressing their fans. (Mukbang stars, many of whom are women, can be paid as much as $10,000 a month to eat on camera.)

  Still, Kodoku No Gurume isn’t a celebration of gluttony. When Gorō orders four times as much food as an ordinary customer, it’s so we can see more of the restaurant’s menu come to life—not so we can get off on watching him pack more into his own slim frame. Unlike many of the more blasé Mukbang personalities, Yutaka Matsushige, the actor who plays Gorō, is so much fun to watch. If there were a show where he played an electronics repairman who mused about life over extreme close-ups of circuit boards and red-hot soldering irons, I’d probably watch that, too.

  There’s something so inexplicably, universally appealing about Kodoku, in fact, my daughter, Iris, and I have watched them all together; it’s one of the only shows we can agree on. (Now, when I chide Iris for pouring soy sauce over her rice before eating, she’ll say, “Dad, Gorō does that all the time.” I can’t argue.) So when my family decided to spend two weeks in Tokyo this past July, we realized, “Hey, we could actually go somewhere Gorō ate. How about season five, episode six?”

  The fish restaurant from that episode is named Kue. It has a cute blue roof and sits on a quiet corner near O-okayama Station. My wife and daughter and I squeezed into a communal table along with a couple of old women and a lone businessman (younger than Gorō) who seemed to be on his lunch break. We ordered what Gorō ordered: the Kue set lunch, which is about $12 for an improbable amount of food.

  The restaurant holds about two dozen people, and as far as we could tell, all of them ordered the Kue lunch set. For half an hour, nobody got any food, and then the set meals started coming out from the kitchen one after another, and you could witness the faces brightening across the restaurant in a wave. I peered at my fellow diners’ trays and saw that the sashimi and simmered fish assortment was laid out according to the chef’s whim.

  The whole experience felt like some bizarre combination of Space Mountain, the Travel Channel, and sitting at the When Harry Met Sally orgasm table at Katz’s Delicatessen. It was crossing the fourth wall into a make-believe world. It felt impossible, like Pleasantville with miso soup. It took me a long time to figure out why. What’s the difference between following Guy Fieri and following Gorō Inogashira?

  The makers of Kodoku understand that one of the best ways to get at the truth is to apply a thin veneer of fiction. Bring a camera crew into a restaurant and the place changes. What’s more uncomfortable than a person waving a camera in your face and saying, “Just do what you normally do”? Paradoxically, you can re-create the experience of eating at a neighborhood restaurant more faithfully by giving the staff (and customers) the day off and bringing in actors who are used to working on camera and giving us multiple takes until they nail the banter with the hostess.

  Want proof? Just keep watching Kodoku No Gurume after the credits roll, when Masayuki Qusumi (who also wrote the Kodoku comic) visits the same restaurant. It’s everything you expect from a mediocre food show: bad audio, weirdly enthusiastic voice-over, a stilted conversation with the chef. “Make this go away,” you want to yell at the screen. “Give me the real restaurant back! I mean… the fake one.”

  If the thrill of watching fake people eat real food has awakened anything in you, you can stream every episode of Kodoku for free, albeit illegally, with excellent unofficial English subtitles written by a group of fans.

  In New York City, What’s the Difference Between a $240 Sushi Roll and a $6.95 Sushi Roll?

  BY GREG ROSALSKY

  From Pacific Standard

  A producer at Freakonomics Radio, Greg Rosalsky understandably is focused on economic metrics when he examines the dining scene in New York City. His analysis, however, lays bare some telling points about the gap between the haves and the have-nots in America today.

  Columbus Circle sits at the southwest corner of Central Park in New York City. At its center, a statue of Christopher Columbus peers over a sea of people, as though looking for land, while yellow taxis whirl around him. The tallest structure around the circle is the Time Warner Center. It’s a modern glassy building with twin 80-story towers, housing the headqua
rters of the eponymous media conglomerate, a hotel, a jazz concert hall, and a luxury shopping mall. If you enter through the building’s giant glass facade, you’ll pass by a Hugo Boss, a Whole Foods, and a Williams Sonoma. Take a series of escalators up to the fourth floor, turn right and you’ll reach Masa—the most expensive restaurant in the United States.

  Masa was founded by the sushi wizard Masayoshi Takayama. Born and raised in Japan, Takayama, 62, built a cult following in Beverly Hills during the 1980s and ’90s and was lured east to work his magic when the $2 billion Time Warner Center was finished in 2004. Masa is one of the crown jewels in the center’s “Restaurant Collection,” which is best thought of as the world’s most extravagant food court.

  With the exception of the H&M you pass to get there, everything about Masa screams luxury. The sushi bar, hewn from one solid 30-foot piece of blonde hinoki wood at a cost nearly twice that of a new Mercedes Benz, is sanded daily for cleanliness. Much of its fish, the restaurant says, is flown in fresh from the Sea of Japan. The restaurant is “omakase,” meaning Takayama hand selects the menu each night. On one recent Saturday night, appetizers included toro tartare with caviar, steamed king crab, and Ohmi beef with Bianchetto truffle. That was followed by a long list of sushi, from toro (tuna) to shimaji (striped jack) to hotate (bay scallop). Finally came dessert: grapefruit granite and buckwheat tea.

  Food critics go crazy for this place. Masa’s long list of awards includes the coveted three-star rating from the Michelin guidebook, a distinction held by only six restaurants in the Big Apple. Anthony Bourdain wrote that his experience at Masa was “a completely over-the-top exercise in pure self-indulgence, like having sex with two five-thousand-dollar-a-night escorts at the same time—while driving an Aston Martin.” It’s a hedonistic food orgy that comes at a mind-boggling price: a minimum of $1,200 for a couple, not including tax or drinks.

  Takayama co-owns another restaurant just across Central Park called Kappo Masa. The menu there is a la carte and slightly cheaper, but just barely. Options include a sushi roll that’s $240, a steak that’s $68, and a bottle of sake that’s $2,650. This restaurant has not been as warmly received by critics. Pete Wells, a food critic for the New York Times, wrote in his review of the restaurant last year: “The cost of eating at Kappo Masa is so brutally, illogically, relentlessly high, and so out of proportion to any pleasure you may get, that large numbers start to seem like uninvited and poorly behaved guests at the table.” Wells gave the restaurant zero stars.

  Kappo Masa is located on Madison Ave. in the Lenox Hill neighborhood of the Upper East Side, sandwiched between Central Park and the luxury apartment buildings of Park Avenue. Across the street are multimillion-dollar art galleries, the Carlyle Hotel (with rooms ranging from $400 to $15,000-plus per night), and Vera Wang Bride, a store for the designer’s wedding dresses (the starting price of one is $2,900). Wang is a regular at Kappo Masa, and so are many other locals. They can, after all, afford it. With a median household income of an estimated $217,070 per year, the blocks around Kappo Masa are some of the richest in New York City.

  Fifty blocks north of Kappo Masa and across the Harlem River we find a very different economic reality, and a very different market for fish. The South Bronx neighborhood of Mott Haven is the poorest neighborhood in the city. In fact, with a median household income of $19,536 a year and a poverty rate of near 50 percent, Mott Haven and its neighbor, Port Morris, represent the poorest zip code in the poorest congressional district of the entire U.S. In some areas of Mott Haven and Port Morris, a typical household could save for an entire month, without paying rent or any other expenses, and they still wouldn’t have enough for a single dinner date at Masa.

  When it comes to addressing poverty and inequality, making artisanal sushi accessible to the poor has got to be at the bottom of the list of priorities. But food disparities remain a real problem—one that is manifested in issues like higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease among South Bronxites—and it’s an issue reflected in the lower rate of fish consumption among the poor. Fish, which is low in fat and rich in protein, vitamins, minerals, and omega-3 fatty acids, is considered by experts to be an integral part of a healthy diet (especially if it is not fried and if it contains low levels of mercury). One influential meta-analysis of 20 studies in this area concluded that regular consumption of fatty fish like salmon, mackerel, and herring “reduces risk of coronary death by 36 percent.” The Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency recommend that Americans, especially pregnant women and young children, eat “at least 8 ounces and up to 12 ounces (2–3 servings) per week of a variety of fish that are lower in mercury to support fetal growth and development”—a recommendation they’re concerned that many Americans are not following.

  Part of the reason scholars and activists have believed that low-income households choose junk food over fresh fish and vegetables is that a lot of poor neighborhoods lack access to anything fresh and wholesome. Mott Haven and Port Morris have long been labeled “food deserts,” places where the glow of fast-food signs light up the night streets but healthier restaurants and grocery stores are hard, or impossible, for families to find. In recent years, there has been a coordinated city effort at the federal, state, and local levels to change this scenario.

  Yet, in an uncomfortable irony, amid the effort to bring healthier food options to the area, the South Bronx is home to the world’s largest wholesale food distributors, including none other than the Fulton Fish Market, the second biggest fish market on Earth. The Fulton market, which enjoyed a 180-year stint in lower Manhattan, moved to new facilities in the South Bronx in 2005. It distributes across the Eastern seaboard—and its clients include Masa.

  Mott Haven and Port Morris have their local seafood restaurants, too, even if they’re far outnumbered by McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts. At Jay’s Fish Market, which distributes raw fish but also functions as an eat-in restaurant, you can get raw red snapper for $5.99 per pound and a (rather tasty but not healthy) fried bluefish sandwich and French fries for $5.50. There was also Sea Food Kingz, until it went out of business. But the most interesting of the bunch is a sushi joint.

  When I found out about Ceetay Asian Fusion, I was first surprised that it even existed and then doubly so that it had 4.5 out of 5 stars (with 178 reviews) on Yelp, so I called them up and scheduled an interview with the owner. Biking there from Brooklyn on a sweltering afternoon in late May, I passed Kappo Masa, scanned their menu (out of my price range), and continued pedaling up Madison Avenue into East Harlem.

  The most recent Census data shows that median household income begins to plummet once you get north of the Upper East Side, starting at 96th street. It’s a fact that becomes clear when you begin to see brick public-housing towers rising up into the sky and business-casual white people give way to working-class blacks and Latinos. The thought of what they could do with $2,650—the cost of a bottle of sake at Kappo Masa—popped into my head, and the world seemed crueler. I continued over the Harlem River.

  Ceetay Asian Fusion was created by Amir Chayon in 2012. It’s a small place that seats about 25. When I walked through the door, I asked for the owner; Chayon was standing nearby talking to two men and told me he would be a few minutes, so I sat down and glanced at the menu. Lunch specials started at $9.45. This was my kind of place.

  Chayon, 42, seemed to be on a first-name basis with many of his customers: hungry Bronxites of every race and ethnicity. The restaurateur himself is originally from Israel, with piercing blue eyes and an athletic build. On the day we met, he was wearing blue jeans, a purple shirt, a neck-chain, and black sneakers. His journey to the South Bronx began eight years ago when he first arrived in New York City. In Israel, Chayon had been an aspiring actor and paid his bills working in restaurants. Arriving in Manhattan, he scanned a newspaper for jobs and found one as a general manager of a bar and grill in Mott Haven, just a couple of blocks from where Ceetay now stands.

  “I didn’
t think much about the neighborhood. I couldn’t care less,” he says. “Then I got an apartment here right away. And I started working here. All of a sudden my life is the South Bronx.”

  Ceetay sits in the amorphous space where Mott Haven and Port Morris collide. Across the street, amid stylish graffiti, sit a tattoo parlor, a run-down antique shop, and Fordham Gospel Mission, a church with a purple awning that inhabits what used to be a storefront. Two short blocks away from the restaurant on Alexander Avenue are the Mitchel Houses, a public-housing project of 10 imposing brick towers ranging from 17 to 20 stories tall. It’s a complex with a long history of crime and gang-related violence.

  Chayon says in his first years in the neighborhood, he was scared to let his wife walk alone at night. But he was happy living there, especially with his low-rent loft apartment. While managing a bar and befriending the locals, Chayon began to plan his own place. He knew the restaurant business and he knew his neighborhood and he knew creating a place that served strictly sushi would be an economic loser—so he decided on Asian fusion. It’s a business strategy that combines the first sushi bar in the South Bronx with key staples of Americanized Asian cuisine: fried rice, pad thai, chicken tikka masala, and so on. Every morning, Chayon’s supplier brings in fish fresh from the Fulton Fish Market.

  Crime, Chayon says, is not as bad as it once was in the South Bronx. And the numbers back him up. The New York Police Department’s 40th precinct, the two square miles at the southern tip of the Bronx that includes Mott Haven, Port Morris, and the Fulton Fish Market, has seen an estimated 70 percent decline in crime since 1990, including an 87 percent decline in murder, a 50 percent decline in assaults, and a 92 percent decline in car thefts. That said, it remains one of the most troubled areas of the city, and, while it is undoubtedly much safer than it was, some of the NYPD’s more optimistic data has, on occasion, come into question.