The Interactivity of Food

Yesterday was a relatively quiet Monday. We skipped out at lunch to meet up with Mark, Wayne and some of the other guys from Fujikyu and Saturday night. Wayne's one-year exchange program in Japan is over and he's headed back to Taiwan, so everyone was gathering to see him off. After a breezy afternoon drinking beer and having the Hodemonster take us for all our money in a game of Texas Hold 'Em ("Always fun playing you guys," he remarked at the end of it), we headed out to a Japanese-style steakhouse. It was slightly different from a western one, in the same way an apple is different from a combine harvester.



The first thing that struck me was the payment method. No waitress takes your order. Instead, this:

A vending machine with buttons for each dish on their menu, along with each side order and drink. You stick your money in, you push your button, you get a ticket for each order along with your change. Go to the table, sit down, put your tickets on the desk, the waitress comes by to pick them up, you get your food. None of that outmoded and misunderstanding-riddled "human contact" stuff.

The second semi-shock was the food. The Japanese are really big on interactive food; very often, the consumer participates in some way in the cooking of his meal. Thus, our steaming plates were filled with uncooked meat and vegetables, and had a protective paper wall, presumably to save our forearms from flying grease.

After inexpertly poking around the plate with my chopsticks, trying to turn the meat around and burning my hands and screaming and dropping the chopsticks and having everyone laugh at me and getting pissed off and trying even harder and dropping them again and you get the picture, I finally had this:

A gloriously miscooked smorgasboard of beefy madness, with a side order of soy-sopping rice. (I'm kinda surprised at how little soy everybody seemed to use; when I happily pumped my standard amount onto my rice, Wayne stared at it like it was enriched uranium.)

The food was decent enough. The meat was slightly stringy and the rogue flying bit of grease would occasionally jump out with a shrill cackle and land, pinprickly, on my skin; but such considerations are not of any importance to us fearless Tokyo travellers. I've done Typing of the Dead, bitch. I can take you burning into my elbow.

After the meal, we wandered back out to the streets of Yoyogi.


After walking Wayne to his taxicab and seeing him off, four of us went to play pool at a quiet little pool hall in Yoyogi. We then took the train home, where Hanako had a wonderful kimchi nabe dinner ready for us.

You guessed it - more food interactivity. Kimchi nabe is a steamboat dish, where a broth is brought to the boil on a portable stove right on the dining table, and the diners stick the ingredients they would like in the bowl, then ladle them out and eat them with chopsticks. Kimchi is the word for pickled Korean vegetables (a particular favorite of mine), in addition to which we had pork, fat-ass Japanese mushrooms (delicious), bean sprouts and tofu. A wonderful meal.

Today, Krust and I are going to venture out on our own, jump into a completely random train and get absolutely lost in translation. A full report shall be forthcoming, assuming we manage to find our way back.

Peace.