After a morning of traveling and visiting temples, it was time for lunch. The Ravishing Mrs. TB consulted the oracle of The InterWeb and found several recommendations for a tonkatsu restaurant at the edge of the main shopping district. A quick walk brought us to it.
The ubiquitous display of the food the restaurant serves:
Initial serving for lunch. Interestingly, cabbage is a common side dish for tonkatsu. You can have as much of it as you want. Also present are the small serving of pickled vegetables, which also seem to be at almost every meal.
Tonkatsu (Fried Pork cutlet) originated in the Meiji era of Japan (A.D. 1869-1912) as an adaptation of European cuisine. Pork is traditional, but now chicken katsu and fish katsu is also a thing.
The restaurant only served various forms of katsu. My selection was a garlic and miso stuffed tonkatsu.
One fascinating note to me is that, like small Japanese restaurants, the food was prepared right in front of you. There was a support kitchen as well, but the main event - the breading and frying - took place five feet away from me. Even in this small restaurant, everyone was dressed precisely and professionally (it has always struck me as rude to take pictures of doing their jobs, but the image is burned into my mind). It struck me again that this was another difference between many restaurants I have been to here in the U.S. and Japan: this restaurant clearly took what they did seriously and treated it as important as any other task.
Perhaps not by accident, my garlic and miso tonkatsu was delicious.
What better advertisement for a restaurant than a window with a selection of its dishes for the public to see.
ReplyDeleteThere seem to be so many admirable things about the Japanese culture. And how opposite from here in the US. I don't think we used to be this way, but somehow we don't seem to be admirable as a society any more. Except perhaps our materialism.
Leigh, sadly with the adoption of more Western Style restaurants (including fast food), this is less of a thing that it used to - at least in Tokyo. Maybe smaller towns and cities are more traditional in this way.
DeleteThere is a lot to admire about Japanese culture. And yes, I am hard pressed on any given day to come up with 10 things I admire anymore about American culture. It does not have as much to do with "sides" as the fact that, in general, we seem to have become both very materialistic and very coarse.
Seems cabbage is as prevalent over there as potatoes are here TB, that last photo got the stomach growling this morning, guess I better start on breakfast.......:) So what happens to the display food at the end of the day? Tossed?
ReplyDeleteNylon12 , I had never seen this sort of thing before, although we have never eaten at a strictly Tonkatsu restaurant before. As it happened two places, I can only assume it is a traditional side dish.
DeleteInterestingly, the food you see is plastic. There is a least one street in Tokyo that is dedicated to vendors of plastic food for display.
One of the things I've noticed about Japanese culture, with great jealousy, is they do not look down on ANY profession. Street sweeper or short-order cook, they carry out their task with professionalism we can only dream of in this country.
ReplyDeleteAnon - I would agree with you. I think it goes both ways though: professions are not looked down upon, but people take pride in their work. Traditional Japanese culture (at least, all that I have read about it) very much values good work and a good work ethic and doing things as well as you can; that is why we have Japanese craftspeople and arts practitioners that have dedicated their lives to their craft and art that they are recognized as living national treasures. While in the U.S. there may be a lot of people that live by those values and there are even culture pockets that have the same (thinking of the Amish here, for example) as a culture we seem to no longer have that as a defining characteristic.
DeleteKind of tacking onto your reply to Leigh's comment, I often wonder how we became the way we are currently as a society? I'm not sure I have any clear cut answer but have many things that I suspect have been a contributor.
ReplyDeleteEd, civilization, societies, and culture are infrequently destroyed by a single event. Usually it is the slow and silent unwinding of a thousand different threads that hold the idea of civilization and societies and culture together. Part of the difficulty in identifying such things I suspect is simply that it is not clear what is tied to what, how something is a precursor to something that may not even be related.
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