Long Fast on Fermented

It was Japan’s fault.  I’ll blame it on Japan.  I’d made it four months or so without any meat.  Last night I had steak tartar.  Tonight, I had sushi.  As I recall I was with precisely the same friend whom I’d broke a long fast on fermented beverages, a few years back, here in town, as well. 

Something about the thought of apres work in Tokyo makes routines like tea-tolling and vegetarianism particularly challenging.  Indeed it isn’t so much the reality of sitting down to dine, but rather the anticipation of what that process will be like.  There will be dimly lit, wooden environments with notably tasteful hard-bop playing just so, up above. And someone else will order and they will suggest something they are giddy about trying. 

And so, it was.  We made our way upstairs to a window seat at Severo.  A CEO we were to meet had chosen the place.  He was running late.  My friend drew my attention to the refinement of the tight little environment that couldn’t have seated more than ten people. He needn’t have.  The waiters seemed more like guilded artisans as one and then another traded seemingly weighty ideas with my colleague.  “I’ve ordered Champaign.” He mentioned.  We toasted and considered our decades of shared history as the beef-ologist wheeled over a tray with five remarkable cuts of beef on a mirrored tray. “I’ll follow your lead.”  Tartar in Japan sounds as safe as it does delicious.  Raw tends to work just fine in Tokyo. 

Any country has tastes you can only sample there. But Japan may well have more than most.  Certainly, sushi and sashimi and ramen and even tongkatsu just don’t taste the same anywhere else.  But it’s not just the local flavors that are dreamy but the local environments, and the local rituals that all reinforce a culinary pattern.  And during the day in Tokyo, my routine is almost always to do meeting after meeting after meeting.  These meetings are unsurprisingly, mostly in Japanese.  And I down a double shot of espresso before just about every appointment so that I don’t impolitely zone off into oblivion as others discuss and I follow, childlike.  After the last meeting, the body is craving an antidote to the caffeinated propulsion that’s seen you, jet lagged, this far.  I’m sure it’s different if you live here.  But visiting it tends to be, as Elliot Smith used to say, the ‘last stop for a resolution.’

Friday, 4/27/18