Food; Home @ 06 Aug 2008 04:24 pm by Christina Waters
“Chinese-Japanese Cuisine” says the sign on the old China Station building at Fair & mission, which is currently being revamped for a future opening.
Huh? The Westside is prime restaurant territory, where roving foodies (not to mention ravenous students) eagerly await the next dining possibility. Why would anyone offer the curious culinary cross-colonization of Chinese cookery and Japanese cuisine? (Do they give Oscars for alliteration?) After much emailing with the chef/owner of the O’mei, I want to clarify that I would welcome a menu reflecting an authentic, historically-based dialogue between Chinese and Japanese culinary cultures. What I fear is cross-over convenience that ends up being neither Chinese, nor Japanese.
Are we being asked to believe that a single restaurant can convincingly create dishes from two heavyweight culinary cultures? Or that if you can, say whip up a kung pao something, then you can obviously also make robata, or yakitori, or sushi?….What this means to me — and I’ll eat my words if I’m wrong — is that we’re looking at the imminent opening of yet another pan-Asian fusion everything that remotely involves soy sauce eatery.
How about a Bagels & Pho bistro? Or Norwegian Barbeque?
Christina — don’t be so hasty in displaying your culinary ignorance!
In Taiwan, a CHINESE country which was occupied by JAPAN for about 50 years, just what you say is impossible is a reality.
And what in the HELL is “gan pao something”? Again, you display ignorance of Chinese cuisine. Please tell us exactly what your smarty-pants phrasing means, besides being smarty-pants phrasing.
If you truly do “dine the world”, you would have dined at restaurants near the temple of the city gods in Taipei, where CHINESE versions of sushi are served along with sautes of shredded gobo, where the pickles are not limited to takuan, where sautes of “sansai” picked from local mountains are not-uncommon, and where Yen Shui Goose showered with ginger AND basil is an ordinary thing. Oh, I forgot, basil is Thai/Viet/Italian … can’t possiblly be Chinese.
While this new eatery is mostly likely not going to feature this authentically TAIWANESE amalgam of cuisines (and peoples too), maybe we shouldn’t second guess them.
At the very least, let’s not second guess things we have no knowledge of. Would you like “gan pao” sauce with those words you should be eating soon? Or, since you seem to think that Norwegians have no knowledge of roasting meat over an open fire, would you prefer Nordic BBQ Sauce?