My time at the Mexican restaurant is almost over. I’ve been serving people for about a year now, and this is my take on the customers that patronize us.

The American family
Usually seen on Saturday lunch. Looking for a taste of home and a menu they can understand. They’re afraid of how spicy the food might be, and the kids invariably eat quesadillas. The dad starts getting hammered on Saturday at noon.

The boss
Foreign or Japanese, this is the boss that takes their team for a night out. Laid back, traveled, and sometimes with a sense of humor. They are known for pushing people to drink, and making their way through the tequila list on the company’s dime. Usually seen on Wednesday nights.

The girl at the office who got dragged along
Little Mayumi had better plans for after work, but her boss and co-workers bullied her into joining the team for a night out. She sits on a corner and makes little conversation. While her co-workers are busy drinking themselves to the ground, she orders an iced tea and distributes the food. Her only joy comes at the end of the meal when she orders a slice of cake and a latte.

The US military
The most thankful customers ever. Usually stationed in some remote corner of Japan, they come every few months to Tokyo and the military puts them in a hotel down the road. We’re a wet dream for them, with service and menus in English and food they recognize. Most reliable tippers.

Expat investment bankers on dates
Young and cocky with a gorgeous date attached to them. They pay with platinum or black American express cards, and cannot stop checking their blackberries.

English teachers on dates
Young and cocky, but without the financial resources of the investment banker to back their act up.

Ladies who lunch (American)
The wives of successful husbands who gave everything up to come to Japan. They stick to themselves and the small area of Tokyo where service in English is available. Come for lunch to talk about their children and exchange tips on getting a good Filipino nanny.

Ladies who lunch (French)
Same as American ladies who lunch, except that they drink wine and tell dirty jokes.

People who’ve been to Latin America
Usually come dressed in some bizarre piece of clothing they acquired through their travels. They come with friends or dates to impress them and insist on reminding us of the great dishes that are not on the menu. Most annoying if they want to order in Spanish but only speak five words.

People who want to go to Latin America
Usually young Japanese who are obsessed with Latin America. They bought an overpriced poncho to look the part, and are dreaming of a long road trip throughout the continent. They ask questions about every picture on the walls and will believe almost anything that comes out of our mouths (it’s totally safe to travel through the Colombian mountains!).

Embassy workers
They thrive on predictability. Tried everything on the menu a year ago, and are now settled into a routine where they eat the same thing two-three times per week. (One chicken burrito, please).

“Why don’t you give it a try?”

“I don’t think I want to know.”

A was pushing me to use a little machine to test how much of my body is fat.

I already know that I’m overweight, and wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to put a figure to it.

One thing I already knew though — I want to learn more about kaiseki cooking. I had an amazing kaiseki meal in Kyoto, and what struck me the most was the intensity of the flavors in spite of them hardly using any oil to bring them out. The meal was light, and probably quite healthy.

In contrast, I tend to use oil to make things taste good. Sure, a boiled egg tastes alright, but scrambled eggs mixed in with cream and done on butter taste so much better. Or drizzling oilve oil on the pasta. Or bread and butter. Or, oh well…I could go on and on.

To teach myself some tricks, I bought a book Yoshihiro Murata, who is one of Japan’s leading kaiseki chefs. My first stab at kaiseki cooking is a gorgeous summer tomato soup. Not a single drop of oil, yet the flavor was amazing.

The base is a mix of tomatoes and cherry tomatoes. Half of the juice is kept fresh, while the other half is boiled and reduced to tomato-paste consistency. The two are mixed, chilled, and seasoned with lemon juice and salt. For the creamy top, mix in a blender yuba (or tofu if you don’t have it), a bit of dashi, sesame and soy sauce. Ladle the yuba carefully on top and garnish with cucumbers.

It tasted like summer in a bowl, and it was healthy too.

I took the test and know now what the number is. But I feel this soup is a step in the right direction.

There are certain foods I hate eating. When I was a kid, I didn’t like onions, and especially spinach. I would literally barf whenever my mom made me eat spinach.

With time I’ve gotten rid of a lot of these dislikes, but a few still remain. Lili has been trying to convince me to eat liver for a long time, but I just can’t get over it. I don’t enjoy foie gras either.

One of my challenges is to teach myself to eat my dislikes, one of which is peppers. I don’t like their bitter taste, especially when they show up raw in a salad. But, I recently found a way around my dislike: fire-roasted peppers. Done this way, the bitter goes away and the sweet flavour remains. I thought of this dish today at the grocery store with inspiration from a video by Gordon Ramsay, and I really liked the way it came out.

Sauce:

Take one orange pepper and put it directly on the flame until the skin chars. Do the same to one medium onion, two tomatoes and two cloves of garlic. After charring the pepper, put it inside a plastic bag — the steam will help peel it.

Put everything in a blender with a small piece of chipotle pepper. Strain the sauce onto a hot pan with a little bit of oil and “fry” it, reduce it and season it. Set aside.

Fish:

Score the skin of the fish. I used Sea Bream, but another rich fish will do the trick. Put the fish skin-side down on a pan and fry it until crisp. Flip it a give it a few seconds on the other side. Plate the fish on the sauce and garnish with cilantro.

The Gordon Ramsay video:

Like most people, I try to hold my farts in public. At Stockholm however, I really wanted to release a loud one, just to see if I could make the experience even more awkward for everybody in the room.

Stockholm seems to be frozen in time, but to its detriment, not a good time. Walking in feels like a bad hotel from the 1980s, complete with a cold buffet spread, a window display with mousse desserts and “modernist” furniture that would be best thrown away.

If the room didn’t feel right, the fact that there was no background music, and the windows isolated the noise from the street pretty effectively, made it even more uncomfortable. The waiters were all professional, but when there’s four waiters for seven customers, no music, and they watch intently my every move, I get nervous. At some point during my meal, I had to go to the washroom and laugh it off.

The food was, to my surprise, not bad at all. I got the special lunch of the day (1,260 yen), which consisted of a cold salmon piece with salad, gazpacho, pasta salad, extremely juicy fried chicken and a mousse dessert. Everything was prepared correctly, but I could have had the meal of my life in that room, and I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it. The cold buffet looked like a dreadful spread of deviled eggs, boiled shrimp, smoked salmon and wilted salad.

Stockholm is in serious need of a renovation. Unless they do so, only drop by to have a laugh and maybe fart.

Address and details: http://www.sunnypages.jp/travel_guide/tokyo_restaurants/others/Stockholm/579/top

This is one of those asshole posts where I brag about the meals I’ve had.

One of the most popular searches at the website is for the newly starred Michelin restaurants in Tokyo. After the 2008 Tokyo Michelin guide awarded a record number of stars to the city’s eateries, there’s been a lot of interest in finding more about these places. To tap into that, I recently compiled a list of the Michelin restaurants where you can eat for under 5,000 yen (approx. US$50 — you can find the guide here).

I’ve also eaten at some of these places. My impression is that the one thing that sets these restaurants apart is the seasoning. Sometimes the ingredients are simple and cheap, yet the seasoning is so perfect that
it takes them to another level. So far my favorite meal was at L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon, and my favorite Japanese place was Abe.

L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon. Broadbean puree with tomato salad and parmesan galette; passion fruit and mango dessert; fish with eggplants and butter/balsamic sauce.

Abe. Tofu, fish of the day, seaweed with tofu, soup and rice.

Au gout de jour Nouvelle Ere. Trio of chocolate desserts; corn soup with corn mousse and caramelized corn; olive oil poached salmon with wasabi foam and cucumber noodles.

Sankame. Grilled fish set with bonito sashimi, rice, soup, pickles, nimono and fruit for dessert.

Nakajima. Boiled fish set, with rice, soup and pickles.

Last Wednesday as I worked the lunch service at the restaurant:

“I’m sorry but we’re out of the lunch special today,” I say to a group of five ladies in their late 30s / early 40s who walk in ten minutes before closing time.

“What was the special?”

“What do you care…you can’t have it anyway,” says one of her friends.

“It was meatballs madam.”

“Meatballs…I could have a set of those,” says lady number one looking my way with a grin on her face.

“I’m sure you could use some,” is the commentary of the table.

I walk away with a grin on my face.

Lili came to visit, and unsurprisingly, the trip involved lots and lots of food. Here’s a little photo recap of some of the stuff we ate and saw. A lot of the photo credits go to Lili.

L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon (one of the most amazing meals ever). Broadbean puree with tomato salad and parmesan galette; fish with eggplants and a butter/balsamic sauce; passion fruit, mango and ice cream dessert.

Wasabi roots, pickled cucumbers, veggie spread and knife store.

Tuna auctions, slicing a tuna, boiled octopus, raw and broiled hamo and sashimi on a stick

Broiled ayu, yuba with soybeans, bamboo shoots with peas, spring platter, beans with plum salt.

Pierre Herme ice cream trio, Pierre Herme orange, carrot and cardomom cup, Sadaharu Aoki cake and croissant.

Beautiful gardens and temples

Random shots at a sumo match, katsuo shavings, selling rice crackers and kitty-chan canned ramen noodles.

I received an amazing present from Lili — a santoku knife.

I’ll soon be moving to the United States (probably sometime in August) to start my PhD, and I knew that I wanted to get a good Japanese knife before leaving Tokyo. Lili gave me one from an amazing company — Aritsugu, which is a Kyoto-based company over 450 years old.

The main difference with my previous knife (which is a cheap Henckel chef’s knife) is the precision of the blade. The knife is so sharp that I just need to put it on top of something and with little effort it goes through (the blade is quite heavy as well, which makes it incredibly easy). The knife needs a bit more care than a regular stainless-steel one, but it’s totally worth it.

To top it off, they offered to engrave my name on it (in Japanese) — it is a Nico knife

Saw this on a rainy day in Shibuya right next to the busiest crossing ever (the one that always shows up in scenes of modern Japan). Who forgot this in the middle of the street??

I ended up by chance watching a chef dismember a poisonous blowfish. I walked into the restaurant thinking it was a seafood place, and only found out halfway through my meal that the head chef was a certified blowfish handler.

It was a bit creepy when I first walked in, since Kakashika is located in a basement, and as I opened the doors, there was nobody inside except the staff. Normally I’d walk away, but hurrying up the stairs didn’t seem like a realistic option, and the waitress was already hushing me to my seat. Since I was the only person on the counter, the chef and I quickly started talking, and I think they were mostly amused at my interest in Japanese food. Somehow we got to the tale of me eating a pulsating shrimp, when a second chef came in from the back holding a massive blowfish and proudly announced that this one had just stopped shaking

I immediately asked if I could stay to see how they chop the fish. My biggest surprise was how much of the fish is inedible. I had somehow assumed that the liver was the dangerous part, and that it would be a small section of the fish. No. I’d say that about 2/3 of the fish, including the skin, ended up in the garbage bin.

I have to say that it seems pretty stupid to eat a fish that can kill us if handled incorrectly, and which doesn’t taste so good anyhow. The chef himself admitted to the flavour being unremarkable. When I pressed him to describe it to me, he said that unless he was told it was blowfish, he wouldn’t be able to tell, except that the meat is tough.

I ate alligator meat once, and it was damn tough. Maybe there’s a reason why we don’t normally eat these animals: they can kill us back, and they’re not so tasty to begin with. Almost nobody dies though from blowfish if handled by a certified chef — most deaths occur from people trying to slice the fish at home after buying it from a unscrupulous purveyor.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a tasting to form a strong opinion on blowfish (my wallet is not that deep), but you can read my review of their lunch service and find the contact info here.