The second in an occasional series.
Ten: Predatory seating.Nine: Culinary relativism.
I am a food racist. There, I’ve said it. I’m not proud about it or anything. It turns out I’ve been one for years, but I did not know it until my second day in Stockholm, when Elise dragged me to the mall in Kista to kit me out with deep-winter clothes. In September. After a few hours sweating it out in burqaesque parkas, I needed to replenish my salt levels, so Elise proposed sushi.
I love sushi. The only reason we in the west cook our food is because our disgusting medieval ancestors knew that cooking kills the maggots in sty-bound farm animals. I had a rare and precious opportunity to play in sties as a child in the Ardennes, and I can tell you there is nothing in there you’d want to eat raw. Or even medium-rare. Hence my longstanding reverence for the Japanese/Korean tradition of cleanliness that was the necessary prerequisite for the coming about of sushi.
When we arrived at the Kista sushi bar I was floored by something I’d never seen before. Standing behind the bar was a white guy. Actually, he was whiter than that: he was Serb, I think, and huge. I had never seen a white guy make sushi before. I soon wished that were still the case: He would pick lazily at suspiciously pre-filleted strips of fish which he then mashed onto a gob of rice in the palm of a hand the size of Montenegro. The result invariably exploded on the way from my plate to my mouth. The rolls, too, looked and tasted like stuffed hosepipe. As the Serb glared behind her, Elise turned to me and asked, chirpily, “What do you think?” “Mmm, delicious,” I gagged.
In the subsequent year and a half, I’ve seen way too many white people make sushi over here. They, and their customers, all seem to think that it involves splaying bits of dead fish on rice. I don’t even know how to begin to disabuse people of that crude notionLuckily, there are a few good sushi places in Stockholm, manned by Japanese and Koreans, and at least one that could hold its own in New York..
This is not tolerance of gastronomic diversity on the part of Swedes, this is an unacceptable level of culinary relativism, and my stomach and I just won’t stand for it. Imagine the Japanese opening a curry restaurant; Indians running a tapas bar, with bullfighting on the television; the Spanish making Borscht; Russian babushkas catering Vietnamese food; and the Vietnamese having a big wok of mama’s secret ragu sauce simmering on the stove. Unfortunately, in Stockholm, such imagery is not always just in the mind.
Come on, Stefan. You judge Stockholm’s sushi (and foreign food) culture after a visit to a MALL (and some other unknown places)? Please, get yourself a better guide.
I, for one, have yet to visit a sushi place in Stockholm where the staff is of a “wrong” etnicity. The same goes for Thai, Indian, Chinese, Mongolian, Greek, Polish, whatever. If you feel the way you do, you’re just visiting the wrong places.
(The only field this might actually apply to is pizza places, which in Sweden are actually run by Kurds, primarily, but hey, Pizza Hut isn’t very Italian either, is it?)
Oh, and when I read your side entry, I no longer have any idea why you made this post in the first place. Look like trash-talk for no obvious reason. Sorry.
Geens talk about sushi
Stefan Geens bashes swedish sushi-bars – "I’ve seen way too many white people make sushi over here". I think the man might have a point….
Ah yes, I forgot about the Kurds and their pizzas. Add it to the list.
You have to go to the Baltic states, Stefan!
Last summers visit to Estonia was great. They have everything nowadays. They have thai food, chinese, indian, everything.
But they have no immigration, so the food tastes like shit. Everything is cooked by Estonians in funny hats.
So I agree with your post, almost totally. The exception is of course, as mentioned above, pizza. Italians don•t know how to make them.
Ugh, Swedish/Kurdish pizza, and the particular unpleasantness that is pizzasallad… I hope that is a typo in the previous comment: having spent time in both Italy and Sweden, I know I would rate even third-rate Italian pizza more highly than the best one can find here in Sweden.
I wonder, perhaps, if you aren’t just anti-Swedish. If you hadn’t started sleeping with the enemy there might not be a response to this. Even sushi chefs in NY are invariably not Japanese. I could never work it out, but most look Malaysian or Sri Lankan. What would happen if you got excellent sushi from a Swedish chef (bork, bork, bork)? Would you still poke it with your stick, hoping it fell apart.
Meanwhile, you should be rejoicing in collision cuisine. This is from one of my favorite WSJ aheds:
“When the New TriBeCa Diner was the plain old TriBeCa Diner, the cook was Greek and the menu was nine pages long. “Everything was not fresh,” the new executive chef says in a pink-plastic booth late on a slow afternoon. “I decided: No more Greek food, no more Greek people. Change everything.” So Hussein Hussein, an Egyptian, reopened with a Polish-Italian menu.
Mr. Hussein can’t cook Egyptian food. Nor has he visited Poland. “I’m going this summer, for sure,” he says. But he worked in Italian restaurants after giving up law school, and he does have a Polish girlfriend. Thus did the New TriBeCa Diner come to pass.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Halina Sokolowska stands kneading pierogi dough; bigos and barszcz bubble on the stove. Unlike Mr. Hussein’s girlfriend, she doesn’t speak English; she doesn’t speak Arabic either. Mr. Hussein speaks no Polish. Still, he has trained Ms. Sokolowska to make gnocchi and fettuccine primavera.
In Mr. Hussein’s book, an Egyptian searching for a Polish-Italian cook needn’t look in Italy or in Poland. “There’s tons of cooks in New York,” he says. “If I taught a Polish woman who can’t understand me how to cook Italian food, anybody can.”
Matthew: Puhlease. I’m not talking about fusion cuisine, but cuisine clash. I’m talking about one culture’s food being molested by another.
Stick anyone in any high end kitchen for 10 years and they are bound to come out with gems if they have any talent. But the trick is not to perform at the top, it’s to provide quality ethnic food for not a lot of money. When it comes to sushi, if you haven’t learned Japanese in order to soak it all in behind the scenes at an authentic sushi bar for a few years, you will never get it. The east village sushi joints I had the luxury to experience all had Japanese as the lingua franca.
Ethnic food is not just about applying the recipes to the ingredients. It’s about applying an institutional memory. That’s all.
Swedish pizzas kick serious ass, primarily because they’re not letting the flavors of the toppings get completely smothered by the TOMATO! flavor, the way US & Italian ones do.
The thai guys over on the MoFo part of Folkungagatan do pretty damned good job of their sushi. I honestly don’t think there’s some mystical zen quality required to make good sushi, but maybe a few years experience, as with any food.
Shockingly, Stefan, you miss the point. Who’d have thought.
Stefan:
are you numbering from 10 to 1 (per your subhead) or from I to X (per title)? I can’t wait for you to miscount… or end up in negative numbers…
(i don’t know why these pedantic things keep bothering me… maybe it’s the lead in the water…)
Stefan, you doofus. For one thing, you’re just plain wrong about the east village sushi joints you had the luxury to experience: if you recall, Zen One’s lingua was Korean, not Japanese. And some of the best Mexican food in downtown NYC is cooked by the Chinese. And Marcus Samuelsson… but I’m not even going there.
Oh you have to nitpick, don’t you. I too realized the little Korean/Japanese faux-pas, but concluded it was too minor to bother with, because you KNOW what I mean. Or not, evidently. And I’ve already made my point about paying through the nose for excellent culturally eclectic food. Food globalists can do whatever they want and I will applaud. It’s the misplaced parochialists that have to try harder.
Good Mexican food made by the Chinese? Only an Englishman could say that.
The most atrocious Italian food I have ever had was made by a Pakistani chef in a newly opened “Italian” restaurant in Islamabad. A totally forgettable experience.
I identify with SG’s observation. I don’t like anyone to mess with my food and I would expect it to be prepared sanitarily and be well presented. This includes, but is not limited to, the ingredients, the ceremony of the preparation and consuming the dish.
Sometimes good food is lost in bad atmosphere and a good atmosphere is lost in food poorly prepared, but usually it is spoiled by the attitude of the person preparing or serving it. Seldom it is ruined by the partner in the gastronomic adventure.
I can’t make up my mind whether this is a clever dead-pan joke, or you really don’t have any idea what the Japanese fast-food landscape is like. 🙂
The reason I love comment #11 is that you seem to be the nitpickiest of them all with your own superior disdain for all things incorrect.
Is it when people discover your pretensions that you cover it up with sarcasm or is the sarcasm implicit from the start?
I lived in Tokyo for eight years back in the 1960s and feel qualified to comment on sushi which is one of my favorite foods.
I now dwell in Nashville, Tennessee and, horror of horrors, ocasionally dine on “Grocery Store Sushi”. It is prepared by a man from Burma who does quite a credible job. Most of the sushi restaurants in Nashville are run by Koreans, some are good, some are terrible. I have made sushi myself on many occasions and personally thought it was rather tasty. I am a combination of German-Swiss and Scotch-Irish. Ethnic origin seems to have little to do wih ones ability to prepare food.
I lived in Tokyo for eight years back in the 1960s and feel qualified to comment on sushi which is one of my favorite foods.
I now dwell in Nashville, Tennessee and, horror of horrors, ocasionally dine on “Grocery Store Sushi”. It is prepared by a man from Burma who does quite a credible job. Most of the sushi restaurants in Nashville are run by Koreans, some are good, some are terrible. I have made sushi myself on many occasions and personally thought it was rather tasty. I am a combination of German-Swiss and Scotch-Irish. Ethnic origin seems to have little to do wih ones ability to prepare food.