Jakob's Bowl

Improvisation On A Theme Of Four Flavors

I still remember my first meal at the China Moon Café in 1987. I was in my firm’s San Francisco office as part of my weekly Chicago to Tampa to San Francisco and back circle that I endured for over three months that year. It was a Thursday night and one of our Chicago Partners was also in town. She had been instrumental in hiring me five years earlier and knew that I liked good food. She asked me if I had ever been to China Moon, and while I had been cooking from Barbara Tropp’s, The Modern Art Of Chinese Cooking for a few years, I had never been to her restaurant. I didn’t need to be asked twice to eat in her cooking. A few hours later we were sharing some of the most heavenly Chinese food I had ever eaten at the time, and I will never forget the velvety texture of her scallops…mmmm! She had obviously worked as hard to master the country's cuisines as she had its language and culture, and it was encouraging to confirm that skill in an ethnic cuisine had nothing to do with ethnicity.

Flying Leaves

It’s been many years since there was a large selection of coast-to-coast flights, and when I booked my trip to Boston, it was a question of minimizing the damage - getting there with as few connections as possible and in the straightest line. Fortunately, I found flights through Chicago that allowed me to arrive at and then return from my destination at reasonable times during the day. Assuming this is possible, I actually think it can be more enjoyable than a direct flight. Instead of sitting in that cramped seat for six or more hours, you get a break to walk around and even get some real coffee and something to eat that actually tastes like food. Additionally, if you have the misfortune of a bad seat or a crammed flight, there is the possibility of relief on the second leg. Yes, the travel time may be two or more hours longer, but that is extra, uninterrupted time to read. On this trip I packed Bottom Feeder: How To Eat Ethically In A World of Vanishing Seafood, by Taras Grescoe (2008), and it was a compelling from start to finish.

Heirloom Manga To Chew: Oishinbo A la Carte

A friend gave me a number of different multi-volume Japanese graphic novels a few months back - manga as they are collectively known - including one just published in English, Oishinbo A la Carte. Usually translated as "The Gourmet", the word Oishinbo was created from the Japanese word for delicious, oishii, and the word for someone who loves to eat, kuishinbo. That’s right; it’s not a samurai epic or a work of futuristic science fiction, it’s all about food, more importantly, it is about food as culture - not food in culture, as used say, by painters or novelists. It’s simply the most informative book on Japanese food and cooking and their relation to Japanese society that I’ve ever found in English, and it’s a comic book!!!

Oishinbo is written by Tetsu Kariya and drawn in a ‘classic’ style by Akira Hanasaki - think Dick Tracy or Terry and the Pirates. It was published in the monthly manga magazine Big Comic Spirits from 1983 through 2008. Oishinbo was also collected and published in 102 volumes, each of which was a best seller averaging 1.2 million copies. The Japanese publishing company VIZ Media is producing a seven volume series of Oishinbo in English - the ‘best of’ Oishinbo, if you will.