Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | food & dining
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November 29, 2010

Here's a cool Asian/Asian American spin on the ubiquitous city guides concept, if you live in LA or some select other cities around the globe. Privy 5 is a startup that's launching a series of city-focused websites that invites celebrities and local playas to submit their Top 5 lists in categories such as restaurants, hotels, bars, karaoke/noraebang, shops and spas,...

November 20, 2010

I came across this story on Reappropriate, a great blog about race and identity: New York restaurant owner Eddie Huang responds to a lukewarm NYT review of his Lower East Side joint Xiao Ye on his very unapologetic and in-your-face Asian AMERICAN blog, "Fresh off the Boat" and follows up by posting his mother's rather FoB-y note to him saying essentially, see? You deserve your bad review for not listening to me! Then CNN catches wind of the flap and interviews him. This is interesting to me on a couple of levels.
October 31, 2010

learn how to make curry laksa from New Asian Cuisine I should have written about New Asian Cuisine a long time ago, since I've been subscribing to the site's email newsletter for years. Seriously, I don't know what I'm thinking. NAC is just plain cool, and worth visiting. Regularly. The site is a treasure trove for foodies who love to cook, and who love Asian cuisine. You'll find a fabulous array of diverse recipes, both traditional and contemporary, authentic and fusion. Here's how the creators of the site describe it:
September 26, 2010

asiansupper.com Since we're such foodies, people think Erin and I eat out all the time. But the fact is, we cook a lot at home too. Last night, f'rinstance, I grilled chicken breasts rubbed with homemade spinach pesto, served with Caesar salad with homemade dressing (Erin makes the BEST Caesar dressing) and wild grain rice, drizzled with homemade Argentinian Chimichurri sauce. OK, so it ain't Asian. We cook a lot of Asian dishes too, not just Japanese but also Korean and Indian and Chinese. We often start with recipes but hardly ever stay true to those recipes. We tweak and customize everything -- mostly, we add a lot more garlic than the recipe requires. Now we have another source for Asian recipes: Asian Supper.
May 27, 2010

Sushi Poppers -- is this cool or dumb? Wow. As if buying crappy-tasting, unauthentic "sushi" at your local supermarket or Costco wasn't enough, they've found a way to completely commodify sushi -- sushi rolls, at least -- as a mass-produced pre-packaged snack food. Sushi Poppers are individually wrapped sushi rolls on a stick that you eat like... a Popsicle, those quiescently frozen confections. In fact, you can even buy Sushi Poppers online, and have it delivered frozen, packed with dry ice. They claim they'll be fine frozen for up to 30 days. I dunno, I've never been able to eat sushi that's even refrigerated overnight, never mind frozen for a month. I may have to order some just to test it. You get six tubes of sushi on a stick, with seven pieces in each roll (that's 42 pieces), for $29.95. You can get various flavors, including ones with raw tuna, spicy tuna or salmon, cooked fish, vegetarian, meat (teriyaki chicken or beef, miso chicken) and some dessert flavors. It seems they're really stretching the definition of "sushi" here. If you're suspicious of ordering frozen sushi through the mail, the company is planning to have the Poppers available at retailers nationwide, with the sushi made locally.
November 18, 2009

Martha Stewart needs some etiquette lessons in how to speak to Asian Americans.A reader named Robin, who is Japanese American and born in Iowa and bakes apple pies, sent me this email: "I was wincing yesterday when Martha Stewart asked an asian american woman in the audience (Sumi somethingorother, who baked an apple pie for Martha's contest) "Where are you from?" and the woman said with no accent "Oh I'm from here...New York City.". Martha continued with the (stereo)typical line of questioning something like 'where are you really from because if you are from Asia it's unusual to make an apple pie'. I don't have it verbatim but it was painful. Just another "What ARE you?" type of conversation. I really don't think Martha is a bigot but as she is the standard bearer of suburban white women I think it was totally disappointing for her to go down that path as if it were totally fine to question someone with Asian features about where they really come from." She sent a link to Martha Stewart's page for the pie show, but there isn't a video of the entire program, at least not yet. It looks like they only upload excerpts instead of entire shows, but I'll keep an eye out for YouTube postings of this segment. UPDATED: Today, Robin commented below on this blog post with a clarification: "The video is up, check at the 2:00 minute mark: http://www.marthastewart.com/article/meet-the-pie-bakers "Verbatim it's : 'Where do you come from?' (answer Here NYC) 'Oh you do, oh, okay, because if you came from Asia this would not a typical pie, right?' (answer 'right...right...' you can kind of hear the 'what the heck!?' in her tone) "So it's not as blatant as it struck me the first time but still the question and that type of follow up would be seen as really bizarre if she asked it of someone with a German name." It may not be as obnoxious as it could have been (I agree with Robin that Martha's probably not a racist), but it still betrayed Stewart's expectation that the audience member with an Asian face was a foreigner. She even sounded disappointed when the woman said she's from New York, because Stewart wanted so badly to make her point about Asians not baking pies.
November 8, 2009

These banners are on display throughout San Jose Unlike the many Chinatowns that serve as ethnic cultural enclaves in many American cities from coast to coast, and the increasing numbers of districts variously called "Koreatowns" and "Little Saigons," you won't find many Nihonmachi, or Japantowns. There are lots of reasons for this, but the main one is probably the Japanese American community's need to assimilate into mainstream America after the shame and humiliation of being imprisoned in internment camps during World War II. In the 1950s and '60s, most JAs moved into suburban America and avoided clustering in ethnic Japanese areas. Denver has Sakura Square, a one-block development built in the 1970s I like to call "Tiny Tokyo" because it's ridiculously small compared to Los Angeles' Little Tokyo. And New York City has a couple-blocks of Japanese businesses that have sprouted in recent years in the East Village that might be called a "mini-Japantown" in Manhattan. Seattle's Japantown evolved after the war into the International District, though I think it's still anchored by the awesome, generations-old Uwajimaya supermarket. But not surprisingly, the three Japantowns that are officially recognized as national historic districts are all in California, where the vast majority of Japanese immigrants settled in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Along with the well-known and tourist-filled Little Tokyo in LA and San Francisco's Japantown is the Japantown area of San Jose that's more a neighborhood than a business district. Erin and I have traveled to and stayed at both Little Tokyo and San Francisco's Japantown, but only visited San Jose's J-town a couple of times. We spent a few hours there last week and we love it. Here's why:
September 30, 2009

The Miso Lobster Ramen is the ultimate dish at Bones, the non-Asian noodle house in Denver. Erin and I have always been wistfully jealous of our friends in Los Angeles and San Francisco, for lots of reasons but not least the fact that they can eat killer ramen any night of the week. We have our fave ramen-yas in both San Francisco's Japantown and LA's Little Tokyo ("ya" means "shop"). There's also great ramen to be had on the East Coast -- I've slurped up wonderful noodles and steamy broth in New York City's funky little "Japantown" district on the lower East side In Denver, for many years we had only one ramen-ya: Oshima Ramen, which was good (albeit pricey) when it opened about a decade ago, and has over the past few years become increasingly dirtier and greasier, and the ramen less special and more bland. As it went downhill, it gave us less and less reason to drive all the way across town for a sad bowl of noodles. Some people (including some food critics who don't know better) think it's "the real thing" but uh, sorry. So Erin and I have made it a holy mission to find good ramen without flying to the coast, and some brave Japanese restaurants have met the challenge just in the past year or so. The best we've found in the area is Okole Maluna, a Hawai'ian restaurant an hour north of Denver in the tiny eastern plains town of Windsor, whose owners serve a killer Saimin (Hawai'ian-style ramen). There's a very good, very authentic ramen served in a little take-out food court in Boulder called Bento Zanmai. Although it'a a bit unorthodox, the miso-ginger ramen served at the late Hisashi “Brian” Takimoto's East Colfax restaurant, Taki's, is very good. And now, even the fast-foody Kokoro is serving ramen (but at only one location, on 6th and Broadway, and only after 4 pm). We keep hearing about a Korean-run Japanese restaurant in Longmont that we haven't made it to. But as you can see, we're willing to drive for a good bowl of ramen, so we'll get there eventually. Imagine our surprise, then, to find that there's been a veritable explosion of ramen happening right under our nose (is that a triple mixed metaphor?) -- and that it's not ramen made by Asians!