In a restaurant in Kyoto that served only fish 70 ways, and all of it
mackerel, I asked my charming and sophisticated guide, a man who bore an
uncanny resemblance to the bonsai teacher in The Karate Kid, and who had
spent a professional life fixing for western journalists, if he would teach
me about Japanese table manners.
“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” he said, staring modestly at the table.
No, please, I won’t be insulted, tell me when I get it wrong and tell me why.
“No, no, I couldn’t.”
Look, I write about food, I need to know, so please teach me.
I won’t be offended. “No, no, I couldn’t.”
Look here, I’m paying you. He had an agonised mien. “No I mean I couldn’t,
because it isn’t possible. You wouldn’t understand. You are not sensitive to
Japanese thinking. We,” he waved a chopstick at the room, “have all agreed
that foreigners are excused table manners. When you make infantile mess and
clumsy, embarrassing mistake with fingers and gross rudeness with your
mouth, when you eat with insulting selfishness, when you are ungrateful and
western, we don’t see it. We are blind to your lack of finesse and
sensitivity.”
Oh, righty-ho, then. Well, just tell me one thing. “Don’t leave chopsticks in
rice. It is sign of death.”
Right. And, I suppose, don’t make rude noises eating soup. “No, Benny Hill
noises very good and pleasant.”
Right. Well, you know we laugh at you because you can’t pronounce your rs?
“Weally?”
Japan is the only country I’ve ever been to that wants tourists not to
understand what they are looking at. It thinks people who aren’t born
Japanese are psychologically, intellectually, spiritually and aesthetically
incapable of understanding their culture. Each time you are confronted by
seven rocks in gravel, two lilies in a pot, a dwarf Christmas tree, a
bedroom without a bed or a limerick without a joke, a polite little local
will say “Sorry, very Japanese, difficult to explain”, which translates as:
“You are too cretinously oafish and hairy to comprehend the finer feelings
that are needed to admire this teapot in all its sublime simplicity.”
To respond, smile with as much patronage as you can muster and say: “Yes, it’s
a pity you’ll never know what your decorative plagiarised trinket
civilisation looks like through sophisticated western eyes.” Or: “How droll
of you to have so many Elvis impersonators, and to make one of them prime
minister.”
The one area where we really do have to doff our bowlers to the children of
the rising sun is in the kitchen. No community goes to the same neurotic and
aesthetic lengths for lunch as the Japanese. The skills involved in
preparing, growing and serving food are way beyond those considered decent,
necessary or appropriate in other cultures. What is particularly memorable
(and here, my admiration is irony-free) is that the exhaustingly complex
dexterity and care of preparation produces the purest form of simplicity.
That is some trick.
Japan’s is a fish- and rice-based cuisine. A Japanese person may go for months
without eating meat. There are plenty of communities that survive on staple
fish, but I can’t think of one as numerous, advanced or ravenous. The
Japanese gastronomy is more at risk from collapsing stocks than any other.
Overfishing will have a dramatic effect on the culture, so sticking a
Japanese restaurant next to a meat market might look like being in the wrong
place at the wrong time. Or it might be missionary work.
Saki is a dining room, in a basement, next to Smithfield meat market. This
area has turned into an eating-out spot, with the now venerable Club Gascon
and the popular, red-blooded Smiths. The streets are overflowing with the
sort of braying, wide-mouthed, hair-gelled City lizards who make you pray
for a cleansing depression. Saki looks like most Japanese restaurants; that
is, nothing at all. It’s odd how the minimal elegance of Tokyo translates as
cheap absence when it reaches Europe. The walls are red. The chairs have two
more legs than the waiters.
Although I admire Japanese food, I can’t warm to it. I rarely yearn for it,
and can barely raise an eyebrow over particularly fatty belly tuna. It’s
never going to be my soul food. I know that my experience is not of the same
order as that of the Japanese man next to me. Every time I watch a sushi
chef in a chic western bar, I think: “Pearls before swine.” But Japanese
food has become the Lego of urban eating out, and as the maki rolls grow
fatter and sloppier and more like seaweed wraps, and the sushi gets
additional mayo and bacon, I respect it less and less.
Saki’s menu, though, is laudably catholic. We had a round-eyed waiter called
Steve, who was charmingly out of his depth in the complex simplicity of
Japanese culture. We ordered what you always order, which is pretty much
everything: I have virtually no barometer for knowing when enough is enough.
Steve came back with a furrowed brow. “The kitchen wants you to know that
you’ve ordered an enormous amount of food, sort of way too much.”
“Never mind,” I said breezily. “Bring it on. I’ve got worms.”
You see, the waiter would never say that in a Polish restaurant. It’s another
inexplicable thing about the Japanese — they think it’s disgusting if you
eat because you’re hungry. Having a public appetite is like having sex with
a dolphin in your mother’s bed on Cherry Blossom Day, so the haiku goes.
Saki’s food was pretty good. The fried courgette teriyaki was nice, the
agedashi tofu was less like congealed river scum than usual, the sushi rice
was nicely judged, if you care about judging sushi rice — which is a bit
like caring about the bass woofers in your car stereo. Best of all were the
udon noodles: boring but decent, they came with excellent Benny Hill noises.
Finally, Steve said: “That’s everything.”
Everything? But my parasites are still squeaking like blind chicks in a tripe
nest. Bring more.
“More?” he said in awe. And before we all broke out into Food, Glorious Food,
he brought more sushi.
I counted 28 items on the bill. For four people, it came to £219 — £21 of
which was for drink. Now that’s a whole lot of money, but like everything
else about the Japs, the normal rules of value don’t apply. It was cheaper
than I expected.
Saki has a dark bar for young people with spots, and overall, it is perfectly
good at what it does. But the experience is, if not instantly forgettable,
indistinguishable from a score of other similar restaurants. London’s
Japanese restaurants are like raw-fish Starbucks: they lack the essential
ethereal dexterity and the ever so humble hubris, the Gilbert and Sullivan
vanity, that makes eating in Japan so unique.
SAKI
4 West Smithfield, EC1; 020 7489 7033
Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-2.30pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6pm-1030pm
Book
a table at Saki
