shoutout to +CARDI B! challenge 'cept these are 5 years -- not 10 -- apart; let's get some support for voice recognition over facial recognition
Trailblazing in the city, "be back immediately, to confiscate" 'your honeys'
“In some cuisines, what you’re looking at, at the highest level, is a competent reproduction.”
About me
Gender Male
Introduction Immediate answer to FAQ. Questions of protection pierced me when I was a maricopa county inmate. For as much as I gained routine that I don't express to others as much as I could, now and then, God works as inorganic and an omnicapacitor even though man and earthenworks are organic.
Excerpt from what I like to read on the web:
“In some cuisines, what you’re looking at, at the highest level, is a competent reproduction.”
Ryan Roadhouse
Portland
Portland is my number one city in the world. Some of the reasons are clear and maybe even superficial. Nike is there, and I’m a sneakerhead. They also have the best record stores ever, which was something I learned early on in our touring career. When you first start to travel, you are at the mercy of the runner—the person who picks you up from the hotel and brings you to sound check. Our runner was a huge music fan, and he introduced me to all these specialty
record stores that are unknown to almost everyone, unless you happen to be a Japanese businessman who wants to buy rare 12-inch singles, mark them up, and sell them back to American collectors in Tokyo.
This collector’s mentality, the sense that everything can be bespoke and valuable, that you can combine a hippie sensibility with a cosmopolitan sophistication, isn’t for everyone. It’s a highly specific tuning—that’s clear from the way that it has been parodied on Portlandia
. To me, though, it’s undeniably compelling. It makes me think of when I was young and my mother made me shop for clothes in thrift stores. I resented it at the time, but I’ll be grateful for it my whole life. It forced me to have a personal sense of style, to appreciate the paths that led away from the beaten path. Portland doesn’t seem to have a tremendous number of natives, but the people who go there are all a
certain type. I think I might be that type, too.
Portland’s appeal is especially clear when it comes to food. Portland is the capital of food trucks. It’s the first place that I ever saw a PB&J food truck. The city is also great for inspiring its chefs to move into uncharted waters. My conversation with Ryan Roadhouse was supposed to be about Nodoguro—the supper-club/idea curating series where he and his wife create menus based on strange content prompts. But as we spoke, it ranged far and wide, through the cities he lived and worked, through the hinterlands of pop culture, but it kept returning to the same fundamental ideas, ideas that had come up explicitly in my conversation with Dave Beran in Chicago and implicitly in many other conversations: How do you design your life as a chef so that you can consistently innovate? Can high-end cuisine also be pop culture?
Portland has always seemed like it’s filled with people who go there from elsewhere to make music or cook food or do other things that get made fun of on Portlandia. Most people who are there aren’t really from there. Will you disprove this theory?
No. I was born in Illinois, in Sterling. It’s outside Chicago. My dad was Canadian, but my mom’s family was from Illinois. As I grew up, my family moved around. I went to high school in Canada, in Saskatchewan, and then lots of places after that.
In the Midwest, what was the first restaurant you remember going to? I’m talking about right at the beginning, when you were a little kid and tagging along with the rest of your family.
The first one I remember must have been in Iowa, a pizza place. I would have been three or four years old and I remember getting cheese pizza and extra sauce on the side.
That’s a pretty sophisticated order for a little kid. You liked the extra sauce or the idea of getting extra sauce?
Probably both. One of my least favorite foods is peel-and-eat shrimp, because it
used to be my favorite food. When I was a little older, eight or so, I went to
one of those places where they were having all you can eat. I ate my body weight in shrimp. I don’t think I have ever been that sick. I don’t know if I caught a bad one or if it was gluttony.
Apart from pizza and shrimp, what did you think about food at that point? Or, rather, did you think about it as something more than a set of calories that
was going to end up in your stomach?
Food was very important. My grandfather, my father’s father, had been an oil executive. The company he worked for went under, so he spent his middle years unemployed. At that point, I was sometimes living only with my grandparents. I was born to young parents and before my parents were more settled, I was raised by my grandparents and by the television. Mr. Rogers taught me how to tie my shoe and how to whistle. My grandfather’s big thing during the day, especially when he was between jobs, was getting dinner ready, not just cooking but finding a bottle of wine, setting the table. At one point, I tried to eat the butter off the table and he was very displeased with me. Food was very important to me, and he was the formative figure. That time with him got me started with cooking. One of the first things I made was these baked ham and cheese sandwiches. Either he encouraged me toward that recipe or I figured it out myself, but they were a lunch staple, one of my favorite things. In first grade, when we had to do writing assignments, I wrote about how to make those sandwiches. And there was a second dish I cooked, too, a pasta carbonara, that I patterned after my grandfather’s recipe—cook noodles with a little butter, crack an egg, whip it with some bacon, and you’re ready to go.
When I got older, I took care of my brothers. After school, it was just the three of us at home, and it was fun to figure out what we were going to eat. Maybe I’d make that carbonara. Maybe I’d make Buffalo wings. Just not shrimp.
You got a head start. My family was in the business. I love music, and I loved it then, so it was generally rewarding to be immersed in that. But there were times
that I felt like maybe I was overdoing it. Or walking back and forth in a narrow corridor.
Well, after that I lost touch with food for a while. Largely, that was because of the direction I got pushed in by my parents. They were still thinking mainly about my schooling. I was still very interested in eating, but cooking fell to the wayside in favor of sports and academics. At one point I remember finding a cookbook. It was one of those
cookbooks that you just find in people’s houses: red and white cover, nothing special, maybe Betty Crocker. I looked at something in there and decided to make it for breakfast the next morning. Before I knew it, I was cooking out of that cookbook regularly. It was a refuge from everything else in my life, all the stresses. I would do it in the morning before my girlfriend woke up. It was me time, the only time like that in the day.
But then you started working in kitchens, and I assume that you had to mostly do what you were told. Was it strange to take a step back and not be able to have your own ideas?
A little. I went through phases where I worked for endless hours underneath a chef with way more experience than I had. Often in those times, I wasn’t allowed any creativity whatsoever. But I got a chef position at a very young age, which allowed me to do anything I wanted. Weirdly, at that same point, I realized that I didn’t have enough craft to do the things I wanted to do. That’s when I found people who served as true mature mentors. When I was working with them, it was a step back, a little bit, to a point where I came to feel that creativity didn’t matter as much.
It didn’t matter how? Because you were more focused on learn
ing? Because you felt like it was more about giving food to diners?
It’s largely because of the kind of cuisine I was cooking. I have only worked in Japanese restaurants. How I ended up there is one of those weird mixes of planning and chance. I loved sushi as a kid. I moved down to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to live with my mom, who had just gotten divorced. At that point, I really needed a job. I went to this local Japa
nese restaurant I had eaten in. I loved the food and I wanted to work there. The problem was that I was a bit too young to really cook. I begged and begged and they hired me and put me in the kitchen. A few years after that, I moved to Denver. I took my résumé around and found work at a Japanese-Hawaiian-fusion place. They were opening a second unit, and I ended up opening that location. I was very young, still, maybe twenty-one, and suddenly I was
“In some cuisines, what you’re looking at, at the highest level, is a competent reproduction.”
Ryan Roadhouse
Portland
Portland is my number one city in the world. Some of the reasons are clear and maybe even superficial. Nike is there, and I’m a sneakerhead. They also have the best record stores ever, which was something I learned early on in our touring career. When you first start to travel, you are at the mercy of the runner—the person who picks you up from the hotel and brings you to sound check. Our runner was a huge music fan, and he introduced me to all these specialty record stores that are unknown to almost everyone, unless you happen to be a Japanese businessman who wants to buy rare 12-inch singles, mark them up, and sell them back to American collectors in Tokyo.
This collector’s mentality, the sense that everything can be bespoke and valuable, that you can combine a hippie sensibility with a cosmopolitan sophistication, isn’t for everyone. It’s a highly specific tuning—that’s clear from the way that it has been parodied on Portlandia. To me, though, it’s undeniably compelling. It makes me think of when I was young and my mother made me shop for clothes in thrift stores. I resented it at the time, but I’ll be grateful for it my whole life. It forced me to have a personal sense of style, to appreciate the paths that led away from the beaten path. Portland doesn’t seem to have a tremendous number of natives, but the people who go there are all a certain type. I think I might be that type, too.
Portland’s appeal is especially clear when it comes to food. Portland is the capital of food trucks. It’s the first place that I ever saw a PB&J food truck. The city is also great for inspiring its chefs to move into uncharted waters. My conversation with Ryan Roadhouse was supposed to be about Nodoguro—the supper-club/idea curating series where he and his wife create menus based on strange content prompts. But as we spoke, it ranged far and wide, through the cities he lived and worked, through the hinterlands of pop culture, but it kept returning to the same fundamental ideas, ideas that had come up explicitly in my conversation with Dave Beran in Chicago and implicitly in many other conversations: How do you design your life as a chef so that you can consistently innovate? Can high-end cuisine also be pop culture?
Portland has always seemed like it’s filled with people who go there from elsewhere to make music or cook food or do other things that get made fun of on Portlandia. Most people who are there aren’t really from there. Will you disprove this theory?
No. I was born in Illinois, in Sterling. It’s outside Chicago. My dad was Canadian, but my mom’s family was from Illinois. As I grew up, my family moved around. I went to high school in Canada, in Saskatchewan, and then lots of places after that.
In the Midwest, what was the first restaurant you remember going to? I’m talking about right at the beginning, when you were a little kid and tagging along with the rest of your family.
The first one I remember must have been in Iowa, a pizza place. I would have been three or four years old and I remember getting cheese pizza and extra sauce on the side.
That’s a pretty sophisticated order for a little kid. You liked the extra sauce or the idea of getting extra sauce?
Probably both. One of my least favorite foods is peel-and-eat shrimp, because it used to be my favorite food. When I was a little older, eight or so, I went to one of those places where they were having all you can eat. I ate my body weight in shrimp. I don’t think I have ever been that sick. I don’t know if I caught a bad one or if it was gluttony.
Apart from pizza and shrimp, what did you think about food at that point? Or, rather, did you think about it as something more than a set of calories that was going to end up in your stomach?
Food was very important. My grandfather, my father’s father, had been an oil executive. The company he worked for went under, so he spent his middle years unemployed. At that point, I was sometimes living only with my grandparents. I was born to young parents and before my parents were more settled, I was raised by my grandparents and by the television. Mr. Rogers taught me how to tie my shoe and how to whistle. My grandfather’s big thing during the day, especially when he was between jobs, was getting dinner ready, not just cooking but finding a bottle of wine, setting the table. At one point, I tried to eat the butter off the table and he was very displeased with me. Food was very important to me, and he was the formative figure. That time with him got me started with cooking. One of the first things I made was these baked ham and cheese sandwiches. Either he encouraged me toward that recipe or I figured it out myself, but they were a lunch staple, one of my favorite things. In first grade, when we had to do writing assignments, I wrote about how to make those sandwiches. And there was a second dish I cooked, too, a pasta carbonara, that I patterned after my grandfather’s recipe—cook noodles with a little butter, crack an egg, whip it with some bacon, and you’re ready to go. When I got older, I took care of my brothers. After school, it was just the three of us at home, and it was fun to figure out what we were going to eat. Maybe I’d make that carbonara. Maybe I’d make Buffalo wings. Just not shrimp.
You got a head start. My family was in the business. I love music, and I loved it then, so it was generally rewarding to be immersed in that. But there were times that I felt like maybe I was overdoing it. Or walking back and forth in a narrow corridor.
Well, after that I lost touch with food for a while. Largely, that was because of the direction I got pushed in by my parents. They were still thinking mainly about my schooling. I was still very interested in eating, but cooking fell to the wayside in favor of sports and academics. At one point I remember finding a cookbook. It was one of those cookbooks that you just find in people’s houses: red and white cover, nothing special, maybe Betty Crocker. I looked at something in there and decided to make it for breakfast the next morning. Before I knew it, I was cooking out of that cookbook regularly. It was a refuge from everything else in my life, all the stresses. I would do it in the morning before my girlfriend woke up. It was me time, the only time like that in the day.
But then you started working in kitchens, and I assume that you had to mostly do what you were told. Was it strange to take a step back and not be able to have your own ideas?
A little. I went through phases where I worked for endless hours underneath a chef with way more experience than I had. Often in those times, I wasn’t allowed any creativity whatsoever. But I got a chef position at a very young age, which allowed me to do anything I wanted. Weirdly, at that same point, I realized that I didn’t have enough craft to do the things I wanted to do. That’s when I found people who served as true mature mentors. When I was working with them, it was a step back, a little bit, to a point where I came to feel that creativity didn’t matter as much.
It didn’t matter how? Because you were more focused on learning? Because you felt like it was more about giving food to diners?
It’s largely because of the kind of cuisine I was cooking. I have only worked in Japanese restaurants. How I ended up there is one of those weird mixes of planning and chance. I loved sushi as a kid. I moved down to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to live with my mom, who had just gotten divorced. At that point, I really needed a job. I went to this local Japanese restaurant I had eaten in. I loved the food and I wanted to work there. The problem was that I was a bit too young to really cook. I begged and begged and they hired me and put me in the kitchen. A few years after that, I moved to Denver. I took my résumé around and found work at a Japanese-Hawaiian-fusion place. They were opening a second unit, and I ended up opening that location. I was very young, still, maybe twenty-one, and suddenly I was
in charge of a restaurant. It was kind of a corporate setup—the place had long hours, seven days a week. I worked in kitchen-menu management for about two years and then left and went back to the earlier place as a more experienced person.
You have a very detailed professional biography, and it’s fascinating to me, because you learn different lessons all along the
way. I have been asking chefs what art form they feel closest to, whether it’s music or sculpture. Has your opinion on that changed over the years, as you’ve gone from restaurant to restaurant?
I remember one specific moment during the time I was in Los Angeles, I worked in a restaurant named Urasawa, which is on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It was a Michelin two-star place, very small, with a ridiculous price point.1
Urasawa helped me understand more about creativity and the beautiful plate. But it also helped me see how theatrical a restaurant really is. When you walk into Urasawa, everything is staged. You have costumes. You have lighting. But again, the type of theater is different in Japanese cooking. The highest level of achievement is perfect reproduction. If that’s the highest form of your craft, it’s devoid of creativity. So there were
unanswered questions about presentation and cost and formula. From there, a headhunter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, found me working at a place that had a name but no real concept, and they were looking for a chef to come in and take on the place. It looked like a good place to experiment with my ideas and cut loose. Part of that was size. In Denver, I had started to look at my own ideas, but the size of the place worked against me. It was so big—more than two hundred
seats—that we could develop the cuisine, but most of the people coming in would want pretty basic fare. Jackson Hole was smaller. There were fewer people, and so I learned that if I wanted people to come back I should change the menu often. We changed it twice a week, which emphasized creativity and dish development. It also meant more risk. Some of the dishes would go out with minimal testing. There was more off-the-cuff cooking.
This is an understatement. At one point, it was the second-most-expensive place in America, behind Masa in New York. A study in 2013 showed that the average bill there was $1,111, which is pricey unless it’s in binary, in which case it’s only $15.
Japanese dining is the exact opposite. It’s all about formality and rigidity. Have you been to
Japan and seen how things are done there?
Only once. The chef I worked for in Denver sent me there to motivate me. He had an apartment there. He had a restaurant for me to land in and an intense internship set up for me that let me hit the ground running. The restaurant was not what I expected at all. It was one of my great surprises. I was blown away by this guy’s cooking. It was so disjointed, so not-classic, so
filled with these oddball ingredients like avocados and corn. It shattered what I thought of as traditional cuisine. Have you ever seen that movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi?
Not only did I see it, but it obsessed me. So much so that I insisted on taking a pilgrimage to Japan, to eat at his restaurant. And since then I’ve done it twice. In a way, that restaurant
sparked this book. It helped me to understand chefs as creative artists with their own rules and traditions and challenges and obsession.
Right. So that kind of tension between training and innovation is everywhere in that movie. What’s a sushi master’s version of creativity? Pressing the rice different on one side compared to how your father did it. There’s a pressure to conform. But I also saw from this chef
who I worked with that conformity could be avoided. In the end, I liked the structure of Japanese cooking. I think I personally work well within limitations. It’s something I have always done. There are certain things about dishes based on tradition. And that’s carried through to Nodoguro. My current setup seats only thirteen people. I am cooking on a household electric stovetop. I work with a farmer. I like to set major limita
tions for myself and try to work within that format.
After living and working in so many places, how did you end up in Portland, my favorite city?
There’s a place in Portland called Bamboo Sushi. They do sustainable seafood and sushi. The owner was very clever and savvy, and he wanted to expand his concept across the nation. That meant altering the concept slightly for other
“In some cuisines, what you’re looking at, at the highest level, is a competent reproduction.”
Ryan Roadhouse
Portland
Portland is my number one city in the world. Some of the reasons are clear and maybe even superficial. Nike is there, and I’m a sneakerhead. They also have the best record stores ever, which was something I learned early on in our touring career. When you first start to travel, you are at the mercy of the runner—the person who picks you up from the hotel and brings you to sound check. Our runner was a huge music fan, and he introduced me to all these specialty record stores that are unknown to almost everyone, unless you happen to be a Japanese businessman who wants to buy rare 12-inch singles, mark them up, and sell them back to American collectors in Tokyo.
This collector’s mentality, the sense that everything can be bespoke and valuable, that you can combine a hippie sensibility with a cosmopolitan sophistication, isn’t for everyone. It’s a highly specific tuning—that’s clear from the way that it has been parodied on Portlandia. To me, though, it’s undeniably compelling. It makes me think of when I was young and my mother made me shop for clothes in thrift stores. I resented it at the time, but I’ll be grateful for it my whole life. It forced me to have a personal sense of style, to appreciate the paths that led away from the beaten path. Portland doesn’t seem to have a tremendous number of natives, but the people who go there are all a certain type. I think I might be that type, too.
Portland’s appeal is especially clear when it comes to food. Portland is the capital of food trucks. It’s the first place that I ever saw a PB&J food truck. The city is also great for inspiring its chefs to move into uncharted waters. My conversation with Ryan Roadhouse was supposed to be about Nodoguro—the supper-club/idea curating series where he and his wife create menus based on strange content prompts. But as we spoke, it ranged far and wide, through the cities he lived and worked, through the hinterlands of pop culture, but it kept returning to the same fundamental ideas, ideas that had come up explicitly in my conversation with Dave Beran in Chicago and implicitly in many other conversations: How do you design your life as a chef so that you can consistently innovate? Can high-end cuisine also be pop culture?
Portland has always seemed like it’s filled with people who go there from elsewhere to make music or cook food or do other things that get made fun of on Portlandia. Most people who are there aren’t really from there. Will you disprove this theory?
No. I was born in Illinois, in Sterling. It’s outside Chicago. My dad was Canadian, but my mom’s family was from Illinois. As I grew up, my family moved around. I went to high school in Canada, in Saskatchewan, and then lots of places after that.
In the Midwest, what was the first restaurant you remember going to? I’m talking about right at the beginning, when you were a little kid and tagging along with the rest of your family.
The first one I remember must have been in Iowa, a pizza place. I would have been three or four years old and I remember getting cheese pizza and extra sauce on the side.
That’s a pretty sophisticated order for a little kid. You liked the extra sauce or the idea of getting extra sauce?
Probably both. One of my least favorite foods is peel-and-eat shrimp, because it used to be my favorite food. When I was a little older, eight or so, I went to one of those places where they were having all you can eat. I ate my body weight in shrimp. I don’t think I have ever been that sick. I don’t know if I caught a bad one or if it was gluttony.
Apart from pizza and shrimp, what did you think about food at that point? Or, rather, did you think about it as something more than a set of calories that was going to end up in your stomach?
Food was very important. My grandfather, my father’s father, had been an oil executive. The company he worked for went under, so he spent his middle years unemployed. At that point, I was sometimes living only with my grandparents. I was born to young parents and before my parents were more settled, I was raised by my grandparents and by the television. Mr. Rogers taught me how to tie my shoe and how to whistle. My grandfather’s big thing during the day, especially when he was between jobs, was getting dinner ready, not just cooking but finding a bottle of wine, setting the table. At one point, I tried to eat the butter off the table and he was very displeased with me. Food was very important to me, and he was the formative figure. That time with him got me started with cooking. One of the first things I made was these baked ham and cheese sandwiches. Either he encouraged me toward that recipe or I figured it out myself, but they were a lunch staple, one of my favorite things. In first grade, when we had to do writing assignments, I wrote about how to make those sandwiches. And there was a second dish I cooked, too, a pasta carbonara, that I patterned after my grandfather’s recipe—cook noodles with a little butter, crack an egg, whip it with some bacon, and you’re ready to go. When I got older, I took care of my brothers. After school, it was just the three of us at home, and it was fun to figure out what we were going to eat. Maybe I’d make that carbonara. Maybe I’d make Buffalo wings. Just not shrimp.
You got a head start. My family was in the business. I love music, and I loved it then, so it was generally rewarding to be immersed in that. But there were times that I felt like maybe I was overdoing it. Or walking back and forth in a narrow corridor.
Well, after that I lost touch with food for a while. Largely, that was because of the direction I got pushed in by my parents. They were still thinking mainly about my schooling. I was still very interested in eating, but cooking fell to the wayside in favor of sports and academics. At one point I remember finding a cookbook. It was one of those cookbooks that you just find in people’s houses: red and white cover, nothing special, maybe Betty Crocker. I looked at something in there and decided to make it for breakfast the next morning. Before I knew it, I was cooking out of that cookbook regularly. It was a refuge from everything else in my life, all the stresses. I would do it in the morning before my girlfriend woke up. It was me time, the only time like that in the day.
But then you started working in kitchens, and I assume that you had to mostly do what you were told. Was it strange to take a step back and not be able to have your own ideas?
A little. I went through phases where I worked for endless hours underneath a chef with way more experience than I had. Often in those times, I wasn’t allowed any creativity whatsoever. But I got a chef position at a very young age, which allowed me to do anything I wanted. Weirdly, at that same point, I realized that I didn’t have enough craft to do the things I wanted to do. That’s when I found people who served as true mature mentors. When I was working with them, it was a step back, a little bit, to a point where I came to feel that creativity didn’t matter as much.
It didn’t matter how? Because you were more focused on learning? Because you felt like it was more about giving food to diners?
It’s largely because of the kind of cuisine I was cooking. I have only worked in Japanese restaurants. How I ended up there is one of those weird mixes of planning and chance. I loved sushi as a kid. I moved down to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to live with my mom, who had just gotten divorced. At that point, I really needed a job. I went to this local Japanese restaurant I had eaten in. I loved the food and I wanted to work there. The problem was that I was a bit too young to really cook. I begged and begged and they hired me and put me in the kitchen. A few years after that, I moved to Denver. I took my résumé around and found work at a Japanese-Hawaiian-fusion place. They were opening a second unit, and I ended up opening that location. I was very young, still, maybe twenty-one, and suddenly I was in charge of a restaurant. It was kind of a corporate setup—the place had long hours, seven days a week. I worked in kitchen-menu management for about two years and then left and went back to the earlier place as a more experienced person.
You have a very detailed professional biography, and it’s fascinating to me, because you learn different lessons all along the way. I have been asking chefs what art form they feel closest to, whether it’s music or sculpture. Has your opinion on that changed over the years, as you’ve gone from restaurant to restaurant?
I remember one specific moment during the time I was in Los Angeles, I worked in a restaurant named Urasawa, which is on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It was a Michelin two-star place, very small, with a ridiculous price point.1 Urasawa helped me understand more about creativity and the beautiful plate. But it also helped me see how theatrical a restaurant really is. When you walk into Urasawa, everything is staged. You have costumes. You have lighting. But again, the type of theater is different in Japanese cooking. The highest level of achievement is perfect reproduction. If that’s the highest form of your craft, it’s devoid of creativity. So there were unanswered questions about presentation and cost and formula. From there, a headhunter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, found me working at a place that had a name but no real concept, and they were looking for a chef to come in and take on the place. It looked like a good place to experiment with my ideas and cut loose. Part of that was size. In Denver, I had started to look at my own ideas, but the size of the place worked against me. It was so big—more than two hundred seats—that we could develop the cuisine, but most of the people coming in would want pretty basic fare. Jackson Hole was smaller. There were fewer people, and so I learned that if I wanted people to come back I should change the menu often. We changed it twice a week, which emphasized creativity and dish development. It also meant more risk. Some of the dishes would go out with minimal testing. There was more off-the-cuff cooking.
This is an understatement. At one point, it was the second-most-expensive place in America, behind Masa in New York. A study in 2013 showed that the average bill there was $1,111, which is pricey unless it’s in binary, in which case it’s only $15.
Japanese dining is the exact opposite. It’s all about formality and rigidity. Have you been to Japan and seen how things are done there?
Only once. The chef I worked for in Denver sent me there to motivate me. He had an apartment there. He had a restaurant for me to land in and an intense internship set up for me that let me hit the ground running. The restaurant was not what I expected at all. It was one of my great surprises. I was blown away by this guy’s cooking. It was so disjointed, so not-classic, so filled with these oddball ingredients like avocados and corn. It shattered what I thought of as traditional cuisine. Have you ever seen that movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi?
Not only did I see it, but it obsessed me. So much so that I insisted on taking a pilgrimage to Japan, to eat at his restaurant. And since then I’ve done it twice. In a way, that restaurant sparked this book. It helped me to understand chefs as creative artists with their own rules and traditions and challenges and obsession.
Right. So that kind of tension between training and innovation is everywhere in that movie. What’s a sushi master’s version of creativity? Pressing the rice different on one side compared to how your father did it. There’s a pressure to conform. But I also saw from this chef who I worked with that conformity could be avoided. In the end, I liked the structure of Japanese cooking. I think I personally work well within limitations. It’s something I have always done. There are certain things about dishes based on tradition. And that’s carried through to Nodoguro. My current setup seats only thirteen people. I am cooking on a household electric stovetop. I work with a farmer. I like to set major limitations for myself and try to work within that format.
After living and working in so many places, how did you end up in Portland, my favorite city?
There’s a place in Portland called Bamboo Sushi. They do sustainable seafood and sushi. The owner was very clever and savvy, and he wanted to expand his concept across the nation. That meant altering the concept slightly for other
places: what worked in Portland might not work exactly the same way in San Francisco or Seattle, based partly on what fish were available and partly on other local factors. I was in Denver, and I applied for the San Francisco job. They got back to me and said, come to Portland. The personality here is a version of what you see when the city is parodied. There are lots of people here who do handcraft of one kind or another. That extends to the food world. The Portland model, for better or worse, is, say, a company of a few guys who go out and forage and then bring ingredients to the restaurant. They have a little answering service, a tiny list of what they’re getting, and in the afternoon they bring you a little box of these foraged ingredients. The fact that these guys can sustain themselves is amazing. In other cities, those same kinds of people have to make their money doing big bulk orders to New York and forage on the side. But in Portland there are lots of people doing these things more because they enjoy it.
So you cook at your pop-up Nodoguro. And you do what you call “atmosphere curation” with the help of your wife. What is that? I’ve never heard that term before, but I like it.
It started as a result of necessity. When I did my first pop-up, I wanted to base it
on flowers—on the language of flowers, how flowers contribute to cuisine. My wife, Lena, was watching as I prepared the menu, and she had the idea to put a little stamp of a dandelion or cherry blossoms on the menu. She also helped with the table decorations, which were little wood stumps along with glasses with dandelions planted in them. That helped to refine the experience. It made it a more complete idea. That pop-up went well. But when it came time for
the next one, I realized that we had set the bar high. There were about forty people who came to the first one, and I needed all of them to come back, and to bring new people also. That meant making sure that the next idea was as creatively productive. For the second one, Lena did a little research as we were figuring out the concept, and she had the idea to do fireflies. It was a seasonally themed idea. At the time, she was only really thinking of it in terms of decor, but I started seeing how it could guide the menu, too. Then someone else got involved, which led to a little painting. I began to see how people could experience change not only through food, but through the new feel of the space.
There are other restaurants that do versions of that same thing, obviously, like Next in Chicago. But because you’re running a
smaller operation, you can make more sharp turns, or immerse yourself more completely. At some point, both of those things started to happen.
Right. I was reading Haruki Murakami’s novels, and I started to notice that there were all these food items mentioned. And I wasn’t the only one who was noticing. There was a weird online subculture that was springing up around the way that food worked in his fiction.
“In some cuisines, what you’re looking at, at the highest level, is a competent reproduction.”
Ryan Roadhouse
Portland
Portland is my number one city in the world. Some of the reasons are clear and maybe even superficial. Nike is there, and I’m a sneakerhead. They also have the best record stores ever, which was something I learned early on in our touring career. When you first start to travel, you are at the mercy of the runner—the person who picks you up from the hotel and brings you to sound check. Our runner was a huge music fan, and he introduced me to all these specialty record stores that are unknown to almost everyone, unless you happen to be a Japanese businessman who wants to buy rare 12-inch singles, mark them up, and sell them back to American collectors in Tokyo.
This collector’s mentality, the sense that everything can be bespoke and valuable, that you can combine a hippie sensibility with a cosmopolitan sophistication, isn’t for everyone. It’s a highly specific tuning—that’s clear from the way that it has been parodied on Portlandia. To me, though, it’s undeniably compelling. It makes me think of when I was young and my mother made me shop for clothes in thrift stores. I resented it at the time, but I’ll be grateful for it my whole life. It forced me to have a personal sense of style, to appreciate the paths that led away from the beaten path. Portland doesn’t seem to have a tremendous number of natives, but the people who go there are all a certain type. I think I might be that type, too.
Portland’s appeal is especially clear when it comes to food. Portland is the capital of food trucks. It’s the first place that I ever saw a PB&J food truck. The city is also great for inspiring its chefs to move into uncharted waters. My conversation with Ryan Roadhouse was supposed to be about Nodoguro—the supper-club/idea curating series where he and his wife create menus based on strange content prompts. But as we spoke, it ranged far and wide, through the cities he lived and worked, through the hinterlands of pop culture, but it kept returning to the same fundamental ideas, ideas that had come up explicitly in my conversation with Dave Beran in Chicago and implicitly in many other conversations: How do you design your life as a chef so that you can consistently innovate? Can high-end cuisine also be pop culture?
Portland has always seemed like it’s filled with people who go there from elsewhere to make music or cook food or do other things that get made fun of on Portlandia. Most people who are there aren’t really from there. Will you disprove this theory?
No. I was born in Illinois, in Sterling. It’s outside Chicago. My dad was Canadian, but my mom’s family was from Illinois. As I grew up, my family moved around. I went to high school in Canada, in Saskatchewan, and then lots of places after that.
In the Midwest, what was the first restaurant you remember going to? I’m talking about right at the beginning, when you were a little kid and tagging along with the rest of your family.
The first one I remember must have been in Iowa, a pizza place. I would have been three or four years old and I remember getting cheese pizza and extra sauce on the side.
That’s a pretty sophisticated order for a little kid. You liked the extra sauce or the idea of getting extra sauce?
Probably both. One of my least favorite foods is peel-and-eat shrimp, because it used to be my favorite food. When I was a little older, eight or so, I went to one of those places where they were having all you can eat. I ate my body weight in shrimp. I don’t think I have ever been that sick. I don’t know if I caught a bad one or if it was gluttony.
Apart from pizza and shrimp, what did you think about food at that point? Or, rather, did you think about it as something more than a set of calories that was going to end up in your stomach?
Food was very important. My grandfather, my father’s father, had been an oil executive. The company he worked for went under, so he spent his middle years unemployed. At that point, I was sometimes living only with my grandparents. I was born to young parents and before my parents were more settled, I was raised by my grandparents and by the television. Mr. Rogers taught me how to tie my shoe and how to whistle. My grandfather’s big thing during the day, especially when he was between jobs, was getting dinner ready, not just cooking but finding a bottle of wine, setting the table. At one point, I tried to eat the butter off the table and he was very displeased with me. Food was very important to me, and he was the formative figure. That time with him got me started with cooking. One of the first things I made was these baked ham and cheese sandwiches. Either he encouraged me toward that recipe or I figured it out myself, but they were a lunch staple, one of my favorite things. In first grade, when we had to do writing assignments, I wrote about how to make those sandwiches. And there was a second dish I cooked, too, a pasta carbonara, that I patterned after my grandfather’s recipe—cook noodles with a little butter, crack an egg, whip it with some bacon, and you’re ready to go. When I got older, I took care of my brothers. After school, it was just the three of us at home, and it was fun to figure out what we were going to eat. Maybe I’d make that carbonara. Maybe I’d make Buffalo wings. Just not shrimp.
You got a head start. My family was in the business. I love music, and I loved it then, so it was generally rewarding to be immersed in that. But there were times that I felt like maybe I was overdoing it. Or walking back and forth in a narrow corridor.
Well, after that I lost touch with food for a while. Largely, that was because of the direction I got pushed in by my parents. They were still thinking mainly about my schooling. I was still very interested in eating, but cooking fell to the wayside in favor of sports and academics. At one point I remember finding a cookbook. It was one of those cookbooks that you just find in people’s houses: red and white cover, nothing special, maybe Betty Crocker. I looked at something in there and decided to make it for breakfast the next morning. Before I knew it, I was cooking out of that cookbook regularly. It was a refuge from everything else in my life, all the stresses. I would do it in the morning before my girlfriend woke up. It was me time, the only time like that in the day.
But then you started working in kitchens, and I assume that you had to mostly do what you were told. Was it strange to take a step back and not be able to have your own ideas?
A little. I went through phases where I worked for endless hours underneath a chef with way more experience than I had. Often in those times, I wasn’t allowed any creativity whatsoever. But I got a chef position at a very young age, which allowed me to do anything I wanted. Weirdly, at that same point, I realized that I didn’t have enough craft to do the things I wanted to do. That’s when I found people who served as true mature mentors. When I was working with them, it was a step back, a little bit, to a point where I came to feel that creativity didn’t matter as much.
It didn’t matter how? Because you were more focused on learning? Because you felt like it was more about giving food to diners?
It’s largely because of the kind of cuisine I was cooking. I have only worked in Japanese restaurants. How I ended up there is one of those weird mixes of planning and chance. I loved sushi as a kid. I moved down to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to live with my mom, who had just gotten divorced. At that point, I really needed a job. I went to this local Japanese restaurant I had eaten in. I loved the food and I wanted to work there. The problem was that I was a bit too young to really cook. I begged and begged and they hired me and put me in the kitchen. A few years after that, I moved to Denver. I took my résumé around and found work at a Japanese-Hawaiian-fusion place. They were opening a second unit, and I ended up opening that location. I was very young, still, maybe twenty-one, and suddenly I was in charge of a restaurant. It was kind of a corporate setup—the place had long hours, seven days a week. I worked in kitchen-menu management for about two years and then left and went back to the earlier place as a more experienced person.
You have a very detailed professional biography, and it’s fascinating to me, because you learn different lessons all along the way. I have been asking chefs what art form they feel closest to, whether it’s music or sculpture. Has your opinion on that changed over the years, as you’ve gone from restaurant to restaurant?
I remember one specific moment during the time I was in Los Angeles, I worked in a restaurant named Urasawa, which is on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It was a Michelin two-star place, very small, with a ridiculous price point.1 Urasawa helped me understand more about creativity and the beautiful plate. But it also helped me see how theatrical a restaurant really is. When you walk into Urasawa, everything is staged. You have costumes. You have lighting. But again, the type of theater is different in Japanese cooking. The highest level of achievement is perfect reproduction. If that’s the highest form of your craft, it’s devoid of creativity. So there were unanswered questions about presentation and cost and formula. From there, a headhunter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, found me working at a place that had a name but no real concept, and they were looking for a chef to come in and take on the place. It looked like a good place to experiment with my ideas and cut loose. Part of that was size. In Denver, I had started to look at my own ideas, but the size of the place worked against me. It was so big—more than two hundred seats—that we could develop the cuisine, but most of the people coming in would want pretty basic fare. Jackson Hole was smaller. There were fewer people, and so I learned that if I wanted people to come back I should change the menu often. We changed it twice a week, which emphasized creativity and dish development. It also meant more risk. Some of the dishes would go out with minimal testing. There was more off-the-cuff cooking.
This is an understatement. At one point, it was the second-most-expensive place in America, behind Masa in New York. A study in 2013 showed that the average bill there was $1,111, which is pricey unless it’s in binary, in which case it’s only $15.
Japanese dining is the exact opposite. It’s all about formality and rigidity. Have you been to Japan and seen how things are done there?
Only once. The chef I worked for in Denver sent me there to motivate me. He had an apartment there. He had a restaurant for me to land in and an intense internship set up for me that let me hit the ground running. The restaurant was not what I expected at all. It was one of my great surprises. I was blown away by this guy’s cooking. It was so disjointed, so not-classic, so filled with these oddball ingredients like avocados and corn. It shattered what I thought of as traditional cuisine. Have you ever seen that movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi?
Not only did I see it, but it obsessed me. So much so that I insisted on taking a pilgrimage to Japan, to eat at his restaurant. And since then I’ve done it twice. In a way, that restaurant sparked this book. It helped me to understand chefs as creative artists with their own rules and traditions and challenges and obsession.
Right. So that kind of tension between training and innovation is everywhere in that movie. What’s a sushi master’s version of creativity? Pressing the rice different on one side compared to how your father did it. There’s a pressure to conform. But I also saw from this chef who I worked with that conformity could be avoided. In the end, I liked the structure of Japanese cooking. I think I personally work well within limitations. It’s something I have always done. There are certain things about dishes based on tradition. And that’s carried through to Nodoguro. My current setup seats only thirteen people. I am cooking on a household electric stovetop. I work with a farmer. I like to set major limitations for myself and try to work within that format.
After living and working in so many places, how did you end up in Portland, my favorite city?
There’s a place in Portland called Bamboo Sushi. They do sustainable seafood and sushi. The owner was very clever and savvy, and he wanted to expand his concept across the nation. That meant altering the concept slightly for other places: what worked in Portland might not work exactly the same way in San Francisco or Seattle, based partly on what fish were available and partly on other local factors. I was in Denver, and I applied for the San Francisco job. They got back to me and said, come to Portland. The personality here is a version of what you see when the city is parodied. There are lots of people here who do handcraft of one kind or another. That extends to the food world. The Portland model, for better or worse, is, say, a company of a few guys who go out and forage and then bring ingredients to the restaurant. They have a little answering service, a tiny list of what they’re getting, and in the afternoon they bring you a little box of these foraged ingredients. The fact that these guys can sustain themselves is amazing. In other cities, those same kinds of people have to make their money doing big bulk orders to New York and forage on the side. But in Portland there are lots of people doing these things more because they enjoy it.
So you cook at your pop-up Nodoguro. And you do what you call “atmosphere curation” with the help of your wife. What is that? I’ve never heard that term before, but I like it.
It started as a result of necessity. When I did my first pop-up, I wanted to base it on flowers—on the language of flowers, how flowers contribute to cuisine. My wife, Lena, was watching as I prepared the menu, and she had the idea to put a little stamp of a dandelion or cherry blossoms on the menu. She also helped with the table decorations, which were little wood stumps along with glasses with dandelions planted in them. That helped to refine the experience. It made it a more complete idea. That pop-up went well. But when it came time for the next one, I realized that we had set the bar high. There were about forty people who came to the first one, and I needed all of them to come back, and to bring new people also. That meant making sure that the next idea was as creatively productive. For the second one, Lena did a little research as we were figuring out the concept, and she had the idea to do fireflies. It was a seasonally themed idea. At the time, she was only really thinking of it in terms of decor, but I started seeing how it could guide the menu, too. Then someone else got involved, which led to a little painting. I began to see how people could experience change not only through food, but through the new feel of the space.
There are other restaurants that do versions of that same thing, obviously, like Next in Chicago. But because you’re running a smaller operation, you can make more sharp turns, or immerse yourself more completely. At some point, both of those things started to happen.
Right. I was reading Haruki Murakami’s novels, and I started to notice that there were all these food items mentioned. And I wasn’t the only one who was noticing. There was a weird online subculture that was springing up around the way that food worked in his fiction.
There were blogs. There were two cookbooks in Japan. So I used Murakami as a starting point, and worked with the food elements in his fiction to make my menu. It was based on elements right out of these books, though we applied certain transformation to them. For example, in Hear the Wind Sing, there’s a character who stacks up pancakes and pours Coca-Cola over them.2 That seemed like a great starting point. That idea became our dessert, though not literally. We had a woman we were working with, a tea master, who was making a snack for us. She was a huge Murakami fan. She had gone to see him speak and he had told the crowd that his favorite food was canned peaches. We picked fresh peaches, blanched them, skinned them, and poached them in red syrup. Then we broke down all the flavors in Coca-Cola and ended up making this flat syrup that tasted like Coca-Cola, and serving it over a buttermilk
ice cream that was slightly carbonated. So that act of translation from the novels brought us through to fizzing ice cream, syrup, peaches, on a Japanese rice sundae. That started to be when more people came in.
That’s Murakami’s first novel, which I haven’t read. I know someone who does something similar to what Ryan does—he tracks all the Western music in Murakami’s fiction. That means lots of jazz and classical. In Hear The Wind Sing, he also mentioned the Mickey Mouse Club theme, Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia,” the Beach Boys’ “California Girls,” and two songs by Elvis, “Return to Sender” and “Good Luck Charm.”
That’s like writing a novel, or at least translating one. It would be like looking at a painting of people at the symphony, and trying
to re-create the music that they’re listening to.
It was an exciting way of making productive limitations. I tried to make food to my style but with all these additional twists as laid out in other people’s artwork. The next one we did after that was Studio Ghibli, which was based on snapshots from all the movies.3 For that menu, we ended up serving nine courses—things like chiashu with tur
nip, miso, and walnut, which we took from a scene in Spirited Away, or acorns, figs, and honey, which was related to My Neighbor Totoro. The total meal was $85, a low price point, at least compared to the other places I had seen. Then we did Twin Peaks, which was quite cool: our take on a Waldorf salad, or pie, or a traditional diner sandwich, or a damn fine cup of coffee.4
Ghibli was the studio founded by Hayao Miyazaki, who people call the Disney of Japan. They shut down in 2014 after Miyazaki’s retirement, after making twenty movies. I think my favorite is Totoro, partly because of the soot sprites.
As I’m writing this, David Lynch keep leaving and rejoining the Twin Peaks reboot on Showtime. He was in, then he was out, and now he seems to be back in. I hope he stays in, and then we can see what foods his characters eat this time around, and then Ryan can put them on yet another Nodoguro menu. Maybe Lynch can eat that one too.
Not only did you do your Twin Peaks menu, but you got to serve it to David Lynch himself. What was that like?
You ask like you weren’t there.
Oh, yeah. I was there. To me it was surreal, but I was just eating with him. How was it to actually make food for him in that context? It’s almost like you’re doing a remake of his show, but with food as the medium.
It was super-weird, but it wasn’t as weird as I imagined it might be. We did the dinner in Los Angeles. We got out there, and the event was still a little bit in flux: equipment, scheduling, prep, everything. As a chef, I was worried about the actual cooking conditions—we were doing it in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, and I needed to figure out if the kitchen there really worked. The next day, we stopped off in the restaurant to have a cup of coffee, and the waiter asked us where we were staying. We told him Bungalow 3. “How did you sleep?” he said. We explained that we weren’t actually sleeping there, that we were doing a food event. “Oh,” he said. “That’s the bungalow that John Belushi died in, so some of the staff feel like it’s haunted.” That made the whole thing even weirder: a Twin Peaks dinner for David Lynch in a haunted bungalow. And then the prep turned out to be pretty difficult. It was a hot L.A. day. There were gels we had to set. The refrigerator was heating up on us. And the whole time there were photographers circling us.
And then you had to serve the actual dinner. That’s when I came in.
Yeah. That’s when I met David, too. There was something about his work that I felt turned out to be true of him as well. There are these moments of horror and surrealism, but there is also a very accessible and approachable quality. I was worried he might pull a diva move where he only had a half hour, but he was super-nice and polite and happy to
be there. But that’s when it hit me. Twin Peaks was his. He might look at the dinner I made and say, “What the hell? This has nothing to do with Twin Peaks.”
But you explained how you worked. You connected the dots for him as far as it went: his work to yours.
I tried to give a little background for each dish. The first course was Cod in
the Dashi Percolator, which is flash-fried black cod, dashi with vaporized sake, mustard greens, crispy parsnip. That comes from a scene in the show where Agent Cooper and Sheriff Harry S. Truman—Kyle MacLachlan and Michael Ontkean—are drinking coffee. All of a sudden, Jack Nance runs out and says, “Fellas, don’t drink that coffee—there was a fish in my percolator.” For me, that suggested something about what to put around fish. We put this
scalding hot dashi broth around the cod. I explained the connection. I watched David Lynch’s expression. He seemed really thrilled. But what really made the evening is that he cut in. “Can I tell you a story of where that scene came from?” he said. Apparently he used to go to a café in Virginia. He was friends with two other guys, one of whom was part of the family that owned the café. The three of them would hang out and drink coffee. One day the third guy came in.
He ordered coffee, took a gulp and spit it out. “What’s the matter?” David Lynch and the other guy calmed him down. But he kept saying it was terrible. Finally, they investigated. In the kitchen, in the coffee percolator, there was a bar of Lava soap.
That was the amazing thing to me. You have this one incident, a real event, that gets translated and retranslated into different
people’s artwork. Did that change the way you thought of this overall process for extracting menus from other people’s artwork?
It reminded me that it’s a strange process, but also one that I’m growing comfortable with. For example, for a long time I have wanted to do a menu based on the work of the band Neutral Milk Hotel: re-create the sense of their music, lyrics, and album art. There’s a
surreal component but also a kind of safety or lushness. At first it seemed intimidating, like there were so many ways to get it wrong. Now I see it a little more clearly. That’s been on the calendar for a while, but we’re doing it as a collaboration with a ceramicist who is making actual dishes. It’s a matter of coordinating with her schedule.
Do you feel like introducing all these new and strange elements
is exciting for Japanese cuisine, or does it stretch it so much that it’s a kind of betrayal?
Like I said, I had seen a chef who was really out there and experimental. And there’s a personal part of it, too, an issue I have always dealt with, which is working in Japanese restaurants as a non-Japanese person. There’s an idea that you’re going to be better at that kind of cooking if you’re Japanese. I remember situations where guests didn’t want me to
prepare their food, especially if it was an open counter. They wanted a Japanese person making their sushi. So maybe deep down I felt like I was bringing something new and novel to it just by being me.
Making art that’s not what people expect is part of the fun. The Roots do a version of it at The Tonight Show. There are bands that get booked as musical
guests on the show that seem like a weird fit for us, but that combination is what makes it interesting.
As I have headed down this path of cooking out from these cultural reference points, that relationship has become clearer. I realize that I only have formal training in Japanese food, and so I’ll always be rooted in that. All these dishes at Nodoguro, no matter how strange they may seem, are broadly
based on Japanese ideas. At the core all the food is Japanese but sometimes inspired by non-Japanese ideas.
Dave Beran at Next in Chicago was telling me that one of the liberating things is putting an old idea away. They do that there because they change over the whole place. At a traditional restaurant, if you do a dish people love, you’re kind of stuck
with it. But when change is built into the DNA of the place, you change along with it.
That’s one of the great things. When we do themes and then set them aside, they’re gone. We clean the slate and start over again. For us, there’s an added dimension, which is that our very idea will have to change. I can’t rent out the old café space attached to the grocery store forever. And so, as we find a new space, the idea behind it will have to
change, too. And then there’s the fact that I’m changing as a chef. At some point, you want to show off your techniques. But as you go, you realize that when it comes down to it, the experience of dining is sort of simple. You want to cook stuff and you want people to enjoy it. You want food to be delicious. You never want that obscured by technique. This relates back to Japanese cuisine, too. In classical Japanese cooking, there are all these weird ingredients,
things that North Americans might think of as Fear Factor food: sea cucumbers and fermented guts. Making use of them in the right way is all craft. For me, I’m more about pure enjoyment.
Nathan Myhrvold talks about how America discovers food, and he’s very interested in the way that cuisines come to us: we get sushi, we get Thai, we get
Vietnamese. Then eventually it’s all here, like it seemingly is now, at least in New York, and the new ideas are less about bringing things in and more about combining them. Are we getting to the point where all cuisines are fusion?
Yeah, I think we are, but I think it’s great. Once again, look at Jiro. The filmmakers found this one guy, this super-unique individual who makes the
best sushi in the world. But he’s a very singular person. So is that authenticity? Is he embodying a tradition, or changing it? Those are all open questions. It’s great for more people to go to Japan in their minds or via screen and come back here and see what’s authentic, and how many versions of authenticity there are.
I’m always thinking up tools in music or in life that could make things easier. If you could invent
one device that would make your life in the kitchen easier, what would it be?
There was a thing in the DuckTales cartoon when I was little. You could hit it and time would stop.5 We do ten to twelve courses for people throughout the week. So the best tool I can imagine is a time-stopper. That’s been one of the greatest challenges, doing these menus as a one-man show for this many
courses. When people come in, they don’t want to sit there for five hours to have dinner.
It’s a magic watch that Gyro invents in the episode “Time Teasers.” Obviously. I’m just kidding about how obvious it was. I don’t know the show that well. It’s not even that it’s much past my time. I just never crossed paths with it profitably. But there’s a similar device in John D. MacDonald’s The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything. I don’t know if I read the book version, which is from the early sixties, but I remember the TV movie, which starred Robert Hays. He could press the stem on the watch and everything around him turned red and he could do what he wanted: sneak into people’s houses, take off people’s clothes, switch the cat food and the dog food. That came out the same year he starred in Airplane! The TV movie was in June. Airplane!
was in July. A few months
later, Prince released Dirty Mind. What a year.
You mentioned DuckTales! You’re pulling out a deep cut there. Millennials will have no idea what you are taking about. Other chefs have talked about pace, too. Nathan Myhrvold likes to keep things moving alone. He wants every course to be five minutes or less. People
don’t like to sit for as long as they used to. What else is changing in food culture? What are the main challenges people are going to face in ten years?
In the sushi world, one of the biggest changes has been the supply of bluefin tuna. In the nineteenth century, it was considered a cheap fish. Then it started to gain in value. In the late sixties, there were competitions to catch the fish. People caught all they could and in the end very little of it got used. In fact, it only started to be an issue because JAL airlines brought it back to Japan from the East Coast. It was a way of filling up returning planes. And now it’s nearly extinct. I haven’t touched one in five years. So you devise substitutes. You realize that there are lots of things that you would have never used that now are more central for use. For me, I use more local fish. I go to the guy down the lane and ask him what’s coming from the coast. The seafood changes have been very cool. They let me blow up the toolkit and expand my mind.
�����
2
14,
������
3
8,
������
4
�����
1
12,
������
2
14,
������
3
8,
������
4
�����
1
12,
������
2
14,
������
3
8,
������
4
�����
1
12,
������
2
14,
������
3
8,
������
4
Comments
Post a Comment