Everything was better when I was a kid. The wars were better. The diseases were better. Even the Presidents were better. And especially the Japanese restaurants were better. Much better.
I am referring, of course, to the one and only Little Tokyo in Dinkytown, near the campus of the University of Minnesota. My best friend Wayne Matsuura's parents were good friends with the owners of Little Tokyo, so Wayne and I would go there on Friday nights to stuff ourselves with tempura vegetables and pickled daikon radishes and rice balls soaked in sake and then wrapped up in layers of seaweed. In return we washed dishes and broke to saddle the larger cockroaches so we could ride 'em out of town after the place closed. I remember the food as light and crispy and filling and pungent.
But today,October 31, some sixty years later, I find myself in a Japanese place on Center Street in Provo, Utah, that does not live up to my memories at all.
I started with a bowl of miso soup, which tasted exactly like chicken soup. Then I got a green salad, with, the waitress said, the 'house dressing'. The so-called house dressing was some kind of watery mayonnaise. So that didn't do anything to cheer me up. The decor was dark and severe, with simple Japanese calligraphy on the walls. I was happy to have a nice thick pillow on my chair -- but it was covered with crumbs. Next came the pot stickers:
They were okay; nothing to strew cherry blossoms over. As I stared at my plate of pot stickers I realized with embarrassment that I've never really known the proper way to eat them. Do you pick them up with your fingers to nibble on or cut them in pieces with a knife and fork? Me, I just stab 'em with my fork, dunk in the sauce, and then stuff the whole thing in my mouth. On reflections, that seems a rather barbaric way to eat them. So I've probably been offending Japanese culinarians for many years past. Perhaps if I had stopped there I would not now be glaring at my computer screen, with steam slowly rising out of my ears. But I went ahead and ordered vegetable tempura:
It came with the smallest bowl of rice I have ever been served in an Asian restaurant, so I couldn't even fill up on stodge. The veggies had not been dipped in batter at all; they were dipped in cement. I tried using the dipping sauce to soften them up, but they remained as impervious as granite. And flavorless as well; I ladled on the soy sauce like there was no tomorrow, but it hardly made a dent in the void. As I gnawed my way through the last piece I noticed that even though it was now high noon there was not a single solitary other customer in the restaurant -- and now I knew why; if you didn't bring your own jackhammer you probably couldn't digest anything on the menu.
I give the Osaka a one burp rating -- and they're only getting that because I liked the fish in their lobby:
My meal of pot stickers and vegetable tempura, which included the miso soup and green salad, cost $10.56.
I did not feel I had dined well after finishing this meal, so I stopped next door at Bianca's La Petite French Bakery for a Bavarian cream filled kro-nut, a leviathan pastry that set me back $4.99:
It's supposed to be a French donut sliced in half with cream filling in the middle. It succeeds in being nearly impossible to eat without dislocating your jaw and getting powdered sugar on everything within a radius of ten feet:
But it's very good; soft and sweet without being at all gooey. As I sat back covered in powdered sugar, I decided that one lousy Japanese meal does not a tragedy make -- not when I can balance it out with a heavy sweet that will soon have me napping peacefully in my recliner until the hobgoblins start coming out tonight for their cheap candy treats. I should have gotten some gift certificates from the Osaka to hand out for Halloween . . . talk about trick or treat!
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