Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo by Matthew Amster-Burton Read Free Book Online

hot, ultra-rich broth and toppings. The goal is to lift a tangle of noodles with your chopsticks and dip them in the bowl of broth on the way to your mouth. This is a crazy way to eat noodles and, unless you’ve been inculcated with the principles of noodle-slurping physics from birth, a great way to ruin your clothes.

The World’s Greatest Supermarket
スーパー
    No one postures in a supermarket. It’s an unfiltered view under those bright lights. You’re going to see the real culture and the real cravings and appetites of the people.
    —Peter Jon Lindberg
    A while back, I was listening to
The Splendid Table,
and Lynne Rossetto Kasper was talking to Lindberg, a
Travel and Leisure
columnist. The subject? Supermarkets around the world.
    “What country do you think has the best supermarkets?” asked Kasper.
    Lindberg didn’t hesitate. “It has to be Japan,” he replied.
    The moment I stepped into Life Supermarket in Nakano, I knew what he meant. The name is written in English and pronounced “rye-fuh,” and it looks like a small suburban American supermarket, except the only parking lot is for bicycles. Dozens and dozens of bicycles. Bicycle parking lots in Japan can be enormous. Think it’s hard to find your car at the airport? I saw a parking lot outside a mall in Asakusa with room for at least a thousand bikes, all spooned together, with none of those helpful cartoon reminders that you’re parked in 2C .
    Go through the sliding doors and take the escalator down to the basement. If it’s a hot day—and in July, it’s always a hot day—you’ll drink in a welcome blast of air conditioning and, perhaps, a less-welcome blast of the Life Supermarket theme song. This five-second jingle is played on a continuous loop in random parts of the store at random times of day, at various tempos. The song consists of a girlish voice singing, “FUNNY FUNNY FUNNY / SURPRISE, SURPRISE!” over and over and over again.
    This induces the Five Stages of Dealing with an Intolerable Jingle. First you laugh. Then you get confused. Then you get angry. Then you go into a wide-eyed trance. Then you load up your basket with Japanese candy bars. In a couple of days, I went from, “Why are they polluting this beautiful supermarket with this terrible song?” to “I don’t hear anything, but for some reason, I feel like if I shop here more often I’ll get a funny surprise.”
    This may be a silly thing to say, but Life Supermarket is thoroughly devoted to Japanese food. It’s easy to cook Japanese in a small kitchen, and it’s just as easy to stock a satisfying range of Japanese ingredients and prepared foods in a small supermarket. Life Supermarket is tiny compared to a suburban American store.
    True, there’s an aisle devoted to foreign foods, and then there are familiar foods that have been put through the Japanese filter and emerged a little bit mutated. Take breakfast cereal. You’ll find familiar American brands such as Kellogg’s, but often without English words anywhere on the box. One of the most popular Kellogg’s cereals in Japan is Brown Rice Flakes. They’re quite good, and the back-of-the-box recipes include cold tofu salad and the savory pancake okonomiyaki, each topped with a flurry of crispy rice flakes. Iris and I got mildly addicted to a Japanese brand of dark chocolate cornflakes, the only chocolate cereal I’ve ever eaten that actually tastes like chocolate. (Believe me, I’ve tried them all.)
    Stocking my pantry at Life Supermarket was fantastically simple and inexpensive. I bought soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, rice, salt, and sugar. (I was standing right in front of the salt when I asked where to find it. This happens to me every time I ask for help finding any item in any store.) Total outlay: about $15, and most of that was for the rice. Japan is an unabashed rice protectionist, levying prohibitive tariffs on imported rice. As a result, supermarket rice is domestic, high quality, and very