A Cook's Tour by Anthony Bourdain

Author:Anthony Bourdain [Bourdain, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: General, Cooking, Travel, International, Essays, Food, Essays & Travelogues, Regional & Ethnic, Cookery
ISBN: 9781582341408
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2001-12-07T08:00:00+00:00

We are barbarians. We are big, hairy, smelly, foreign devils, unsophisticated, loud, clumsy, overexpressive, and overfed, blundering thoughtlessly through life. At least that’s how you might feel when preparing yourself for the ryokan experience. The Japanese – those that can afford it – like to unwind and relax. They like skiing. They adore golf. Fly-fishing is an obsession. But the traditional way to kick back is to spend a weekend at a ryokan, a country inn, usually in a rural area in the mountains, away from city life. There, one can spend a few days in quiet reflection, soaking in onsen (hot springs), enjoying the healthy benefits of a massage, perhaps taking in a little musical entertainment, and dining on kaiseki, the most refined, sophisticated style of eating in Japan. An outgrowth of the tea ceremony, kaiseki is the national version of haute cuisine, an experience designed to appeal to all the senses, and one’s spirit, in equal proportion, as well as one’s sense of history and location – a complete yin/yang workup. What better way for a stressed-out office drone to lose himself completely to pleasure than to step back for a few days into the sixteenth century?

Nervously waiting for the shinkansen, the bullet train, to the seaside town of Atami, I was becoming painfully aware of my otherness. Kaiseki, like no other Japanese cuisine, offers a minefield of possible behavioral gaffes to the uninformed Westerner like myself. Now, I know how to use chopsticks. By New York standards, I’m impressive. But while reading up on proper dining etiquette at a kaiseki meal, the customary practices and procedures when staying at a ryokan, my heart filled with dread and terror.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.