SuperSwede said:
"...there's something about eating food that's looking at you..."
Funny you should mention that! I participated in a plant startup in Japan in the early 80's that required being there for about 10 days. On the last evening, the QA manager, who was my counterpart, invited me out to dinner with him, and took me to his favorite neighborhood restaurant. It was a tiny little place, with maybe 20 seats, total, and the owner was also the chef/maitre'd/waiter/busboy/accountant/janitor/etc. We sat at the counter, which had a lower level upon which you ate your food, and a higher level (just above eye-level, when seated) where the chef placed the plates of food when he finished preparing them.
Dinner was a succession of individual small courses consisting of a wide variety of different food types and methods of preparation. Since my host and the chef conversed only in Japanese, I had absolutely no idea what I was eating. My host's English was quite poor, so my questions of "What's this?" were answered in a largely unintelligible fashion, because he had no idea what the English word was for most of what we ate. I do remember one course quite clearly, though--and there was absolutely NO QUESTION what it was!
About halfway through the meal, my host pointed to a large fish tank in back of the chef. It quickly became evident that this was
not an aquarium! In it were 20 or so fish swimming around that were the same approximate size and shape as a bluegill sunfish, for those of you familiar with that type of fish (see photo below). Their length was approx. 9", I'd guess. Anyway, the chef netted two of these fish out of the tank and busily went to work preparing them. Because of the two-tiered counter, we couldn't see what he was doing on the other side, though the chopping and cutting sounds of his knife made it fairly clear that he was preparing a raw fish, or
sashimi, course for us. Now, I happen to love fresh sashimi and sushi, and it clearly doesn't get any fresher than this, so I wasn't at all alarmed. When he finished, he put our two plates up on the second tier of the counter, and we each reached up and moved them down onto the first tier to dig in. That was the disquieting part....
What our friend the chef had done was to neatly filet the fish, cut the skin off the meat, and then slice it up into fine strips, mixed with mild white radish and with some wasabi and soy-based dipping sauce on the side. All well and good. The problem was that he hadn't killed the fish before fileting them. In fact, they were still very much alive. And how do I know this, you ask?
Well, what he had done was to take each of the poor fish, now denuded of the major portion of it's flesh and skin, and run a thin wooden skewer (much like a giant toothpick) through the tail and then through the fish again just in back of the head. This held the fish in a sideways arched position--basically a "letter C" when viewed from the top. He then placed the fish on the plate, with the cut-up pile of sashimi within the arch of that letter C shape. So, as I ate its admittedly very tasty flesh, the fish would occasionally wiggle its tail, flap its fins or move its mouth. And the eye pointed toward me watched me the whole time, or so it seemed. So, while it was delicious, I have never felt so guilty about eating anything in my life!
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) after a night out with my buddy in nyc...and the waitress (who spoke very little english) actually pointed at her tongue two different times and said...duck tongue?...to make sure i was really ordering the duck tongue!
