The Agony & the Ecstasy

Curry has always been there for us. It’s what pulled us through when the family had taken up residence in the Hotel New Grand in a long and open ended stay. A work promotion for my dad meant a move for the family to Yokohama. Waiting for our things to arrive by boat from New Jersey. Sitting on a park bench by the harbor staring out at the ocean. Boats coming and going. Which one’s ours?

There was a little cafe there at street level where I found myself everyday. It was called “The Cafe.” Club sandwich for lunch. Beef curry for dinner. Banana milkshake for dessert. Months went by.

Kurabu sando kudasai. I practiced in the elevator. Up and down. Banana milkshake. A 12-year-old boy doesn’t necessarily understand how to keep himself from losing his fucking mind. Not in complete control of his instrument. Feeling a world slip away, he surrounds himself with familiar things and develops a sense of humor.

The hotel was not new but it was grand. A modern high rise had been built on the old foundation of marble and oak. It was where MacArthur stayed in the heady first few days of the occupation. Where the dreaded Naporitan was born, in imitation of American GI ketchup spaghetti rations. The curry they served was among the first in the country. Yokohama had long been the port of call for the English, who brought their beloved naval curry, a western beef stew with Indian spices. Like the first Italians to eat a tomato, it struck a chord. The dish spread throughout the country. Today, it is probably the national dish.

I would go alone to the cafe and sit at the counter. It was there that I first experienced the witchcraft that would later envelop me and define my life. The curry they made was the exact same as my dad’s, the one I had grown up with. Relics of the same era. It came silver served in a gravy boat. The staff all done up in bow ties.

In better days my dad would make it for dinner. He started off with the House Curry bricks like everyone else, but began to innovate with the spice blend, adding store-bought garam masala to give it a richer taste. Every family in Japan has their own recipe. Secret ingredients are part of the game.

Leaving my little world in New Jersey had been difficult, but making new friends at the international school I began to realize my place in the world. A Franco-Japanese boy who spoke English with an Australian accent. A Japanese girl who left Japan for a few years and couldn’t go back to public school. I was cut from their cloth. The young lad was loosed from this world! Newly awakened, I said goodbye to that old provincial life.

At twelve years old I was just getting my feet wet in the game. Watching my dad lose it over little things and plunge into darkness. Shuddering over the 500 yen toll. Barely eating. The newspaper was late. Oh god. The psychiatric arts weren’t particularly sophisticated in Japan in those days and probably still aren’t. With limited options for treatment in Japan, we turned around and flew back to New Jersey. The small town I grew up in and loved felt like a foreign place. Everything tasted bitter, nothing made sense. As a precautionary measure, I was sent to see a child psychiatrist and couldn’t open up. I wasn’t sure what I had witnessed but I knew it separated me from everyone else. So to the psychiatrist, the mushroom treatment. Fed him shit and kept him in the dark. This dumb prick in that office in Cherry Hill. He didn’t know about the life!

Cognitive behavioral therapy was also of limited use to the old man. Freud said the Irish were immune to psychoanalysis, having never met the Japanese. His therapist helped him understand the condition using the metaphor of a computer.

“I don’t have connectivity.” He told me one day.

It was an early insight into the lifestyle. While it feels like a sober appraisal of the situation, it doesn’t correspond in any way to reality. We are simply living an experience we can’t fully comprehend. There is no good or bad. Particularly to a depressive. You’re not going to ruin my day. Only I can do that. God help you if that yolk breaks in the pan. Cancel my engagements for the rest of the year!

Twenty-something years later he would ask me, in the car on the way to the H-Mart not far from that doctor’s office in Cherry Hill, how I’ve been coping.

Cheers, dad. Thanks for checking in.

“Uhh, Welcome.”

I don’t know. I guess I just try to enjoy things in a deep way.

“Huh…” He said, scratching his head.

As I emphasized in a deep way with my hands one of them slid over to the dial to turn up the classical FM for the last few minutes of the ride. It was all business at H-mart, but I could tell by the pace of his walk he wasn’t doing great. A stroke had hobbled him a year before and who sits at home watching the market. Another depressive period. He was barely eating and had lost a lot of weight. I made the flight back from LA with tears in my eyes about life in general and nothing in particular. A few years of doing my own thing there and I was just getting my head above water.

Why don’t we make curry?

“Ok…”

We got home and I went to work. A big plate of curry with a sliced ribeye on the side. You can tell his level of enjoyment with the recklessness and speed with which he eats. There were grains of rice flying in every direction. He barely breathed for the 5 minutes it took to finish his plate.

Afterwards, “pretty good.”

I’m often asked before a big event if I’m nervous cooking for a lot of people or under pressure or whatever. Having cut my teeth in the high stakes world of cooking for a depressed 70-year-old Japanese man, I laugh and say No. In that life, who isn’t clutch starves to death. I think the old man put on five pounds that week and I flew back to LA with the same tears in my eyes. You gotta be shitting me. It was a plot line from a late Ozu film. You have some idea now why I chose that name.

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Niigata senbei
Japanese rice crackers, choice of black pepper, uni, squid, nori, or a mix of all 4

temaki
choice of blue crab, maguro, kanpachi namerou, or ikura

sesame miso bagna fredda
local raw vegetables with an umami-rich anchovy dip

hiyashi salad
local lettuces, radish, cucumber, sesame ginger dressing

owan
rich fish stock miso soup

white anchovy salad with shiso vinaigrette
marinated white anchovies over local greens with fresh shiso dressing

scallop ceviche
raw sea scallops, sudachi, ikura, aonori

kanpachi namerou
tartare of kanpachi with white miso, ginger, shiso, over rice

Japanese beef curry bento
local grass-fed beef stewed in our house-made curry spice over Japanese rice with hiyashi salad and pickles

black cod saikyo yaki bento
roasted black cod marinated in miso, over Japanese rice with hiyashi salad and pickles

seared scallop bento
seared sea scallops over Japanese rice, hiyashi salad & pickles

maguro bento
raw bluefin tuna over sushi rice with hiyashi salad, pickles

chirashi
raw itoyori, saba, tuna, nodoguro, scallop, kinmedai, tai, ikura, uni over sushi rice*

basque cheesecake
yuzu coconut rice pudding