Thank you for illustrating and reinforcing the ignorance of Schlosser’s post.
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Some of my best best food memories during my childhood in Asia are of dining with my grandfather. After supper on cold winter nights, we’d enjoy sweet warm soups like red bean broth or a bowl of potent (well, potent for a kid at least) of fermented rice porridge with black sesame tangyuan. During the lazy, humid summer evenings, chilled mung bean soup, or a refreshing wood ear mushroom soup with dates would be served. “All to balance out the chi of the season,” as my grandfather would say. The mung bean soup during summer has been a tradition in our family for generations. In the North, grandpa would recall, sweet pancakes would often be treats for the table after a large family meal when he himself was a child.
I must have been mistaken in those silly memories. Thanks to you and Ms. Dunlop (whom I consider an ambassador for bridging Chinese cuisine to the West) for correcting the errors in my upbringing.
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Like I said, thin, not-very-sweet soup. If something starchy, like a pancake, again they’re not very sweet, and there’s a “healthy” element and some sense of balance. The dessert I had at Shibumi was sweet potato with miso.
Those are at the opposite end of the spectrum from western-style, very sweet, utterly imbalanced desserts like pie, cake, ice cream, sticky toffee pudding, or gateau Victoire.
Yeah. I commented on the Instagram post only to have it removed a few hours later.
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Except mooncakes aren’t served in restaurants and aren’t considered a “dessert.” It’s something you share w/ family and friends outside of a restaurant. I would completely baffled if I even saw one on a menu at a restaurant. And it would feel SUPER weird to eat one anywhere outside of my home (or in a similarly, “non-commercial” setting).
But that goes to @hppzz’s point that, apparently, sakura mochi apparently also aren’t served in restaurants, even in Japan, and probably aren’t considered a dessert, either. So Schlosser took a high horse attitude and was wrong.
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Exactly like sakura mochi. That’s precisely what Schlosser was missing (that and not being an arrogant asshole). It was implicit in my first post regarding this antisocial media brouhaha:
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Tristan Harris … dismissed the testimony by the [Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter] executives, saying “it’s almost like having the heads of Exxon, BP and Shell asking about what are you doing to responsibly stop climate change.” Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, said “their business model is to create a society that is addicted, outraged, polarized, performative and disinformed. That’s just the fundamentals of how it works.”
Okay, so you understand that part.
The thing is apparently one of the posters here actually tried to inform Schlosser of his misunderstanding, and he deleted that post. So Schlosser isn’t just “missing” this info. He is actively erasing it. Did he do that to protect his ego? Perhaps. But he also eliminates a chance on that post (which presumably gets more views than the IG posts from the poor plebs who “only” have 500 followers) for additional cultural understanding and learning. That’s a BIG problem.
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I really do think Eaterla was very fair to him, they gave him plenty of space to give his pov and he mostly used it to try and rationalize his behavior.
That line about the 500 followers was perfect, just says it all.
Chef David might want to take some some lessons in how to ask for forgiveness from John Cleese
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fwiw, at kitcho arashiyama (one of the kaiseki restaurants schosser trained at in kyoto) i was served sakura mochi for dessert in april.
also plenty of pictures of sakura mochi at the other restaurant he trained at, kikunoi honten:
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Correct me if I’m wrong but These Kyoto kaiseki dinners appear to be truly the exception rather than the norm in the rest of Japan outside Kyoto . Not an experience the average Japanese will enjoy…
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Kaiseki and chaji are special occasion meals with different sets of rules.
Particularly in Kyoto, there is a massive difference between the everyday meal versus a celebratory meal. Hare no hi versus ke no hi (ハレの日、ケの日）
With Shibumi and Chef Schlosser constantly saying they are not kaiseki, it’s a bit odd. In the context of kaiseki, with kaiseki being an evolution of tea ceremony, having a sweet confection makes sense as it is required prior to drinking matcha.
To keep it simple, Kyoto is Japanese but not all Japanese things are from Kyoto.
Kaiseki is Japanese food but not all Japanese food is derivative of Kaiseki.
I also found it amusing that upon looking at Shibumi’s non alcoholic drinks offering, the only matcha offered is a shaken matcha cold brew. That to me is far more sacrilegious than the lack of sakura mochi at Japanese restaurants in America.
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agreed, just wanted to give some perspective on his possible reasoning for serving it as his restaurant. i think it’s more his kaiseki training and less him trying to cater to american’s expectations.
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If he had said it that way, we wouldn’t be having this discussion on FTC and there would not be an EaterLA exposé.
It still comes down to the fact that you need not tear others down to bring yourself up.
If you’re going to use your social media platform to promote your business, then promote yourself, your food, and your passion. No need to bring anyone/anything else into the fray.
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I think he probably believes the word should be reserved for meals that closely follow the traditional sequence of courses. And if he doesn’t use the word, nobody can complain that he’s not doing it correctly.
To me it was much closer to an izakaya experience.
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I thought izakaya too. With nicer antiques.
And for what it’s worth, the house made dorayaki I had in the before times probably had the best anko in town. I wouldn’t be surprised if their sakura mochi is equally delicious.
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at first they claimed to be kappo
sakura mochi was delicious
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guy’s a moron
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