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Adventures in Dining: Bento Buff
I have an ongoing fantasy where Sarasota becomes a small Japanese city, like the kind you see in the gauzy establishing shots of late-night anime, where power lines and paper lanterns have been lovingly rendered alongside shining modern train stations and old machiya row homes.
It’s the image of a sleepy little hamlet only moments before the giant robots start fighting. This is culinary bento country. “In Japan, it’s really amazing the array of lunchboxes there are,” David Shiplett, executive chef at Bradenton’s Ezra Café, says of bento boxes. “Everybody uses them. They’re made to travel, be packed and carried on the run. Everywhere you can imagine they have bento boxes, whether you’re getting on or off a train, a bus . . . I always thought [bento’s popularity] was because so many people commute in Japan.”
In today’s Japan, you can purchase bentos with every filling imaginable, in almost as many shapes and sizes, filled with everything from rice and nori seaweed to European-style preparations. They are status symbols for school children and stand in the place of our culture’s cafeteria and fast food traditions. Every train station and bus stop has its own signature bento, and Hokka Hokka Tei—a to-go bento company—has some 2,000 franchises throughout the country.
Shiplett offers his bento at Ezra. The exact components vary from time to time, but its basic make-up is a calamari salad with wasabi dressing, a spring roll, marinated squid, fried oysters with basil aioli on a bed of Napa cabbage, tempura tuna sashimi and a little seaweed salad to freshen the palette of colors between compartments. The calamari salad is spectacular. Shiplett says he personally makes every portion to guard the secrets of his squid and wasabi. The wasabi dressing is creamy but light—midway between the green romaine and the corn-starched tubes. It’s kitty corner from the marinated squid, a perfect micro/macro relationship between the warmth of the fried calamari and the mirin-soaked tanginess of the room-temperature squid. The tempura tuna (still a rich crimson in the center) and fried oysters add a necessary balance of starch that brings it all out of the ocean and onto land. The spring roll tastes as light and fresh as its namesake.
Focusing on balance is what really distinguishes the Japanese bento from Western foods-on-the-go—like, say, an aluminum-wrapped tuna salad on rye. To hear Kazu and Akiko Tsuchiya, the husband and wife team behind Kazu’s Sushi and Asian Bistro on Siesta Drive, tell it, balance is definitive. “If you eat dinner at a Japanese house,” Kazu says, “we eat a little bit of veggies, rice, meat or fish…no vitamins needed.”
Even when empty, on a Wednesday morning before it opens for lunch, it’s striking just how small Kazu’s dining room is. There’s room for a little more than a dozen diners.
It’s indicative of the homey approach the owners take to their restaurant. Regulars are greeted by name, and their dietary quirks anticipated. Kazu points out that their bentos have been somewhat Americanized to suit our local tastes (shock: there’s no such thing as a Siesta Key roll in Japan!) Teriyaki, likewise, is more of a Japanese-American flavor than a Japanese one.
Back in Japan’s Kamakura period, during the 12th and 13th centuries, commoners and the rising samurai class would carry dried rice in pouches as they went about their business. During the Azuchi-Momoyama and Edo periods, these gave way to the compartmentalized, lacquered boxes that we recognize as bento today. After a postwar dip in popularity, the bento surged back into prominence during Japan’s ascendancy in the go-go 1980s.
Kazu and Akiko describe their own mothers preparing bento before field trips with glowing nostalgia. That sense of family attention has carried over in the way they greet their regulars, in the care that’s apparent in a flawlessly crisp breast of chicken katsu. The milky, soothing miso comes almost immediately, as though it were waiting just for me. And watching Kazu as he whips up a spicy tuna roll at the sushi bar, he doesn’t display the aggressive, color-guard precision of so many sushi chefs. His style is gentler, more relaxed—almost domestic.
I don’t think it’s sentimentalizing things too much to conjure another recurring mental anime I run—in light-soaked flashback form—of a mother applying delicate focus and loving care to a school lunch bento for a big-eyed child in short pants and a sailor shirt, just before the Gundam robots land and start kicking the tar out of suburban Tokyo. It’s obvious to me by now that my fantasies of Japan exist on a different planet from the one where Ezra and Kazu’s serve bento.
It’s noontime and I’m puzzling through the latest issue of the Japanese manga (Japanese comics) anthology Shonen Jump while I wait for my lunch to arrive at Pacific Rim. I’m having some trouble following the stories because, in a nod to authenticity, the American editors of this manga laid out the pages Japanese-style, from right to left. Given their typically comic-booky treatment of physics and anatomy, it’s difficult to tell whether the cat-man is flying through the air because of the giant laser explosion, or if the laser explosion happens because the cat-man is flying through the air.
If Ezra does nouvelle bento, and Kazu’s does it like a family bistro, Pacific Rim (Pac Rim to regulars) does the businessperson’s bento. The table next to me is clearly an office on lunch break: all women’s blazers and hip-clip cell phone holders. My bento arrives after the obligatory courses of miso soup and ginger-dressed salad. It has a few California rolls, tempura scallops, sesame-spiced rice and a totally kawaii (cute) pile of little pickles in the center.
It all poses gracefully in front of me—asparagus perched over scallops—while
I clap my chopsticks in anticipation.
It has been way too long since I’ve enjoyed the perfection of sweet potato tempura. This is by far the star of Pac Rim’s bento—crispy on the outside, firm and sweet when you bite down and dipped in salty sweet tentsuyu sauce. It would be a perfect dessert if it were just a little less hearty. As things stand, it fills my stomach with warmth and my mouth with soft, soothing sweetness.
The pickles play a perfect supporting roll, only faintly pickle tasting, with plenty of their original vegetable crisp providing texture. I finish up feeling ready to form like Voltron and spend the rest of the day with onomatopoeic sound effects following
my fingers as they type, crackling with electricity.
It may seem strange that such a quotidian part of Japanese food evokes such fantastic daydreams in my mind, but then, I work with what cultural touchstones I have on hand.
Like the anime flights of fancy, the bento offers a moment of respite and pause from work, a little artistic nourishment in the midst of modern civic, professional and academic frenzy. It can be a gourmet statement—the kind of meal that demands my complete focus. Or it can offer comfort from home during those daytime hours when home is the furthest away. Personally, I enjoy the graceful freshness, the healthy variety, the flavors that pair perfectly with an hour away from my desk, a pot of warm green tea and the sounds of giant lizards tearing skyscrapers to the ground.
—By Brian Hughes, Photos by Mark Sickles
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