16 December 2005

Kyo

(A Japanese restaurant, rue de la Verrerie.)

These days I’m all about trying new experiences, like moving to Paris and signing a lease and all, so I’ve been thinking it was time for me to try out sushi, and the worst that could happen to me was dying because of poorly-prepared fugu. So last Sunday I let friends drag me to Kyo (there’s bound to be an accent somewhere in the name, but when I googled it to check I only found the name in uppercase, so I can’t know): it’s well located (in the Marais), the place and waiters are pleasant, prices are reasonable, the food is fresh and there’s the lead singer of a punkish-rockish French band at a table.

Obviously I’m not going to compare this restaurant to others, seeing as it’s my first take at sushi (as for the meat skewers, they’re neither better nor worse than in the last — and first — Japanese restaurant I tried; I just don’t like their skewers), so I’ll trust the others that it’s a good Japanese restaurant. I found the white rice quite insipid, but maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be (I know that’s what soy sauce is there for, but I don’t like it too much either).

What I can judge now is the concept of sushi: true, it’s quite edible even if you don’t particularly like fish (especially salmon, because tuna does taste of sea); true, it’s quite different from cooked fish and you can’t really know whether you’ll like it or not until you try it; what I don’t get, though, is that you put a tiny piece of fish, with a relatively shy taste, in a lump of rice, with no taste at all, rolled in algae, with no taste either, and dip the thing in soy sauce, cover it with wasabi, and wrap it in fresh ginger. And now that’s considered a refined meal, even though it amounts to putting a slice of truffle in a ball of mashed potatoes and covering it with peanut butter and ketchup. I’m okay with eating raw fish because it’s healthy, but if crazes, culinary and otherwise, were motivated by health, the world would be a very different place. No, really, there’s got to be something I don’t get: sushi can’t be fashionable in the Western world just because people are so proud they could go beyond their initial disgust for raw fish. Can’t be. People aren’t so stupid.