Japanese food blue spheres food in liquid
JAPANESE FOOD BLUE SPHERES FOOD IN LIQUID FULL
Now imagine one of those restaurant display cases with several rows full of a few dozen dishes, many of them set menus with several components, and add up the numbers in your head. Full main dishes go up into the equivalent of hundreds of dollars, like 52,600 yen for a platter of sushi for four. A simple cup of green tea is 3,600 yen (about 36 dollars), and a single onigiri rice ball is 7,000 yen. An easy place for the English-speaker to peruse the prices is at the website of FakeFoodJapan (which has a handy converter in the right hand-corner to change the price in yen into your native cuisine). Well I couldn’t have been more wrong about the “cheap” part – in fact those samples cost a LOT of money. Maybe because these days we equate “plastic” with “fake” and “cheap,” they struck me as the opposite of a sign of quality cuisine.
Personally I remember that before I was familiar with Japanese food and culture, when I saw food models in a Japanese restaurant in the US, they seemed odd and rather suspicious. When I see this it makes me feel like I don’t want to eat it. And in fact they’re so unfamiliar to people from most other countries that some are put off by them. Source: YoAndMeĭespite how helpful they are to those of us with minimal Japanese skills, these samples were not created for our benefit – they’ve existed since before mass tourism to Japan was practical. With their exquisite detail, you know exactly what you’re going to get – what toppings on the ramen, what side dishes with the set meal – and if you really can’t communicate in any other way, all you need to do is point.
If you’ve ever visited Japan and had to order food without much kanji knowledge, sampuru サンプル ( ) are a lifesaver. Nowadays, you can get this fake food in any form you want: keychains, flash drives, cell phone charms, and even fake food iPhone cases. Known in Japan as sampuru サンプル ( ), or “sample,” this waxy, fake food has been around for nearly 100 years and, over time, has evolved beyond restaurant windows. He demands to eat the food that’s in the display and, to his disappointment, discovers that it’s not real food at all, just a plastic replica. In one scene, Big Bird stops in front of a restaurant and looks at the food displayed in the window. When I watched Big Bird in Japan as a kid, one scene in particular stuck in my memory, even decades afterwards.