The comedian Lewis Black says that the product peddlers believe consumers are so dumb that we’re “meat with eyes.” That phrase repeatedly popped in my head during my vacation to North Carolina, but most particularly when we had dinner at Arigato in Greensboro.
We arrived at our hotel in Greensboro last Friday night after driving all day in torrential rain. I was surprised to see three Japanese restaurants listed in the hotel directory; craving sushi, I talked en into going to “Arigato Japanese Steakhouse and Sushi Bar”.
When we pulled up to the Walmart-sized, window-less building with a parking lot full of pick-up trucks, hunger prevented me from pondering just why the restaurant was a hit with the masses of Greensboro, NC.
We asked for the first available table and got stuck in the smoking section at a BBQ table with six Meat With Eyes: Four young 20-somethings who seem pretty happy now but you can tell they’re all 5 years away from a succession of calamitous white trash milestones, and a horrible 30-ish white trash couple who didn’t talk to each other once the entire meal and put all of their concentration into shoveling as much rice and meat into their mouths as human anatomy permits.
The Caucasian waitress, dressed in a mockery of a kimono, offered us chopsticks. Gone are the days when you have to shame yourself by asking for a fork! Now you can identify yourself as a cultured pansy by taking chopsticks, which one of the MWEs, and en and I did. Then we ordered: I got shrimp BBQ, en got chicken BBQ, and everyone else got steak BBQ, or steak and shrimp BBQ.
Our soups looked like miso soup except with fat gobulars floating on top. It tasted like chicken broth with five times the added salt. We ordered the only maki roll on the menu (California) and in place of the customary crab stick there was shredded imitation crab. The wasabi was mild enough to feed a baby.
The tossed salads were drenched in American dressing. The worst white trash MWE ate one leaf of lettuce that was essentially a Blue Cheese dressing reservoir, then pushed his bowl aside. Halfway through my salad, everyone at the table lit up cigarettes except for en and I. As a Bostonian it was a shock to see people smoking indoors, and I couldn’t help but to glare at them.
I didn’t catch our ambiguously-ethnic chef’s name, but for the purposes of clarity, let’s call him “Juan Carlos.” Juan Carlos approached our table muttering broken sentences in a distinctively Southern English accent, his knife in a metal holster. He began frying our vegetables (onions and zucchini) in a cup of oil, then fried the shrimp appetizer in a lump of butter. Then he fried a big bowl of white rice with CORN mixed in. Because the Japanese are ravenous corn lovers.
“This is how Japanese make it good,” Juan Carlos said as he tossed giant pats of butter all over the food.
With his gleaming sharp cooking utensils, Juan Carlos dazzled us by cutting up cooked shrimp really fast and pushing the pieces two inches away into a simmering pool of butter, a trick he cultivated during his extensive study of the millennia-old discipline of Japanese Table Theatrics. The MWEs sucked their cigarettes and politely clapped while I suffered severe stomach spasms stifling hysterical giggles.
We then each got about five cups of fried rice and corn and a tablespoon of shrimp and vegetables, which everyone devoured while Juan Carlos cooked our meat. He did some more tricks, like banging things on the table really fast while making karate noises.
After our meat was done and served, Juan Carlos left to enthusiastic applause from the MWEs, who seemed genuinely appreciative that his presence rendered dinner conversation unnecessary. After about 5 more minutes of eating and smoking, the waitress came over armed with take-out containers and checks.
Japanese food, widely acknowledged as one of the world’s healthiest cuisines, has undergone a sickening transformation in order to be successfully mass-marketed to Meat With Eyes and satisfy the public’s hunger for new settings in which to consume 1000s of empty calories. I’ve been to fabulous Japanese BBQs before and has a great time, but apparently Japanese has become the new Chinese.
