Japan’s Worst Beats France’s Best

Giles Coren is the restaurant critic for The Times of London; his column provides wry, often searing commentary on contemporary cuisine. He talked to Sophie Grove recently about Tokyo's new Michelin ranking, the merits of Japanese cooking and the flaws that left France in second place. Excerpts:

Grove: Are you surprised that Tokyo has been awarded 191 stars?
Coren: It's no surprise to me. I would say the worst meal I had in Japan was better than the best meal I've ever had in France. I think the Japanese are way ahead. In Tokyo there's a combination of futuristic cleanliness, technique and a sense of direction with a very old-fashioned approach to service. Whatever kind of restaurant you go into you're treated with wonderful respect by the staff and are expected to treat them in a similar way. In sushi bars you actually see businessmen in suits handing presents to the chef.

What about Japanese food?
In Japan everything is about rawness; everything is about what comes out of the ground. Everything is seasonal. That's what we're just coming back to after years of processed food: bourgeois rubbish for about 200 years, then 50 years of processed. In Japan they only cook things if they really, really have to, and the Japanese have been doing that for 10,000 years.

The first time I ate a live raw scallop in Tokyo made me [question why] the French have been grilling these things and doing them with black pudding and some sort of lobster-bisque reduction. We think of scallop as something with a faintly fishy taste. It tastes like a monkfish cheek. [But] if you open the shell still quivering and slice it, bam, and then pop it in your mouth, it tastes like a litchi.

What do you think about the Michelin system itself?
I consider Michelin Guides to be spurious. There's an ongoing problem with what exactly Michelin is really rating: no one really knows. There was a time when it was all about the look of the thing. They were measuring it all against French bourgeois standards. Clearly under the old Michelin rules Japan would never have got any stars. The Michelin people of the 1970s and '80s would have said, "What's this disgusting raw fish?"

Will the French be feeling jilted by Tokyo ' s high rating?
The French are so easily riled by everything. [French culture is] in terminal decline. It's on the cusp of a terrible dark age like ancient Rome or Constantinople in the ninth century. Of course, they still cook beautifully at home. You can buy wonderful food in France. They spend more—I think—per capita on buying food than anybody else. But the thing about French food that used to exist stopped existing when the Americans colonized Montparnasse in the 1930s. Now it's hard to tell where Paris ends and Euro Disney starts. It's like the British car industry in the 1970s, the British Empire in the 1950s. It's just at its end. They can still have a few sparks. They can do the all-singing, all-dancing, bells-and-whistles, duck-press, massive silver service—they can do all that. There's a combination of parochial bigotry, nationalism, incompetence and cheapness.

And what about London?
There are ways in which London is the best city to eat in the world. There are things you can't get in Japan. I would miss food quite quickly if I lived there. For all sorts of historical reasons there's no Chinese food in Japan, which is a shame. To get that extra star in France, Italy and England, it's all about trying to invent some terribly new and exciting thing. Of course to Europeans, Japanese food feels so progressive. It's not; it's ancient and real.

© 2008