Celebrating Authentic Asian Cuisine
We hosted a sold-out special edition historical sushi dinner this week as a sort of “amuse-bouche” to preview the 2012 LuckyRice Food Festival, featuring authentic culinary traditions from all over Asia.
At the dinner I gave a presentation on some of the most surprising twists and turns in sushi history–a few interesting pieces of trivia included the fire that destroyed Edo in the mid-1600s resulting in sushi suddenly becoming a popular street snack (can you guess why?), and the rounding up of prostitutes, pornographers, and sushi chefs by conservative politicians in the 1840s (bet you can’t guess why).
Meanwhile the Michelin-starred chefs at Jewel Bako crafted for our guests a gorgeous collection of old-style sushi that we’d designed to reflect traditional Japanese culinary values – values that are surprisingly different from what we assume is good and desirable in Japanese sushi today. I talked about that as well.
Also joining us to discuss pairing sushi with sake was Timothy Sullivan of UrbanSake, who led us through a tasting of three different varieties and showed us his amazingly cool pocket-pack of rices milled to different percentages for brewing different styles and qualities of sake.
Here are a few more snapshots from the evening, generously provided by Todd Leong of LuckyRice and Timothy Sullivan.
Photo: Todd Leong of LuckyRice