Random Picture #205

The picture above is of a poster for a restaurant near my old apartment in Tokyo. The characters on the left say "samurai" in katakana (the phonetic alphabet used for foreign words - at least usually). I was looking back through my pictures from Japan and something I hadn't thought about in many years occurred to me and that was the fried chicken and the way it is prepared. I don't eat fried chicken, but I did have some many, many years ago when I first arrived in Japan and it is quite different from what you get in the U.S.

You'll note that it is lighter in color. It is more like tempura in terms of the coating than fried chicken in the U.S., which tends to have a redder, darker, and much spicier coating. I also have a vague recollection that the Japanese version tastes of white flour and a hint of soy sauce and ginger, but the years may have dulled my taste memory. Of course, I'm not talking about Japanese KFC, which is almost the same as American KFC, but rather traditional pub-style (izakaya) fried chicken. Also, you'll note the thick slabs of chicken skin on the skewers of (thigh) meat in the center. That's actually supposed to make it more appetizing to people since the Japanese like to eat the skin.

If any of my readers has had non-KFC fried chicken in Japan, I'd like to hear your recollections of the taste. I have to admit that I haven't eaten it for more than 20 years and can't really trust my memory, but the appearance of what is in the picture is exactly what I remember.

McDonald's Chicken Egg McMuffin (product information)

Do your remember making lists of desert island objects when you were a kid? That was what you did before you made lists of desert island songs and books as a teenager. In such lists, you'd think about what you'd need to survive and use those ten items to make a nuclear reactor out of a coconut so that you could live in style in exile.

McToast is sad toast. It's what you'd make at home if you were out of bread and had nothing but stale burger buns to work with.

Sometimes it feels like fast food places are working with the same limits. They have a short list of food stuffs and they keep juggling the mix around to create "new" menu items. This breakfast option from McDonald's Japan feels like a dance card shuffled into the wrong place. It is their fried chicken patty added to an Egg McMuffin. I guess that someone at corporate asked, "what do we have that we haven't swapped into the morning menu?" Still, it's less pathetic than the "McToast" option. That's a burger bun flipped around so that the inside is toasted and filled with ham (Canadian bacon) and cheese.

This probably seems less strange in Japan than it would in America. They already have hot dogs on their regular morning menu there and it is a culture which includes fish and rice as part of its traditional breakfast. To me though, fried chicken, even in the form of a patty of pressed meat, is just "wrong" for breakfast. I'm guessing it's pretty good though if you're hungover, as no small number of businessmen are inclined to be.