Sushi U.S.A.

Prowling the nation's supermarkets, restaurants and homes to explain the cultural phenomenon of Japanese food in the United States – June 2006

Milledgeville – Georgia's former capital, far from any Interstate, hugs close to its old Southern ways. Mascot "Auntie Bellum" points the way to lovely plantation houses, and the downtown grocer stocks hog casings and fresh buttermilk pies.

What else does Flannery O'Connor's hometown offer?

Two sushi bars.

The older of the two, Kuroshika, occupies a superficially converted Hardee's and evinces an aura of, well, frontier sushi. The chef offers tuna but no yellowtail, and the laminate tables remain bolted in place.

Across the street lies the year-old Little Tokyo – a restaurant that could pass muster in Buckhead if not L.A. Guests wait for tables while the sushi chef tops fingers of warm rice with sweet raw shrimp and presents them with the shrimp's deep-fried heads.

For customer Bobby Rocker, a sushi meal at Little Tokyo has become a twice-a-week splurge. "I'm addicted to it, " says the state parole officer who learned to eat raw fish in Macon a year ago. "When they first opened we were here four times a week."

Central Georgia has been officially sushified – as has most of the nation and, indeed, the world. From Milledgeville to Moscow, a sudden taste for cold fish and rice has become the decade's biggest food story, changing how and what we eat as well as the world market for seafood.

"If anyone had told me five or 10 years ago that Japanese would be as popular today I never would have believed it," says Tim Zagat, publisher of the populist Zagat Surveys. "When I was growing up I thought raw fish was a fraternity prank."

This once-exotic dish has emerged as a potent cultural touchstone. Every one of the 40 million people who fills out a MySpace profile answers the question, "Have you eaten sushi in the past month?" It is the only food mentioned besides Oreo cookies. Tony Soprano – he of the all-manicotti-and-veal diet – now feasts on it three times a week. The most expensive meal in New York is the $500 chef's selection at Masa, a sushi bar. The most basic might be the $5 roll combo served at the Wal-Mart in the Dallas suburb of Plano, Texas.

Once more for emphasis: There's now a sushi counter in Wal-Mart.

A fad? A trend? With 9,000 sushi bars across America – and sales nearly triple what they were five years ago, up to $2.8 billion per year by one estimate – it is more than either.

Of the hundreds of outlets that have sprung up in Atlanta in recent years, most have opened outside of the traditional setting of Japanese restaurants – in supermarkets, martini bars, upscale steak houses, Thai restaurants, and even on the concourses of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

"I think sushi became the same as pizza or sandwich, " says Saori Kawano, whose New York firm, Korin Trading Co., sells top-of-the-line Japanese dishware and knives to restaurants nationwide.

We've also given birth to the first generation of American children not squeamish about raw fish. Parents reading to preschoolers from "My First Book of Sushi" present salmon roe as a yummy treat. Both branches of Sushi Avenue – a quarter-mile apart – in Decatur crawl with kids.

Of course, not every strip mall across America has a sushi bar the way it likely holds a Chinese restaurant.

But Japanese cuisine now ranks just below Italian and American as the country's favorite cuisine, in a statistical dead heat with French. Technomic, a food industry research firm, predicts growth of sushi up to 20 percent annually. Its president Ron Paul calls Asian food "the new Kosher for its superior handling of the product."

In Zagat Survey's New York City guide, 22 Japanese restaurants already best the top-rated Chinese restaurant.

"The normal avid diners are now seeing Japanese food as the equivalent of the best food in the world, " says Zagat, who further contends its focus on freshness and quality "is leading the direction of fine dining today."

Spain's Ferran Adria, the world's most influential chef according to nearly all food media and chefs, seems to agree when he writes ". . . A product should be touched, turned over, looked at from all angles, as a sushi expert does with a tuna fish." This, he believes, is the fundamental role of the chef.

Fusion – Japanese style

While it seems like a tsunami of raw fish has suddenly come crashing down, this Japanese wave has been building for more than 30 years.

The French nouvelle cuisine of the 1960s and '70s resulted largely from a series of publicity trips France's top young chefs made to Japan. These chefs – Paul Bocuse, Jean Troisgros and Roger Verge, among others – went to promote French gastronomy but came away with transformative ideas about cooking. They lightened, pared down, turned religiously seasonal and set colorful mouthfuls in spare compositions on white plates.

Meanwhile, immigrant restaurateur Rocky Aoki found the opposite tack was the way to make actual Japanese fare palatable to the general public. His first Benihana, opened in 1964 in New York, foundered when the menu of griddle-cooked dishes hewed to tradition. So he learned to replace typical Japanese understatement with spectacle – think onion volcano – and delicate portions with plates heaped so high, he recalls, "you couldn't see the edge of a dish."

The Japanese steak house, still hugely popular, was born. And so the pattern emerged: As Japanese restaurateurs sold Americans on a make-believe cuisine, forward-thinking chefs turned to Japan for inspiration. And while the country was laughing at John Belushi's cabbage-slaying hibachi act, a young chef named Barry Wine at the Quilted Giraffe startled the '80s New York restaurant world with an expressly Japanese vision of dining. His "American-style kaiseki dinners" were multi-course menus of seasonal local foods presented on fine Japanese ceramics; his "small plates" menu was among the city's first.

At the same time, Americans were starting to take the raw fish plunge in record numbers. sushi bars found a welcome berth everywhere from Manhattan's Harvard Club to the strip malls of suburban Atlanta. The California roll, invented a decade earlier in Los Angeles, eased the path for diners to more hard-core options.

The attitude lingered enough that by the end of the decade chef Nobu Matsuhisa, working in his small Los Angeles restaurant, invented what he called "new-style sashimi" of raw fish cooked on the plate in sizzling, fragrant oil.

Matsuhisa's genius was to take the essence of refined Japanese cooking – the fresh flavors, the beautiful dishware, the small-plates format – but present it with ingredients and flavors that non-Japanese could appreciate. When he opened Nobu in 1994 in New York (the first of many throughout the world), he taught guests to look for bite-sized creative fireworks at the sushi bar.

Jonathan Gold writes in LA Weekly, "Post-Matsuhisa cuisine is the lingua franca of new Los Angeles cooking." He's almost right: it's the lingua franca of new cooking, period.

Full of surprises

At 2 p.m. on a midweek afternoon, a lively crowd lingers over lunch at MF sushibar in Midtown Atlanta. The entrance vestibule is crammed with awards; in one year, the online guide Citysearch named it Best sushi, Best Japanese and Best Midtown Restaurant.

Behind the counter, chef Chris Kinjo unpacks his third shipment this week from Tokyo's Tsukiji market --- the vast open-air nexus of stalls and auction floors that is the beating heart of the world sushi-grade seafood trade.

"Ah, I didn't know this was coming!" cries Kinjo, pulling a dark, leathery fish from a green sleeve of paper. "It's nizadai – what's the English word? – triggerfish!

"When you cut it, it smells so good, like flowers, " Kinjo continues.

Kinjo's Japanese buyer – a man he knows only as "Shimpei" – usually pads each shipment with a few seasonal extras. Otherwise, Shimpei hand-selects the fresh octopus, shima aji (jack) and hirame (flounder) that MF customers expect. Also: two boxes of frantically scurrying sawagani river crabs, no bigger than palmetto bugs, that Kinjo will fry whole.

"I paid $125 or $135 for this one fish, " Kinjo says, pulling from the packing crate a not huge but exceedingly lovely red-skinned specimen with eyes the size of silver dollars and as clear as still water. "It's goldeneye snapper. I won't make any money on this, but it's really the best."

This demand for sushi-grade fish has created the first worldwide market for seafood.

Thirty years ago, New England bluefin tuna was a sport fish, writes Harvard University anthropologist Theodore Bestor, "caught by trophy hunters" and sold "for cat food." Now this fish – which spawns in the Mediterranean and crosses the Atlantic – is the king of the sushi bar. Japanese buyers snap up these 600-pound fish at the Nantucket shore and airlift them to the auction floor at Tsukiji where they may get purchased by a buyer for a sushi bar in Dubai – or Boston.

But as fisheries are depleted, wild bluefin tuna is no longer a ready commodity. Takao Moriuchi, the chef at Buckhead's Taka Sushi Cafe, now sends e-mail bulletins to his regular customers to alert them when it comes in and what premium they can expect to pay.

So fish farms are filling the void. Throughout coastal Spain, Morocco, Tunisia and Croatia, miles of netting extend into coastal waters to pen these ocean-faring fish. Under Japanese supervision, they lead languid lives, fattening up on frozen herring and mackerel. Some sushi chefs reject this product; others see it as the only way to meet the huge demand for toro – fat tuna belly that commands the highest price.

This kind of tuna may be particularly prone to contain high levels of mercury. A recent study from the nonprofit consumer advocacy group gotmercury.org found high and sometimes unsafe levels of mercury in tuna samples taken from six popular sushi restaurants in Los Angeles.

There also is the strange issue of who exactly supplies all this fish we have such an appetite for. As the Chicago Tribune recently pointed out in a report, it will more than likely be True World Foods – a company founded by followers of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon that maintains complex financial ties to the Unification Church.

With wholesale revenues exceeding $250 million last year and 22 distribution facilities around the country (including an important one in Doraville), True World is by far the largest sushi seafood supplier in the country. It sells to 75 percent of the nation's sushi bars.

Back in Milledgeville, the tuna that Bobby Rocker so enjoys was, in fact, supplied by True World Foods. He and his dining companion Kiersten Chandler dig into a beautiful, colorful platter of sushi rolls as more customers pour through the door of Little Tokyo.

"We always order the same rolls, but they're just a little different every time, " says Rocker. "That's what I love about sushi."

A chef couldn't have said it better.

As the world is discovering, the great appeal of Japanese food is that it teaches you to be sensitive to ingredients.

Little Tokyo has become a wood-paneled beehive. Noises of laughter and spatula scraping come from the hibachi tables in their private rooms. The bar blender whirrs with a batch of contextually odd but welcome strawberry daiquiris. The sushi chef moistens his fingers in water and slaps his hands before plunging them into warm rice.

Behind the counter stands the lucky cat figurine called maneki neko. A familiar decoration in sushi bars, it raises one paw with a gesture that is supposed to beckon all passers-by to stop in and have a meal. Across this sushi-loving nation of ours, we're doing just that.

ROLL CALL

9,182: Japanese restaurants in America

5 million: Pounds of fish sold daily in Tokyo's Tsukiji market, the world's largest seafood market

4,381: Length, in feet, of the longest sushi roll ever made

$100: Cost of a top-of-the-line omakase dinner at MF sushibar

$15.95: Cost of all-you-can-eat sushi lunch at Badayori in Sandy Springs

40%: California rolls as a percentage of sales for sushi giant AFC

Sources: Japanese Food Trade News, Zagat Survey, Food & Wine, Supermarket News, "Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World" by Theodore C. Bestor (University of California Press)

The Japanese Paradigm 

Sit down to a Sinatra roll at Shout restaurant, and this is what you get: a sushi roll stuffed with three kinds of fish and cream cheese, breaded and deep-fat-fried, and served up with spicy mayonnaise and a syrupy brown sauce.

My friend, I'll say it clear; I'll state my case of which I'm certain: sushi "my way" is just so wrong.

How did it come to this? How did we Americans take an iconic Japanese dish that should be the essence of simplicity and freshness and turn it into seppuku on a plate?

Sushi is everywhere – so everywhere that it's turned into American food.

Supermarkets may no longer have butchers or bakers on site, but thousands now have chefs who spend all day pressing California rolls. There's even one at the Wal-Mart in Plano, Texas. I saw it. Two nice Burmese men prepare 300 boxes each day next to a wall of Velveeta. The franchiser, AFC Corp., hopes to be in 200 more Wal-Marts soon.

We claim to love Japanese food, but we simply don't get it. Every good thing about the Japanese diet has been lost in translation.

Granted, the Japanese way of eating, unique to the culture that produced it, does not cross cultures easily. We may be in thrall to the small part we know, but we're still blind to the big picture of the Japanese diet – both its untold pleasures and its implications for health and well-being.

Japan today has the thinnest people among 30 industrialized countries, with an obesity rate around 3 percent, as opposed to America's 31 percent. Japan also has the world's longest life expectancy. Yet the Japanese encounter the same lifestyle issues most often implicated in America's rampant obesity problem. They face the same daily stresses, the same disappearing family dinner hour, the same reliance on processed foods, and the same sedentary workplaces.

The Japanese eat more fish and vegetables and less overall fat. But the vital difference, I think, is in how they present flavors, approach meals, respond to hunger and engage all their senses at the table. Simply put, the Japanese know how to eat less and enjoy their food more.

The only way to explain this truth is to tell it.

In 1983, after graduating from college, I moved to the Kansai region of western Japan for two years to teach English. When I first arrived, each meal seemed booby-trapped. The yellow spongy tile on the sashimi platter was merely sweetened egg. But the pinkish goo in the small dish? Fermented squid innards that tasted like shark chum mixed with ammonia.

Learning to appreciate this food took patience. Some of my expat friends gave up hope and subsisted on McDonald's and care packages bearing Old El Paso taco kits.

For me, the turnaround came after I had been in the country for about a month and an American colleague who knew the ropes invited me out to dinner. The meal was unlike any Japanese meal I had eaten back home. The restaurant was in the labyrinth of Osaka's uptown entertainment district, in a dark underground bunker of a dining room. It was an izakaya – a kind of pub with an extended menu of snacks and other small dishes.

My friend and I knocked back draft beers as he did the ordering – crisp grilled rice balls, dressed boiled spinach, pork dumplings and a few other easy-to-like dishes.

No squid goo.

The food arrived helter-skelter, and we shared it all. We ordered more as needed, but after eight or 10 plates, our diminished appetites cut us off.

This one meal encapsulated everything I would come to learn about Japanese food over the next two years.

For starters, it offered a far greater variety of foods than any I had eaten before. Variety, above all, is key to the Japanese diet.

At restaurants, at home, in packed lunches, Japanese meals do not seem complete without constant contrasts. A boneless chicken breast with rice and one vegetable? This kind of "wholesome American meal" would never pass muster in Japan.

Tokyo-based author Elizabeth Andoh attributes this deeply ingrained Japanese impulse to a 1,200-year-old set of dietary guidelines. In her new cookbook, "Washoku" (Ten Speed Press, $35), she notes that washoku, a derivation of Buddhist practice, suggests that each meal should contain five different colors, primary tastes (sweet, salty, etc.), textures and cooking preparations. These principles are not something most modern Japanese think about, but, as Andoh maintains, they are second nature.

"You could follow a girl who's been up all night in a club into a konbini [convenience store], and the assortment of junk food she puts into her kaato [shopping cart] will follow washoku, " says Andoh.

The Japanese Health Ministry published a more contemporary set of nutrition guidelines in 1985 with the slogan "ichi nichi sanju hinmoku tabeyo, " or "eat 30 different foods each day." (Japan's Martha Stewart, popular cookbook author Harumi Kurihara, still recommends this.) Compare this to the original USDA Food Guide Pyramid from 1992, with its suggested 15 to 26 servings of the various food groups, and the message is telling: Americans quantify what they eat, the Japanese qualify.

With such variety on the table, no one dish can predominate. Granted, my izakaya meal was similar to a tapas spread (albeit with more, smaller dishes), but in Japan this kind of decentralized approach is the norm, whether at a formal dinner, in a quick-service restaurant or sitting around the family dinner table.

"There's no main dish, but many small dishes, " says Shinobu Kitayama, a University of Michigan psychologist who studies group dynamics. At a typical home dinner, he says, each member of the family gets a bowl of miso soup and rice, while the group shares a variety of sozai, or side dishes.

But these are not really sides in the American sense. They may be seasoned vegetables, meat or fish. Most often, sozai combine vegetables with small amounts of animal protein; any given meal might feature fish, beef and pork.

"Basically, Japanese are meat-eating vegetarians, " says Kitayama. "You'd never see a 500-gram steak like you would in America."

Sozai may be homemade but will just as likely come from the freezer case, a supermarket, a convenience store or from the vast food halls in the basements of department stores. Everything is portioned and individually packaged – hundreds of small dishes for the taking. Compare this deli experience to, say, Whole Foods Market, where the hot bar, salads and cheesy casseroles come by the pound.

Again, it's quality vs. quantity.

With so many small dishes on the table, the vessels themselves matter. Any Japanese meal presents a tableau of artfully mismatched dishware. Home pantries brim with small plates and bowls.

On a formal level, the art of Japanese food arranging is as codified as flower arranging; in daily practice, people cook from a huge repertoire of dishes, each of which has an accepted "look." Embedded in the aesthetic lie constant visual clues to portion size.

Bear in mind this describes the sushi experience in Japan. Diners sit at the bar and order sushi by the piece or pair directly from the chef or, in an inexpensive kaitenzushi shop, taking plates off a conveyor belt. Most small neighborhood restaurants operate in a similar fashion. The moment a bite of food is ready, the cook hands it to you.

The Japanese approach to satiety is a parabolic curve with an infinite endpoint. "Stuffed" is never the desirable conclusion.

Kitayama believes this is why Japanese food favors subtle seasoning. "Strong tastes can stimulate your appetite, like in Chinese food." Japan may have the only national cuisine with no traditional use for garlic.

If an incremental, small-plates meal leaves someone with a big appetite hungry two hours later, there's a time-honored tradition called shime – "closing" the evening at a soup noodle stand. The broth will be dashi – the ubiquitous stock made from dried skipjack tuna and sea kelp – and it will be filled with umami.

This Japanese notion of a fifth primary taste (in addition to sweet, sour, bitter and salty) was proven by researchers at the University of Miami in 2000, who isolated receptors on the tongue for the amino acids naturally abundant in dashi and many other foods.

In the West, we associate the satisfaction of umami with meats, cheeses and other caloric sources of animal protein. Because the Japanese didn't eat meat until the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the cuisine found ways to extract umami from sea vegetables, fish and plants. The food is low in fat but richer in sources of umami. On the most basic neurochemical level, it tastes meatier that actual meat.

That izakaya meal was for me the beginning of a lifelong passion for Japanese food. When I returned home after two years, I remember thinking how unnecessarily large the portions were here and how the food sat in my stomach after meals. Sadly, the feeling didn't last.

Fried anything – even sushi – is easy enough to eat.

Washoku: 

Basically, the term washoku means "Japanese food" as opposed to Western food. But on a deeper level, it suggests a set of dining principles that have guided the Japanese for centuries. Even in a meal as simple as this inexpensive bento lunch from sushi Yoko in Norcross, we can see these principles in action.

Washoku meals feature five "cooking" preparations, of which raw is among the most important.

Of the five tastes of a washoku meal, a little spice is considered stimulating.

Fermented foods, such as these pickles, aid digestion.

Meat and fish come in small portions, and Japanese cooks are adept at introducing vegetables.

Black sesame seeds add color; washoku meals always display the five colors red, green, yellow, white and black.

The word gohan means both rice and meal; rice gets the central role.

Miso soup, drunk with the meal, deepens the flavors of the other foods.

Japanese Food Vocabulary:

Just how different is the Japanese language of food? Here are a few terms and concepts that underlie Japan's hard-to-translate approach to dining. Hiroko Shimbo, a Japanese cookbook author who lives in New York, and Elizabeth Andoh, an American author who lives in Tokyo, offer expert commentary.

> Shun: Seasonality, or kisetsukan, is the most important guiding principle of Japanese cooking. Andoh describes this related term as "that magic moment in time when something is the best-tasting it can ever be."

> Aji: The Japanese word for taste or flavor, but Shimbo points out that the word "implies aroma, taste, texture and color." The Japanese naturally understand flavors as multisensory.

> Hara hachibunme: An old expression that means you should fill your stomach only 80 percent. As Andoh says, "It's the kind of thing that your grandmother reminds you: You don't have to stuff your face."

Philosophical and aesthetic concepts:

• Ichigo, ichie: "One time, one place." This well-known aphorism, frequently applied to meals, states that whatever happens now can never be repeated. (Think of a memorable seafood meal at the beach.)

• Wabi sabi: The beauty of things that are imperfect, devoid of ornamentation, and rustic.

• Mono no aware: A concept from the tea ceremony, this phrase connotes a "sensitivity to things." The way beautifully presented food and dishware engage all the senses.

• Yohaku: The Japanese eye for white space in any composition. Andoh calls it "the positive use of negative space."


Ichiju Sansai: One Soup, Three Dishes

The South's iconic meal has a simple moniker: meat-and- three.

Diners at home-style cafeterias line up to choose among the day's main-course selections and then outfit it with three side dishes, a roll or square of corn bread and a tumbler of tea. A typical selection might consist of fried chicken with collard greens, pinto beans and macaroni and cheese.

In Japan, the iconic meal is called "ichiju sansai, " which translates as "soup and three." There is no clearly defined main course, but there is always a bowl of broth – usually miso – to be sipped throughout the meal, almost like a beverage. The "three" could be just about anything from grilled fish to braised pork, salad, sashimi, cooked vegetables or, yes, even fried chicken pieces. The other elements of the meal will be a bowl of rice and perhaps a bite of pickled vegetables. Green tea would be the drink of choice.

A soup-and-three might be a typical home meal, a quick lunch in a cafe or this more elegant set menu prepared by chef Tom Naito of Tomo Japanese Restaurant in Smyrna: Grilled salmon, sashimi, clear soup with a manila clam, chilled vegetables simmered with soy and sweet cooking wine, pickles and plain white rice.

Note these telling features of Japanese dining:

• This soup-and-three comes on a tray, which visually suggest its completeness. Japanese meals not only paint a picture, they have a frame.

• Each component gets its own dish. The flavors must remain distinct.

• The salmon is not presented as the main course as it would be on a Western plate. As in Japanese flower arranging (ikebana), different components of the tableau have uneven (but never dominant) weight.

• The front-and-center position that we reserve for the main course is given to the rice and soup that Japanese diners reach for most often during the meal.

• The dishes do not match. Japanese believe a variety of textures and levels of finish in their dishware adds to the visual appeal of the meal.

• The colors of the food are varied; according to ancient principles that are often unconsciously observed by modern Japanese, each meal should contain black, white, red, yellow and green foods. For an excellent discussion of this and other traditional precepts of Japanese cooking, read Elizabeth Andoh's "Washoku."

• No cooking method is repeated. Here, the salmon is grilled, the sashimi raw (raw constitutes a cooking method in Japan the way macaroni and cheese constitutes a vegetable in the South) and the vegetables simmered. Japanese generally eat a variety of differently prepared foods at one sitting.

• Hot and cold foods are eaten concurrently.

• The most attractive container is usually placed in the rear center of the tray. Called the mukozuke ("far dish"), it contains the choicest component of the meal, often pristine raw fish. Naito made the turquoise dish holding sashimi; many finer chefs are also potters.

• There is no spoon for the soup. Japanese miso or clear soup should be lifted and drunk from the side of the bowl. This way it engages all your senses: the bowl hot and smooth in your hand, the fragrant and billowy steam up your nostrils and on your face, the broth slurpy.

• Japanese soup is always rich in the amino acids that register as the fifth primary taste, umami, on the tongue; it intensifies sweet and salty tastes, while it mutes sour and bitter. Umami also triggers satiety.

Japanese Family at Home

Akiko Ikeda rips the shrink wrap from a giant white radish the size of a rolling pin and takes a cleaver to it.

With finger-defying efficiency, she thwak-thwaks the radish into fine matchsticks as her children splay themselves over the sofa in the adjacent family room and wait for dinner. Daughter Sakurako, 9, practices Japanese writing homework for Saturday school, while her brother Ohsei, 14, plays a TV video game that involves bug-eyed manga characters and baseball.

Like many Japanese homemakers abroad, Ikeda keeps the dinner hour as close to home-style as possible. Her house may look much like the others in its Duluth subdivision, but her table shows the unique Japanese idea of what a meal should be, and how it fits into a healthy lifestyle.

Ikeda has moved her kids around the world for her husband Masuyoshi's career with Ricoh, a Japanese office equipment manufacturer.

After five years here, Ikeda remains disinclined to learn English, but that hasn't stopped her from exploring the city – visiting the High Museum of Art, dining at the buzzy Repast Restaurant in Midtown and taking Korean cooking classes.

But while she dabbles in kimchi and makes a mean paella, she more often than not cooks Japanese, as she does this afternoon. Ikeda turns her cleaver to a couple of hapless cucumbers and reduces them to crisp threads with a display of knife skills that say "Iron Chef" more than Gwinnett County mom. Of the places she's lived, she prefers Atlanta for the wide variety of Japanese groceries available but Europe for the fresh fish markets.

"When's dinner?" Sakurako calls in Japanese from the family room.

"Soon, " Ikeda answers, rinsing the clear, wiggly yam-flour noodles called shirataki in a colander. Go, go, go: She never stops moving. Cooking takes a solid hour.

Ikeda's menu looks nothing like a typical American home meal. For starters, there is no main course but rather a variety of dishes served family style to go with individual portions of rice and miso soup. Nor is there any clear division of meat, starch, vegetable and salad. Nearly every dish contains at least a little meat or fish, and Ikeda sneaks in extra vegetables wherever she can; her mission is to make her kids actually like green food.

"American kids don't seem to eat a lot of vegetables, " she observes warily.

Sakurako and Ohsei take the school lunch at Greater Atlanta Christian School in Norcross, and they like it. But it's easy enough to eat the chicken nuggets and mac and cheese, and ignore the canned green beans and cut corn served on the side. School lunches here are so unlike the kyushoku in Japan, where fresh vegetables and meat are integrated into recipes, and the children take turns serving the food to their peers. Frequently, schools weigh the uneaten portion scraped from trays to determine which dishes merit a repeat performance.

So for dinner, Ikeda threads sweet onion chunks between pieces of pork loin before coating the skewers in flaky Japanese bread crumbs and deep-frying them. The kids love this dish, called kushikatsu.

"Mommy, I'm hungry, " Sakurako says, the sizzling kushikatsu reeling her into the kitchen like a fish on a line. She is not allowed to snack before dinner. "Can I help cook?"

Ikeda blots the oil from cubes of pan-fried soft tofu and hands her daughter small, forked bamboo spears.

"Here, stick these in the tofu. No, stick them in straight, " Ikeda says. Sakurako tries again, giggling.

Girls in Japan today don't learn to cook at their mothers' sides as much as they did generations ago. Like many young women, Ikeda took cooking lessons before getting married, which is where she learned her knife skills as well as an arsenal of popular recipes. Most rely not on spices or sauces, but on simple fresh ingredients and the flavorings no Japanese cook can do without: soy sauce, sugar, cooking sake and dashi fish broth.

Ikeda frosts the tofu with the sweetened white miso for a preparation called dengaku, then arranges these speared tofu lollipops on two black lacquer boards. The veneer on the wood is thin, and its streaked grain looks pretty against the browned tofu. Ikeda has stacks and stacks of small plates of every finish, shape and color in her drawers and cabinets. Every night, she assembles her contrasting dishware like flowers for an arrangement.

Dinner is just about ready, and even Ohsei looks up from his game to plot its progress. Ikeda adjusts the sugar-soy balance in her beef-potato stew, joking that as a Tokyoite she prefers a stronger soy flavor. Osakans reputedly like things sweeter.

Ikeda finishes the radish-cucumber salad with shreds of strong-smelling canned scallops and a generous squirt of mayonnaise from a plastic bottle embossed with a Kewpie doll. Japanese mayo is sweet and smooth; it also contains MSG.

Dinner is ready:

• Radish-cucumber salad with scallops

• Beef and potato stew with shirataki noodles and carrots

• Fried pork and onion skewers

• Pan-fried tofu with sweet miso

• Warm edamame (soybeans in the pod)

• Steamed white rice and miso soup. The latter serves as the beverage.

The family assembles around the table, leaving the father's place surrounded by plastic-wrapped dishes of each item. He may not be home until 10 p.m.

"Itadakimasu, " the kids say in unison as they do before every meal; this customary expression means "I accept" and is said with more gravitas than "let's dig in" and less than grace.

As well as she likes to cook, Ikeda doesn't eat much. An inveterate weight watcher, she keeps a scale in her kitchen. She thinks that watching her food intake and making regular weigh-ins beats exercise, which she hates. But she does watch her children intently and directs food their way.

The kids beeline for the fried pork cutlets and then the tofu, which is sweet, soft and immensely likable in a way that would appeal to picky "white-food-only" kids. They eat a little salad at their mother's encouragement and drain their miso soup bowls. Ohsei, who claimed he wasn't so hungry, finishes a bowl of stew (which tastes redolent of beef but is 90 percent vegetarian) and reaches for seconds of tofu. Sakurako finishes with a hillock of edamame that she holds to her mouth with two hands and nibbles.

And in 20 minutes dinner is over. While a meal in a Japanese household can be remarkably healthy and satisfying, some things are universal.


Umami’s Role in Food

A waitress places a clear-as-water broth floating one carrot flower, a green leaf and a curl of white seafood before each of us. I am a kid the first time I try this Japanese soup called sumashi. I kind of hate it because it tastes fishy. But it's also strangely wonderful: full and round, heavy on the tongue. The carrot seems alive with sweetness in this broth.

My mother won't touch it; she's afraid it's this sushi stuff she's been hearing about. I am entranced. What is this taste?

Decades later, Mihoko Obunai has the answer.

"My mom says that taste when you eat clear soup, and it's mmmm, so good, that's umami, " says Obunai, the Japanese chef who owns Repast with her husband, Joe Truex. Obunai's mother, who lives in Tokyo, loves to send her daughter newspaper clippings about how chefs and food writers throughout the world are suddenly keen to this taste that Japanese home cooks have known for centuries.

All now agree that the time has come to redraw the map of the tongue to acknowledge umami (pronounced "ooh, mommy") as the fifth basic taste in addition to sweet, sour, bitter and salty.

Food manufacturers use it in chemical form to make packaged snacks compulsively edible. Nutritionists see it as a key to stimulating appetite. Chefs now have a word to describe something they've known instinctively as well as a new approach to seasoning. Home cooks and consumers – once they catch on – can use umami as a framework for understanding the variety of ethnic products and condiments streaming into the American pantry.

Scientifically, it is the distinct taste of amino acids and comes in a variety of foods: meats and cheeses, fish and shellfish, some vegetables, most sea vegetables and nearly all distilled, fermented and brewed products. In very general terms, Asian cuisines use more umami-rich condiments (soy sauce, fish sauce), while Westerns cuisines favor animal proteins (braised and aged meats, cheeses).

The notion is old, but the proof positive is fairly new. In 2000, a research team at the University of Miami isolated the actual receptors for umami in human taste buds, and the word has since crossed from food science to popular culture.

Two branches of Umami Cafe have opened in New York, and a new cookbook – "The Fifth Taste: Cooking With Umami" (Universe, $27.50) – assembles a spectrum of recipes with a smart explanation of the concept.

Which is ...

A taste you know intimately – and most likely crave. The most common English translation of umami is "brothy." That works if you're describing soups ranging from miso to matzo ball, from Vietnamese pho made with a 24-hour beef broth to instant ramen stirred from a packet of powder. All are filled with umami.

But "brothy" doesn't account for the umami we love in garden-ripe tomatoes, aged Parmesan cheese, mushrooms, corn on the cob and meatloaf.

'The truth about MSG'

Nor does it address the umami-bomb foods that each world culture revels in to the amazement and disgust of others. Think Vegemite in Australia, fermented shrimp paste (belacan) in Malaysia, putrefied shark meat (hakarl) in Iceland, Bovril (beef extract) in England, ketchup in America.

No, the best way to taste umami in its purest form is to let a pinch of a certain crystalline salt dissolve on your tongue. Monosodium glutamate.

"People aren't ready for the truth about MSG, " says Shirley Corriher, an Atlanta cookbook author and one of the nation's best known food scientists. "Study after study has shown that it simply is not an allergen." Corriher doesn't dispute people who claim a reaction to this common food additive, but asserts it is safe and wholesome. "There's so much natural glutamate in everything we love to eat anyhow. It's no different."

Umami and monosodium glutamate: The lauded fifth taste and the vilified food additive have been two sides of the same coin for nearly a century. The story started with that bowl of Japanese clear soup.

In 1908, University of Tokyo chemistry professor Kikunae Ikeda wondered why this clear broth – made by simmering sea kelp in hot water and then infusing it with shavings of air-dried skipjack tuna like a fish tea – had that "mmmm, so good" flavor. He posited the idea that it wasn't one of the four recognized tastes, but a fifth one he called "umami, " borrowing a colloquial word that meant "great taste."

What Ikeda found was a lot of glutamic acid in the soup; the white powder that clung to the sheets of sea kelp was its salt. His patent for extracting this salt was acquired by Ajinomoto, still the world's largest manufacturer of MSG.

Ajinomoto MSG became first a status symbol and then an everyday ingredient throughout Asia in the years leading up to World War II. American soldiers fighting in the Pacific theater developed a taste for it, which they rediscovered in stateside Chinese restaurants once they returned home. Chinese restaurants multiplied during the immediate postwar years.

From Chinese restaurants came "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome." In 1968, the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter from a Chinese-American doctor, Robert Ho Man Kwok, who suspected MSG was behind the headaches and numbness he and others felt after a night of moo goo gai pan. Many studies (since discredited) tied MSG to brain damage and other neurological conditions in lab animals. Today, the Food and Drug Administration classifies MSG as "Generally Recognized as Safe, " or GRAS, along with baking soda. We may specify "no MSG" at the neighborhood Chinese joint, but our processed foods are filled with it.

There may be some medical uses for MSG. For starters, it makes salt taste markedly more saline, yet contains a third the sodium. People on a salt-restricted diet might benefit from it. It also helps perk up appetite, a common problem with aging, and can help the elderly eat more of their food.

Fish sauce works, too

So should home cooks – gulp – keep a little MSG around?

"There's no need to, " says David Kasabian, who wrote "The Fifth Taste" with his wife, Anna. "If you need a boost, do what chefs do – keep Asian fish sauce around. It's concentrated umami in a bottle."

The Kasabians are quick to bring the discussion back to tasty reality. Juicy tomatoes from the garden. Fresh peas and asparagus. Bacon. Barbecue. That mouthwatering sensation on the tongue: That's umami.

But, wait, there's a little more science. Kasabian takes me back to that same bowl of clear soup.

"So you know the white powder on the [kelp] is glutamic acid – that's MSG, " Kasabian continues. "Well, the [fish flakes are] loaded with nucleotides – IMP, GMP, XMP – and these provide synergizing umami."

When the two kinds of umami come together in one mouthful, then the sensation is tenfold. Common examples include pasta with tomato sauce (glutamates) and Parmesan cheese (nucleotides). Consider pepperoni on pizza, turnip greens cooked with smoked ham, and walnuts with blue cheese. Sardines and other fish have plenty of both.

And don't forget sushi: The fish, the seaweed, the soy sauce, the pickled ginger and even the Japanese short-grain rice are loaded with both kinds of umami.

Food manufacturers, well aware of this effect, add chemical sources of basic and synergizing umami to their products for that "can't-eat-just-one" flavor.

All experts agree the crave-making appeal of umami is hard-wired into our own nucleotides. "The reason is simple, " Kasabian says. "Proteins are good for you."

Corriher adds that each of our basic tastes signals a key to our survival: "We like sweets because that's energy you can metabolize, and we like salty foods because they're filled with minerals we need. But bitter foods? No. They might be poison. And with sour foods we just adopt a wait-see attitude."

But just when it seemed the food world was getting used to the idea of a fifth basic taste, researchers at the University of Bordeaux in France have isolated receptors for what they believe to be the sixth taste.

Can you guess what it is? (Hint: France.)

If you guessed fat, you deserve an extra bowl of clear soup.