Last time I was in Vancouver I wimped out on Kintaro Ramen–saw the line out the door and went for bibimbap instead. I made up for it this time by eating at Kintaro twice.

There is little to say about Kintaro that you can’t already find with a quick Google search. Most people point out that the ramen is top-notch and the restaurant is dingy. There is really no decor at all. It looks like this. The banner out front is torn and stained. Some complain about bad service; I had great service, but I’m sure mileage varies.

What makes Kintaro great is the ritual.

The first time I went, it was about 9:45pm. Laurie and Iris and I went to English Bay beach in the afternoon and had cupcakes for snack, then a hot dog from a beachside cart for dinner. Perfect. But later I got hungry, so I walked down to Kintaro. There was no line. It was a little cool outside, but at the counter it was hot, because steam from the cauldrons of stock blew on my face. There is always one employee assigned to continuously skim the stock.

There are three choices of stock at Kintaro: light, medium, or rich. The designation refers, at least in part, to the concentration of pork fat. There is no vegetarian food at Kintaro. The broth may be augmented with miso or soy sauce. I ordered the miso ramen with medium stock and fatty pork. There is also lean pork. Whatever. The fatty pork is absolutely beautiful. They roll and tie a section of pork belly and braise it in the bubbling stock, then chill and slice it. The miso ramen also includes bean sprouts, corn kernels, scallions, onions, and bamboo shoots.

The ritual of Kintaro is this: You study the menu while waiting and order swiftly. The restaurant has no wall hangings to distract you, so you watch the staff assemble your ramen. When it comes, you eat it. You can’t read a book, because it would be destroyed by flying noodle spray. You will get broth on your shirt. When you finish the ramen, you pay up and leave, because someone else needs your seat. Calling it a Zen experience would probably be taking it too far, but you get the idea.

I took my dad to Kintaro for lunch, and we waited in line about 40 minutes. This is also key. When we arrived, we weren’t very hungry, because we were full of French toast. By the time we got in, we were ravenous. Kintaro doesn’t get between you and your ramen, except when necessary.

**Kintaro Ramen**
788 Denman St (at Robson), Vancouver BC
604-682-7568
Tue-Sun: 12pm-11pm
Mon: CLOSED

This week on [Serious Eats](http://www.seriouseats.com/):

Mac and Cheese Mix-Ins

> Wouldn’t it be awesome if Annie’s included a packet of dried morels to throw in with the noodles? They could sell it for ten bucks. I’d buy it.

We’re in Vancouver again. Last night Laurie turned on Food Network Canada and found _Food Jammers_, which, if not the greatest show ever, is definitely the most Canadian show ever.

It’s about three geeky guys who like to hack stuff. On this episode, they’re going camping and want to bring an entire turkey dinner. So they do what you or I would do. They stuff and roast a turkey and blanch some vegetables. Then they build a food dehydrator, freeze the turkey, and saw it into quarter-inch slices. They dehydrate the bird and vegetables, reducing the weight of the entire feast to under four pounds. “This’ll be great on our camping trip,” says one guy. “Oh, I forgot we were going camping,” deadpans another. These are the most stereotypical Canadian guys you can possibly imagine.

Don’t live in Canada? I feel sorry for you. But here, look: full episodes available online, including the turkey episode. Small video with commercials, but still. I also found a couple eps on Bittorrent. You will thank me for this.

**UPDATE:** Apparently you can’t watch the videos outside of Canada. So actually Canada sucks. I will try to figure something out.

**UPDATE II:** Here, this is totally illegal. I haven’t watched this episode yet, but I bet it’s great. [Food Jammers: Office Smoker](https://www.rootsandgrubs.com/video/FoodJammers-OfficeSmoker.avi) (175MB AVI).

We were down to a sad array of four dinner plates. Two dating from 1998, when we bought a set at Williams-Sonoma upon moving to New York. One from IKEA, some time after we got back. And one flowery blue plate from Sur La Table, from when we needed serving plates for something.

“I’m going to Crate and Barrel for new plates,” I said. They’d served me well in the Big Bowl hunt. This turned into an all-morning Dada-and-Iris adventure at the mall, where in addition to C&B, we visited Jamba Juice, the play structure, the Apple Store, Pasta & Co, and the candy store. Iris came along willingly to all of these except the pasta store, and she felt bad about resisting, because it turned out they had a free sample of chocolate cake.

In fact, we had to go to the Apple Store twice, because Iris realized after our first visit that she had not tried the iPhone. (Geekery alert!) I am not exaggerating at all when I say that Iris was able to pick up the iPhone, unlock it, and begin using it without any help from me. The parts that don’t require reading, at least. Dear Apple: Iris is already a seasoned TV veteran, so feel free to hire her for a commercial.

So about those plates. We ended up with plates from the Diner series. They couldn’t be more boring, but they were $4 each and seem to be chip-resistant so far. They fit a little more snugly in the dishwasher, but they fit.

Unlike the Big Bowls, these plates could not be said to have any features that the previous plates (which Iris was delighted to put out for free in the lobby) lacked. So why am I so excited about setting the table or emptying the dishwasher, just because I get to *touch the new plates?*

Two reports from the globalization front.

First, I’ve just finished Sasha Issenberg’s book The Sushi Economy. Unlike Trevor Corson’s book The Zen of Fish, which is about sushi history, Issenberg writes about the global economy, with sushi as exemplar.

But there were some fun historical bits. This was my favorite:

> “Okay, are you ready for the recipe for rice sandwiches?” _Los Angeles Times_ personalities columnist Gene Sherman asked his readers in 1958. A year earlier, that newspaper’s travel pages had advised, “If you’re a sandwich fancier, try sushi when you visit Japan.” But Sherman wasn’t dispensing vacation tips as much as foresight: “According to Senkichi Fujihara, they are very big with tourists in Japan and may supplant the hot dog here,” he wrote. “Recipe: Roll shrimp, eel, egg slices, and assorted white fish into a ball of rice; place between sheets of sun-baked seaweed, dip in soy sauce spiked with pickled ginger root. On second thought, but with the utmost politeness, I’ll take a hot dog.”

I think Sherman was talking about _onigiri_, not sushi, but close enough. Are there other foods that were roundly mocked before becoming a permanent part of the American mainstream? Did people make fun of pizza?

Then, in today’s New York Times, was a great op-ed by James McWilliams: Food That Travels Well:

> Incorporating these measurements into their assessments, scientists reached surprising conclusions. Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard.

There are plenty of other good reasons to buy local food, of course, and McWilliams says so. But I was reminded of a letter I read by a reader of a piece by Michael Pollan about Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm. The article began like this:

> I might never have found my way to Polyface Farm if Joel Salatin hadn’t refused to FedEx me one of his chickens. …

> This man was serious. He went on to explain that Polyface does not ship long distance, does not sell to supermarkets, and does not wholesale its food. All of the meat and eggs that Polyface produces is eaten within a few dozen miles or, at the most, half a day’s drive of the farm—within the farm’s “foodshed.”

In fact, Pollan himself ends up driving to the farm and working there for a week, paid in chicken. The letter writer, Mary Tyler of Newport News, VA, asked:

> Why is it somehow more sustainable to have a thousand people drive ten to a hundred miles to pick up chickens than it is to have one truck deliver said chickens to a central location? I’m all for sustainable farming, organic food, and an end to monoculture, but it seems very cockeyed to leave out the energy expended by nonlocal customers to buy local food.

Indeed, Salatin, a committed ruralist, seems more interested in restoring small face-to-face economies than in environmentalism.

I am more interested in industrial solutions to industrial problems, like the guy in Issenberg’s book who catches tuna pirates using Google Maps. The world view embodied in books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Plenty (which I also just read) is disturbingly provincial–literally, in the sense of _Plenty_, since it’s about eating from within a 100-mile radius that falls mostly within British Columbia.

Perhaps we will be forced back to local economies by an oil crisis. I hope not. In the present, however, I think we should all continue to eat chocolate.