Unless one travels to Japan and tries out the cuisine off the beaten path, from Melbourne let’s say, sushi and bento boxes and ramen is basically all you would see in Melbourne and unless they are done by a Japanese person (and sometimes not even that), it will taste horrible and hell I even recently got food poisoning as a result. These days, many European food can easily be shoveled into cliques meaning that once you had enough of them, you would get sick of it quite quickly because they are almost always the same plus or minus quality. But in all honesty, I once did have a fascination with Japanese food, but nowadays I much prefer Chinese cooking both in and out of the home because you can get the taste, nutrition and enjoyment at the fraction of the cost and also given the sheer amount of Chinese people in Melbourne, most of those place turn out to be good quality as long as you know where to go but with Japanese food, it is easy to go to one and find out that it’s bad based on their desire to cater to the western palate which in turn ensures that the quality will suffer and I have been to quite a lot of them and have left paying almost 1.5 times the cost of meal that I can get at a Chinese place.Others feel free disagree with me, but I'll be real frank here. I like Japanese food, however I've always felt that Japanese food's ascension into the pantheon of "prestige cuisines" nowadays, in many places superseding French as the show-off cuisine, is the best example of the power media and branding can have.
Sushi, sure its raw food so you don't want to pay pennies for it, otherwise it'll kill you. However, with the rise of sushi places charging people $600 U.S. per person, when you can honestly can get the exact same thing in most $50 per person sushi joints or high quality Japanese supermarkets, it must be said. Its sliced raw fish and sushi chefs are just overglorified butchers.
What is Wagyu but beef that's engineered to be 80% fat?
If you're going to make fun of the fact the only interesting German/Austrian food item is schnitzel I don't know why Tonkatsu, which is appropriated from schnitzel btw, deserves to be held up as something you pay top dollar for.
Other Japanese dishes, like Izakaya, is pretty simple fair. Most Dim Sum items take way more skill to make.
I will give the Japanese that Tonkotsu and Tori Paitan ramen, just because of labor exhaustive and creative the flavours are deserves to be mentioned among the greats. Sure as shit not good for you though, since those broths are so creamy precisely because they're basically liquified animal fat compared to Chinese and Vietnamese noodle soups that are much cleaner.
So in short, once again my opinion. Japanese cuisine is good, but why the handing out of Michelin stars to that country like ration cards in a warzone?
Also, my only real impression about Italian food is that pasta and pizza is basically the norm with very little being special about it and if you do go to a real Italian place, I bet you that it will cost at least 2x what a Chinese restaurant will charge on average.
And finally, I don’t understand what is so special about the Michelin star awards about to be honest, most of those places that award them to, are overpriced as f&ck and that sucks out all the enjoyment of a meal, not to mention is seems as though you are paying more the the decor and atmosphere rather then the food with is served in small quantities
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