Food Fads Arriving From Afar

All the food looked pretty good at the International Restaurant Show, except for the balloons.The ones made out of mozzarella, that is. These eerie orbs — touted as the latest thing at a seminar on food trends — are made by warming the mozzarella and then somehow blowing it up, like those amazing bubbles kids used to make with special (vaguely toxic) Wham-O fluid. Drizzled with a balsamic reduction, the bladderlike balls are then deflated by the diner with a prick of the fork.Provided that the diner has not fled the restaurant, screaming.It’s hard to say who’s really eager to eat an appetizer that looks straight out of “Bodies — The Exhibition,” but, in any event, these balls were definitely the low point at the Javits Center show. Happily, a lot more high points abounded. Fad-starved Zagatniks, fear not: Some great new food is winging its way to New York, especially from Japan.“It’s no. 1 curry shop in Japan,” chef Kenny Kaneko said of his enterprise, GoGo Curry. In Japanese, GoGo means 55, which just happens to be Yankee outfielder Hideki Matsui’s number.When the first GoGo opens up on Eighth Avenue and 38th Street in the next month or so, the one and only food it will sell is bowls of rice smothered in thick, dark brown sauce that looks just like the glop that used to glisten atop your parents’ plates of egg foo young.The difference is: This sauce is spectacular. It tastes like a cross between curry, teriyaki, and the pan drippings from boeuf bourguignon. The savory mound is then topped with a helping of meat, chicken, shrimp, sausage, or egg, and will sell for five or six well-spent bucks (or 600 yen, if you have it).That’s fast food, Japan-style. But extremely slow food, Japan-style, is coming across the ocean, too. “In Japan, you’re either trained as a sushi chef, a tempura chef, or a kaiseki chef,” food publicist Steven Hall said. Kaiseki, he believes, is the next big thing: a meal as complex and traditional as the tea ceremony, consisting of many tiny delicacies, each served in an attractive little dish.“Most kaiseki chefs are ceramicists,” Mr. Hall said, and they make these dishes themselves. Each one is unique, as is the meal. “A great kaiseki chef will never feed you the same meal twice,” Mr. Hall said. “They have small restaurants and they’re trained to know their customers and remember what they’ve had before.”But what if you loved the meal you had last time?Mr. Hall chuckled. “Too bad.”Somewhere in between these fast and slow Japanese food experiences lies the revolutionary home tofu maker. “I call it fast slow food,” Natsuyo Nobumoto Lipschutz (“it’s my married name”) said. Ms. Lipschutz is the American sales rep for Banrai, maker of the ceramic double boiler that can take a cup of soy milk and turn it into a cup of custard-soft tofu in a mere 10 minutes (provided you buy the special Banrai soy milk, guaranteed to curdle).“In the old time, like, 20 years ago,” Ms. Lipschutz said, “or maybe 50, the tofu maker used to come with a pushing cart and sell tofu. You’d buy it fresh.” For $88, the tofu kit brings those days back — even if you weren’t alive back then. Or you were alive, in Cleveland.Sprinkled with special citrus flavored salt (another new product), the tofu was absolutely delicious.Other new items that could make it big from Japan include amaou strawberries — strawberries the size of Spaldeens that cost about $2 apiece — and Wagyu beef. Wagyu is to Kobe beef as a Lamborghini is to a Lexus. It is so marbled that it actually looks like scrapple — a network of fat held together by mere hints of meat. The piece I ate tasted like butter larded with, well, lard.Beyond the Japanese pavilion, American purveyors were touting their own next things. Carmi Flavors concocted pancake-flavored coffee. “If someone wants chocolate chunk with fish, we’ll make it, too,” the amenable salesman, John Duff, said.Maybe next year.Over at La Nova, a chicken company that calls its nuggets “boneless wings” (as if that’s not even more disturbing), the latest thing is raspberry dipping sauce. And speaking of fruit in funny places, Molson Coors is selling an orange peel-infused beer called Blue Moon. If you can imagine some oaf with an Orange Julius jostling his drink into your Bud, that’s what it tastes like. The result is foamy, familiar, and pleasant in a beer-for-breakfast kind of way.Whether orange beer, fatty beef, or Japanese curry are going to be the next sushi is anyone’s guess. But I think we can all pretty much predict the fate of the mozzarella balloon.

Food Fads Arriving From Afar

Food Fads Arriving From Afar

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