[This entry was written for The Japan Blog Matsuri]
About a week ago, I was walking west along Senkawa-dori on my way home from the new branch of my gym that’d just opened by Nerima Station. I came across an Italian restaurant that, having lived in the neighbourhood for 4 years, I had often passed, but never actually gone into. Deciding to depart from my usual dining out schedule, I went in and gave it a go.
The restaurant was certainly good at what they cooked, which was Italian food (mathematically, it was actually the subset of “Italian food” consisting of the union of “pizza” and “spaghetti”), but I spent the meal reading my book and feeling like something was very wrong, without being able to put my finger on it exactly.
Standing at the cash register, waiting to pay my bill, my answer finally came to me in a flash:
It was the decor.
The place was done up like a stone-walled cafe somewhere in Rome, which certainly fit the style of the food appropriately. The problem was that someone had obviously gone to the “stick random crap on your walls” school of restaurant design, and decorated the walls with items including the following:
- An advertisement for “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show starring Annie Oakley”
- The sign from a cobbler’s shop somewhere in London
- A wagon wheel and wood barrel as might have been found on a homestead on the prairie
- A 1970s-era Heineken advertisement
Once I noticed what the problem was, it was impossible to avoid being bothered by it. Oh, I’ll probably go back — the food was decent — but it did get me to thinking about “foreign restaurants” in general, and whether they’re really “authentic”. In this case, I’m not talking about food whose taste has been altered to suit the local palate. That happens almost everywhere. I still have to remind the Indian shop down the street that when I say spicy, “I don’t mean spicy for a Japanese person, I mean spicy for a westerner.” And I’m sure that we’ve all had “Japanese food” back in our home countries that’s not much more than strips of beef drenched in sweet teriyaki sauce.
What I am talking about is “atmosphere”. Trying to decompile the thought process of the person who decorated that restaurant, I figured out where he was coming from: “I have a Western restaurant, and here is all this authentic Western stuff to put on the walls! It matches!” And from the point of view of a lot of his customers, he’s right. Hell, it took me a while to notice, and I’m familiar with the cuisines, languages, and geography and timelines involved.
This made me wonder how many restaurants there are back in Toronto that are analogous. I wonder if some of the Vietnamese restaurants that I enjoyed on Spadina had random Chinese and Japanese stuff on the walls. Who knows whether that Ethiopian restaurant on Bloor is full of Congolese flags and Sudanese knick-knacks?
Anybody have any interesting similar experiences to share?
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February 21st, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Thanks for the entry!
February 24th, 2009 at 10:01 am
[...] at Alpha Whiskey Hotel searches for authenticity in restaurants around Japan. This theme of this post was one of the reasons I chose the foreign food theme, [...]
February 24th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
this post reminds me of a Thai restaurant I went to in VA
March 1st, 2009 at 9:56 pm
The “stick random stuff on the walls” school of restaurant decor is very popular in the States.
The Subway restaurant in Rittman, OH (population: a few thousand) has enormous black-and-white historical skyline photos of some really big city (might be NYC, not sure) covering all the walls from floor to ceiling.
I’ve seen a restaurant that served (Americanized) Italian food, but the decor was decidedly Early American. This was in Ohio, so really neither of those things would generally be considered foreign. I found it slightly odd, but at least the decor was consistent with itself.
Sometimes you’ll see things that don’t seem related at all, like mechanical stuff on one wall and vintage glassware on another. In extreme cases each thing on the walls seems totally unrelated to most or all of the others, e.g., you might see a tin washtub, a mosaic depiction of the Acropolis in small ceramic tiles, a summer-camp T-shirt, a lobster trap, and a garden rake, all on the same restaurant wall. I just made up this specific example out of whole cloth, but I’ve seen restaurant walls that were just about that mixed up.
April 13th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
atmosphere is important for that kind of place. Maybe they were trying to do wild west pizza so something. Actually, today is my last day working at Nerima. If I return it will be to do management stuff. I will miss the place. The people are nice.
May 10th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Hey, nice blog. I’ve had similar experiences, even around Kanagawa (which has lots of foreigners, so you’d think they’d be better about this sort of thing).
March 22nd, 2010 at 12:28 pm
Yeah, at least we Americans got the Australian authenticity down with Outback Steakhouse