Japanese Cuisine

Sukiyaki's lies in the great stone shadow of Symphony Hall, about half a block from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society Building, and accessible by subway token. It is bounded on the right by the Mai Fong Chinese restaurant, and on the left by the Redy Hot Lunch Budweiser Bar and Full Gospel Chapel. The sign says "One Flight Up," next door to Mildred's School of The Ballet.

Inside, the room is small and well-lit by scattered oriental lanterns of paper mache. Mirrors face each other on the walls, cut and concluding in pointed spires like sagging Byzantium domes.

"Good evening," said a dark girl in a black-and-white kimono. She had crept up quietly and she carried a small green order pad. There was only one other person in the resturant--a pudgy, bespectacled occidental in gray flannel, with a bright silk vest. I was seated in front of him.

"What ho," he muttered briefly, and the great orange dragon on his vest spouted green flames from one lapel to the other. The girl placed a little red cafeteria tray in front of me.

Oyako don-buri with misoshiri soup is usually very good," my new friend advised. "And reasonable." Reasonable was four dollars. Looking for something vaguely familiar, I decided on sukiyaki with chicken.

My meal was cooked right on the table, on a small, single-burner hot plate made of stainless steel. The girl deposited a frying pan on the burner, dumped in several pounds of chicken fat, covered the chicken fat with a mixture of chopped herbs, and proceeded to pour on a thick, sordid potion.

There was ominous bubbling and chemical activity.

"What's that you're eating?" I asked the man in the orange dragon vest by way of conversation. The girl poured me some tea.

"I'm having oyako," he replied. "Chicken, vegetable, and eggs scrambled with sauce, on steamed rice."

"How's the soup?" said I, twitching my chop sticks.

"Misoshiri means bean," he returned, with an omniscient shrug.

The frying pans contents were now unloaded onto my plate. There being no salt or pepper, I commenced to eat. After struggling with amazing incapacity for ten minutes with my pair of wooden chop sticks, I capitulated to a fork. The Chicken blubber tasted just like chicken blubber, and the herbs like marinated spinach. I asked my friend about the shredded celophane.

"Seaweed," he replied. "A Nipponese dietary staple."

I discreetly dumped the remainder of my plate into the frying pan, and gazed raptly at the chipped white tea pot.

"What do your tea leaves tell you?" my friend with the dragon inquired. He had pretended not to notice how fast I cleaned my plate. There wasn't any sugar for the tea.

"They say you find messages in the tea-formations." He chuckled quietly at his dry wit. My tea leaves looked rather like cigarette ashes.

"You will excuse me, won't you?" I said.

"Of course," he smiled. "But I don't believe there's a lavatory."

"You don't understand," I replied, switching off my hot plate. "Actually, I'm leaving."

I left him there, still eating his oyako, and hurried into the mechanized night of Boston cops and omnibuses, feeling hungry and not at all alien.