The Brothers Karamozov
Some of the townspeople declared that she did this all from pride, but that is hardly credible…. How could she have been proud??
May 1, 2010
Apr 13, 2010
Rediscovering Gyoza
Last year we braved the traffic and the crowds and the lack of parking to see the Japan Street Festival in Manhattan. Several blocks were packed shoulder-to-shoulder with mostly young Japanese studying in America and their Japan-loving friends. Reminded me of Harajuku on a weekend, though not quite as weird.
I had been looking forward to having a good skewer of yakitori for the first time since my final trip to Japan over 20 years ago, but the long wait meant heading into the gyoza line instead. It soon became clear that the company manning the gyoza stand was cooking up packaged, frozen gyoza to market their soy-vinegar dipping sauce, clearly labeled gyoza in English for our benefit.
We collected our gyoza and fought our way to a side street to eat in peace (while a man wearing a loincloth and sunglasses posed for pictures next to us). Still burning hot, the little dumplings were so succulent I practically inhaled them. Much better than any restaurant potsticker I had ever eaten. A little light bulb went off over my head; I should check my local Asian grocery store to see if I could buy them myself.
The yakitori I collected later was disappointing, by the way. It was a slender stick of processed chicken, formed around the skewer. That’s not yakitori! Yakitori should be chunks of chicken on a skewer, complete with a little gristle and skin, doused with soy sauce, and char-broiled in the hot sun on the side of the road by a man in flip-flops.
So we arranged for an expedition to our local Asian grocery store (helpfully named “Asian Grocery Store”) the very next day. Oh, we’d been in there before to raid the candy aisle and pick up Chinese New Year’s decorations, but hadn’t been all the way to the back where the freezer cases stood. There we discovered a veritable wonderland of prepackaged frozen dumplings.
Chicken gyoza. Vegetable gyoza. Chicken and vegetable gyoza. Chicken and vegetable gyoza with black mushrooms. Chicken and vegetable gyoza with black mushrooms, flavored with oyster sauce. Shrimp gyoza. Shrimp and vegetable gyoza. Shrimp and vegetable gyoza, flavored with oyster sauce…
At home we pan-fried them with a little water to steam them, and wolfed them down. The entire package was gone before they got cold.
We returned to the Asian Grocery Store to load up the basement freezer. We went through the checkout with a pile of 15 different flavors and brands of gyoza, soy-vinegar sauce, and the proper tiny sauce bowls. The cashier looked at us funny. I became acutely aware that we were the only white people in the store.
We tried to order Chinese food to go along with our gyoza feasts, but it wasn’t long before I discovered I couldn’t go back to standard restaurant fare. It was too greasy, the sauce was too sweet, the dumplings were cold flavorless lumps. I started telling others they were being cheated if they ordered the dim sum. Even bought a package for one of my aides to take home.
“I pan-fried them and managed to eat three before the kids polished them off,” she told me last night. “They wanted to go out to the Asian Grocery Store right away and buy more. I think we were the only black people in the store.”
They’re busy telling their friends today. I don’t think it will be long before a family somewhere sits down to their evening meal with gyoza, and the wife turns to the husband to say, “You should have seen the mob around the freezer case. I think we were the only Asian people in the store.”
