The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Think of the movies you’ve seen that have made you soooo hungry: Babette’s Feast, Big Night, Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Before them all came Tampopo, Juzo Itami’s 1985 comedy about all the ways food activates our senses and inflames our desires. A surprise art-house hit after a Roger Ebert rave brought it to the attention of American audiences, Tampopo still stands up 30 years later as a weird, mouthwatering masterpiece. The Criterion Collection and Janus Films have given the movie a restoration as bright as the sheen of fat glistening on the surface of a great bowl of ramen. (The restored film screens starting Friday at Film Forum in New York and should expand elsewhere shortly.*) If Tampopo is playing near you this fall, gather a group of friends who love to eat, go out to the theater, and make yourself a reservation at your local ramen joint for immediately afterward. Itami, a well-known actor in Japan, started writing and directing his own films in his 40s;

like all his movies, Tampopo stars his wife and muse, Nobuko Miyamoto. Miyamoto plays the eponymous Tampopo, a Tokyo widow who’s struggling to keep her late husband’s ramen shop afloat. Her fortunes change when through her front door saunters trucker/gastronome Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki), who declares Tampopo’s ramen dull and pledges to help her learn the secret of delicious noodle soup. Tampopo was cannily marketed as a “noodle Western,” and there’s more than a touch of the lone cowboy to Goro; eventually, he’s joined by a band of ramen ronin (including a very, very young Ken Watanabe) who whip Tampopo, and her shop, into shape. But the fun of the movie lies not in its fealty to one genre but in its gleeful embrace of all the genres, from madcap farce to dark comedy to erotic drama to kung-fu action. The training montages and inspirational speeches of Tampopo’s quest for the perfect bowl of ramen are interrupted again and again by a series of bright sketches, none of them having much to do with the main plotline but each one cleverly illuminating an aspect of humans’ relationship with the food that sustains us.

A junior executive shows up his superiors with his expertise at a French restaurant; an etiquette class is disrupted by a noodle-slurping diner; a dying mother rouses herself to make one final dinner for her desperate family.yo sushi takeaway edinburgh A series of odd, erotic, and funny scenes feature a gangster and his moll exploring food as sexual aid in ever more absurd fashion: a breast dipped in whipped cream, a live shrimp skittering across her stomach, and finally an egg yolk exchanged from mouth to mouth until the lovers reach a very messy conclusion. buy sushi grade salmon uk(The gangster gourmand is a great comic creation, but feels a bit bittersweet now; sushi delivery london e3

Itami was hounded by the Japanese mob after his 1992 movie Minbo, or the Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion, and many believe his 1997 “suicide” was actually a murder by yakuza thugs.) Through it all, Itami maintains his infatuation with the sensual and emotional pleasures of a meal well-made, from the fried rice pancakes a homeless tramp whips up while trespassing in a fancy hotel kitchen to the hibachi-grilled meat Tampopo and Goro wrap in lettuce at a celebratory dinner. ichiban sushi menu edison nj“You helped me find my ladder,” Tampopo tells him, and the sentiment underlines the fact that this is the rare film about a single woman in which true love is not her endgame. gotowanie sushi gra onlineThough Goro pines from afar, Tampopo is laser-focused on making her small business a success, and her most romantic scene comes when she swoons at the two strapping gents discussing the proper height and depth for the service counter in her renovated restaurant.sushi tei bali promo

The Culture Gabfest hosts take audience questions from their live show in Santa Monica. Listen to this special Slate Plus bonus segment by joining us today — your first two weeks are free. A good noodle cook, Goro tells Tampopo, looks carefully at his customers’ bowls when they leave the shop. ichiban sushi menu phoenixIf there’s broth left at the bottom, the ramen is a failure, no matter how elegantly it assembles its basic components of broth, noodles, pork, sprouts, and scallions. The messy, silly, sexy Tampopo doesn’t embrace that spirit of simplicity; Itami piles every ingredient imaginable into his bowl, but who cares? It’s delicious, and you’ll slurp up every bite. Update, Oct. 20: This article has been updated to include details on where the film is screening. After these past few weeks of violence, death, and paralyzing despair, I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am to have the opportunity to complain about something completely trivial—and I hope you’re equally excited to read about it!

We both deserve a break from this summer of craziness, and this news here—about food and Lena Dunham’s opinion about some of it—provides us with a doozy. Surprise, surprise: Students at Oberlin College are complaining that the school is engaging in “insensitive” behavior by serving “culturally appropriated” food in its dining halls. Or as any person living in the United States of America—which has presumably appropriated virtually every aspect of its culture, culinary and otherwise, from immigrants—might call it: food. (One exception to said American appropriation, of course, is anything pertaining to Native American culture, which, given the kind of shit Internet trolls give to any hapless sorority girl wearing a feathered headdress at Coachella, is obviously the most egregious cultural appropriation of all.) But the chief offender? Sushi, or at least, the insulting facsimile which is served by the low-wage workers in Oberlin’s student cafeterias. “The undercooked rice and lack of fresh fish is disrespectful,” wrote Tomoyo Joshi, a junior, in the college paper.

“When you’re cooking a country’s dish for other people, including ones who have never tried the original dish before, you’re also representing the meaning of the dish as well as its culture. So if people not from that heritage take food, modify it and serve it as ‘authentic,’ it is appropriative.” So unless you’re the rare college student able to afford the $595 omakase menu at Masa, or better yet, somehow get yourself to Toyko and back before your 2:30 sociology class, then sorry, but sushi is not for you. Better grab a slice of pizza (appropriated from the Italians and disgustingly bastardized), or a sandwich (appropriated from the Earl of Sandwich), the soggy overstuffed likes of which should be stuffed into your sad, undereducated, problematic little mouths, dear Oberlin kids. I have to say though, I do kind of get it coming from Joshi, who is actually from Japan and thus probably is genuinely troubled by the pre-packaged spicy tuna rolls being gobbled up by her classmates.

You see, if I learned one thing from Jiro Dreams of Sushi, it’s that that the Japanese take these things very seriously. Odder yet is the affirmation offered by Oberlin’s most famous and emblematic alum, Lena Dunham who, in an interview with Food and Wine, pronounces herself a fellow traveler to the cause of making sure nobody gets to eat a mediocre hijiki salad or less than authentic banh mi between classes: “There are now big conversations at Oberlin, where I went to college, about cultural appropriation and whether the dining hall sushi and banh mi disrespect certain cuisines,” the Girls star told the magazine. “
The press reported it as, ‘How crazy are Oberlin kids?’ But to me, it was actually, ‘Right on.’ My first reaction to this was: OK, Lena. If you want to hire an authentic sushi chef and start flying live eel in from Japan every other day, I’m sure nobody at Oberlin will protest (except I don’t even want to think of the carbon footprint for that, so my bad.)

But my second thought was: What the hell are we doing here? When did absorbing the best parts of other people’s cultures—allowing them to influence your thinking, your tastes, your palate; expanding your comfort zone so deeply and intrinsically that ideas, tastes, perspectives that are not inherently your own become a part of you—become a bad thing? America is cultural appropriation. Rock n’ roll comes from blues, which came from black spirituals and work songs, which evolved from the oral traditions of Africa. American democracy was based on the British parliamentary system, which adapted it from Rome who got it from Greece. And so on, and so on. In these divided times, we need fewer walls, fewer classifications, fewer rules about what belongs to who and who doesn’t deserve what. I’m not saying it’s cool to go run around in blackface with a tomahawk making racist jokes about Gypsies, but let’s just take a beat and think what this country would be like if one of the many peoples who make up the contents of this vast melting pot (or salad bowl, or whatever analogy you mind most apt)—for the sake of argument