La Isla Bonito

Sitting at the bar in Taisho Yakitori on St. Mark's Pl. and watching the spectacle in the open kitchen is a great pleasure to me. I love the endless and repetitive shouting of the cooks and wait staff. Flamboyant cooks prepare truly flaming stir fries, or more carefully cook egg concoctions in distinctive frying pans with vertically attached handles (to best use Japan's notoriously limited space?) to a seemingly less than salmonella safe half-doneness. Next to them a couple bored looking sous-chef-ish kids tend the yakitori (skewered grilled meats and vegetables), spraying them occasionally with water bottles.

The last visit I paid to Taisho was in the expanded location actually, a few doors down from the original and new enough for the kitchen not to be entirely caked with black and ingrained with the smokiness of homestyle Japanese cooking. Still, no foofy sushi smell here. I suppose it was way un-hip of me not to wait on a long line to sit in the older room, but I was hungry.
But I am not here now to sing the praises of Taisho or even yakitori in general, though they are both most deserving of it. Today, I marvel at a more mysterious item of Japanese cuisine: the bonito flake. These curly flakes are shavings of dried fish. Think prosciutto meets a wood plane. Upon close inspection they even show a grain pattern reminiscent of wood. And they are delicious. Wide ranging in function, they serve as the basis for the most important stock in Japanese cooking and they appear as a topping on many dishes, including takoyaki (octopus balls), glued atop by streams of mayonnaise. (Someone call the cornoner!) But again, the flavor and versatility of bonito flakes is not my topic. I come to the point. It is of the indescribable motion that these take on when heated that I write. Placed on a hot dish, say a rice bowl of sorts, they become animated by the heat from below causing them to twist and dance. It's the trippiest thing to watch. It's like the heat patterns you see on the surface of a hot asphalt road, but condensed a smaller scale. A bonsai sized oasis, a delusion of bonito, kinetic, physical, Brownian almost, right there waiting to be eaten. Sigh, what a thing of beauty, the bonito flake. I decided if I ever go into computer animation, my great work will be to model the motion of a sprinkling of bonito flakes over rice. I will win awards.