Despite the delicious dumplings, I do not recommend dining at "Ringer Hut"

Eating in Japan is often a perilous undertaking. Although I wish it weren’t the case, I’ve been wandering quite far and on a regular basis to find Western-style food such as burgers and fried chicken. The Wendy’s in Sannomiya, for instance, is remarkably like a Wendy’s in the US with just a few differences: the first is the foot-thick layer of smoke that obscures the ceiling, the second is the loud American gangsta rap that is pumped through the restaurant’s sound system, and the third is that the burgers somehow manage to be even greasier than Wendy’s burgers in the states.

The reason why I prefer to eat American-style food is that eating Japanese food is basically a crapshoot in which the odds of edibility are heavily stacked against you. For every mysteriously-labeled menu item that yields something chewy and delicious there are dozens of dishes which are, to be polite, quite challenging to the Western palette. (A less polite way of putting this would be to say that most Japanese food tastes like deep-fried rotting fish byproduct.)

For instance, this evening I ate at “Ringer Hut”, a fast-food style restaurant in Kobe’s swanky Habalando (Harbor Land) district. This outcome of this meal was particularly disheartening because I ordered it with the help of a picture menu. In the picture, the dish I ordered seemed like a delectable noodle victual, complete with fresh vegetables on top and fried dumplings to the side. What I got was moist worm-like boiled vegetables (?) lain atop a bed of crispy hay. Swimming amid the straw and worms were chunks of octopus and guppy. Like all strange-looking meals here I Japan, I approached this one with an open mind. It’s impossible, I naively thought, that this food can be remotely as vile as it appears.

And then I took a bite. After crunching through the straw, the taste was substantially worse that I was expecting, even worse than black licorice. It was a flavor so toxic it immediately struck me as possibly fatal. I think one of the tentacles was still moving, struggling against my molars and poisoning my taste buds. But, like a good soldier, I dutifully chewed and swallowed a bite, and swore to myself that the memory of this meal would be deeply repressed, like many of the gay uncle molestation events I’m probably repressing so deeply I am not even cognizant of such events even happening.

After swallowing and the few deep breaths that followed, my gaze turned to the fried dumplings. They were, at least, a familiar standby. Plus, on the side of the tray, there were little packets of yellow paste—probably mustard (but in Japan you can never be too sure) and perhaps just the thing to erase the tainted flavor left in my mouth. So I generously dipped a dumpling into a pile of yellow and took a bite. The following are the thoughts that entered my mind:

Hmmm . . . this dumpling is actually quite good! And the yellow paste was indeed mustard. Delightful! And such a tangy mustard too. And quite spicy. Really spicy, just the way I like—SWEET BLESSED VIRGIN! IT TRULY HURTS . . . AND THE PAIN. IT’S EXQUISITE! SWEET, SWEET AGONY, CLEANSE MY PALLETE OF ALL PREVIOUSLY INGESTED UNHOLINESSES, SCOUR MY NASAL CAVITY OF ALL UNSOUND SCENTS. THE MUSTARD, THE FLAME—I FEEL THE FLAME. NO . . . I AM THE PAIN.

After a 10-15 seconds, my head started to clear and I took another dumpling between my chopsticks, dipped it in the cleansing mustard, and slid it into my mouth. Overall, comparatively speaking, that was actually a pretty good meal.

Anyhoo, I’ll end this post with a picture that I feel perfectly symbolizes ingesting disease and agony. I don't remember the artist or the title, but I'm calling it "DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME: A Pious Baboon Eats from The Melon of The Damned."