Super Sushi Ramen Express

June 13, 2016
In this entertaining read, Booth, the Copenhagen correspondent for Monocle magazine, makes it delectably clear that Japanese food is a whole lot more than sushi. Informed by a Japanese colleague that he has never tasted real Japanese food, Booth sets forth with his family to eat his way through the Land of the Rising Sun. With only three months to digest an ancient tradition, Booth heroically chows down from Hokkaido to Okinawa. Crowning his pilgrimage is a final supper at an exclusive restaurant that embodies the subtle dining pleasures and philosophies of a cuisine shaped by scarcity, seasonal change, and the fruits of the sea. As a narrator, Booth is both genial and informed, deploying his two sons as comic foils while he performs his “innocent abroad” character with aplomb. There’s more to Booth than meets the eye, and his access to Japanese celebrities makes him an unlikely everyman; at times, this persona comes across as a shtick. But Booth redeems even the most pro forma moments with smooth prose, assiduous research, and tireless fieldwork. A chapter on diet and aging seems misplaced. Otherwise, Booth’s immersion in a remarkable cuisine is both engaging and convincing. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell.

July 1, 2016
A British food and travel writer takes his wife, two young sons, and a bubbly brand of humor to Japan in hopes of examining the food culture and losing a few of the pounds he has picked up living and cooking in Paris.In short, punchy chapters, Booth (The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, 2015, etc.) recounts his adventures on "a foodie family road trip lasting just under three months," sticking to the subjects at hand. He may not reach any novel conclusions about Japanese cuisine, but he vividly sums up the sensory experience of bonito flakes, with their "addictive smoky-citric flavor," or dashi, "sweet as spring peas ripe from the pod, yet complex with the tang of ocean." Many of the author's most delightful experiences involved his family. He took them along to a sumo "stable" to see how the wrestlers achieve their vast girth, and one of the "colossal walrus people" allowed Booth's 6-year-old son to pin him. The author also hiked with his family up "a forest road strewn with the corpses of poisonous snakes" to experience nagashi-somen, noodles launched down a mountain river for diners to catch on the fly. More often, Booth toured production facilities on his own, seeking out real wasabi--remarkably hard to find even in Japan--and Kobe beef. He also attempted, with partial success, to make sense of "the two rival culinary camps that divide Japan," one centered in Tokyo and the other in Kyoto and Osaka. Though Booth trained as a chef in Paris, his tastes are delightfully eclectic: he is as apt to indulge in a 10-hour "food crawl" of Osakan fast-food noodle joints as he is to savor the most delicate sushi, and he evokes both experiences with gusto. While some readers may wish for deeper explorations of some of Booth's subjects, he covers the current state of Japanese cuisine with humor and intelligence.

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July 1, 2016

Globe-trotting Brit Booth (Eating Dangerously) hits the road for Japan, planning to learn the secrets of one of the world's most highly regarded food meccas. To add to the fun, the author's patient wife, Lissen, and two young sons--who predictably most enjoyed the sumo wrestlers but less of the cuisine--joined him. With such compelling chapter titles such as "The Sake Crisis" and "Sumo-Size Me," the text is a treat for readers even if they never taste a single morsel. The author begins by having lunch in a dohyo, where sumo wrestlers eat. Much to everyone's "disappointment," these huge athletes don't bulk up on chocolate but on sweet corn and tofu. Booth's wit is apparent as he learns about tempura from a chef who assures him that "lumps are good." An interesting side note is that contemporary Japanese now prefer beer to sake. Production of sake has dropped from 449 million gallons in 1975 to 185 million gallons today. Despite Booth's quest to learn about Japan's finest foods, he reveals that the now deceased Momofuku Ando, who invented ramen noodles, was a hero and multibillionaire with over 85 billion servings of ramen consumed in the world annually. VERDICT Mainly for foodies interested in Japanese cuisine.--Susan G. Baird, formerly with Oak Lawn P.L., IL

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2016
Spurred to the challenge by a friend who gifted him with a copy of a quintessential Japanese cookbook, travel writer and French-trained chef Booth (The Almost Nearly Perfect People, 2015) decided to eat his way around Japan, a place and a cuisine about which he admittedly knew very little. And so begins a months-long journey where Booth and his family find themselves frequently lost, occasionally in a typhoon, and, most often, full to the point of bursting. Booth samples tempura in Tokyo, the ceremonial meal of kaiseki in Kyoto, ramen in Yokohama, and possibly deadly blowfish in Shimonoseki, touring fish markets and miso and soy sauce factories along the way. There's some of both Bill Bryson and Anthony Bourdain in Booth's cheerful, game, often irreverent, and, perhaps most importantly, hungry approach to discovering a new place. Readers with no patience for lengthy, technical descriptions of food and its preparation might not linger here, but food is really only the foregroundalbeit a wildly eye-catching, engaging oneof Booth's portrait of a place he so clearly finds splendid.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)