Chopsticks Mystery
My wife has just returned from South Korea where she was on business trip. Among many surprising things she encountered was the discovery that Koreans use steel chopsticks. This made me think. Hey, but in Moscow even most expensive sushi bars chopsticks are always wooden and disposable. That’s curious. I’m sure that patrons of sushi bars who take this for granted would be morbidly offended if at some French restaurant in Moscow they were offered plastic knives and forks.
One of the explanations I heard was that sushi bars were introduced in Russia by Americans not Japanese. And Americans don’t really care about restaurant “niceties” like porcelain plates, crystal glasses or starched table-cloths. Even Starbucks that positions itself as a high class coffee house serves 5-dollar venti brave cappuccinos in plastic cups. Is this explanation close to reality?
Related Tags: Russia, Moscow, chopsticks, sushi bar
posted by Konstantin at Tuesday, January 31, 2006
6 Comments:
In my experience, even in the nicest sushi bars in North America , run by Japanese chefs / familys, use single-use wooden chopsticks. Fancy ones can be found at some import shops, but aren't used in the restaurants. I'm not sure what the norm is in Japan itself, (I assume it's the disposable chopsticks for general use and the fancy ones when Grandma comes for dinner) but I do know that the metal chopsticks bit is one of the immediately obvious cultural differences between Japan and Korea. I'm all for bashing American consumer culture, but I don't think that's the cause here. The one benefit to bamboo chopsticks is that they are biodegradeable, unlike a plastic fork.
This is not about bashing American consumer culture but isn't it curious - a person hates an idea of single-use knife and fork at a fancy restaurant but thinks it's ok for a fancy sushi bar.
I don't know much about modern Japan but 30 years ago disposable chopsticks were only at cheapest eataries.
In JAPAN chopstics are never made of steel. (Except for KOREAN restaurants). Steel chopstics are characteristic to KOREA not JAPAN. Sushi is JAPANESE not KOREAN food. In Japan in restaurants chopstics are 98% wooden and disposable regardless of tje quality of the restaurants. The comparison with plastic knives and forks is not very good because the chopstics are made of wood not plastic and there are different ranks of wooden disposable chopstics.
Japanese do care a lot about hygien and and aesthetics and never use steel made chopstics...
I live in Korea - used to live in Russia. Metal chopsticks in Korea are actually a legality and Korean restaurants must not supply customers with wooden chopsticks - it's illegal and meant to preserve Korean culture. All I know is that they are harder to eat with than the wooden ones.
When I was in college in the US I worked as a dishwasher in an upscale Japanese restaurant that had multi-use lacquered wooden chopsticks, but sometimes customers complained that having non-disposable chopsticks wasn't sanitary.
I *love* Korean metal chopsticks. I've spent a lot of time in Korea, and have learned to use them expertly. Let's just say that it's a completely different technique from using wooden chopsticks... especially those cheap wooden ones that you have to break apart. I'm totally all thumbs with those. When I remember, I bring my metal chopsticks with me....
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