This is, sadly, no food blog, but the following article from the New York Times has been giving me a great deal of joy lately and I thought I’d share:
“Seattle has a thousand teriyakis,” Mrs. Ko said one afternoon. Her tone was dismissive, as if explaining the looming presence of the Space Needle to a not particularly bright child. “No Americans do the cooking. Koreans do.”
“This is Seattle food,” she said, extending her argument. “For Seattle people. This is what we eat here. Seattle people eat teriyaki. This isn’t Dallas.”
It has occurred to me that the cost of a newspaper like the New York Times can be worth it if one bumps into an article like this. Or today’s missive from Paris in the same paper:
Mr. Simon [a club owner] has considered moving his operation to Berlin: the authorities there are less stringent and the public is more accepting, he said. The recent report on the night life economy ranked Paris well behind Berlin — as well as London, Amsterdam and Barcelona, Spain — in terms of “nocturnal attractiveness.”
For that reason, party-seekers, D.J.’s and musicians have been fleeing Paris for years.
“The migratory movement toward Berlin is absolutely colossal,” said Éric Labbé, a concert organizer and record store owner who was a co-author of the nightlife petition. With unpredictable police closings and increasingly stringent sound restrictions on music locales, Mr. Labbé said, “it’s incredibly complicated to find places to play.”
Hooray! Confirmation that Paris, while still great, can be a little stifling and that real artists and writers and entertainers are moving to Berlin. Let’s hope they don’t raise the rents in eastern Germany. And, as long as we’re doing comparative cities here, come to think of it, Berlin would be so much better with teriyaki places everywhere…
Adam Cathcart 