Japan What?? More about Poi

 When Japanese ask me what my favorite Japanese foods are, I usually answer that I like non-Japanese Japanese food.

Without getting into a whole Japanese lesson here, “poi” is a suffix that means something is similar to or like something. There are several similar suffixes, but “poi” is the cutest.

So, this is a blog about Japanese food, sort of.  Specifically, it’s about the Japanese approach to the whole world of cuisines that are now available to anyone. It’s about Japanese-Indian food, Japanese-Thai food, Japanese-Chinese food, Japanese-Italian, Japanese-French….you get the idea.

First in cheap izakaya restaurants and now in the kitchen, the Japanese love to recreate foreign specialties in peculiarly Japanese ways. In the west, we call it “fusion cuisine” and charge ridiculous prices for it. In Japan, though, everybody does it. It’s part of the Japanese way of adopting foreign ideas, refining them, and then coming out with something uniquely Japanese.