Japanese cuisine is having a moment. As we’ve noted, Western chefs are beginning to embrace kaiseki, a 500-year-old Japanese eating tradition. The Los Angeles Times recently highlighted it, and the writers of that story also hit Tokyo’s restaurant scene with Spago chef Lee Hefter. In Sunday’s New York Times T Style Magazine: Travel, Adam Sachs takes his own “professional eating” tour through Tokyo, offering up a quick history of Japanese food and his take on a dining scene that, for depth and variety, “has no equal.”

Sachs writes:

I was out with friends from Tokyo, Shun and Kaori Nakasone, who taught me a phrase that’s popular in Japan these days: “my boom.” You use it to describe whatever you’re obsessed with at the moment. “My ‘my boom’ is Bikram yoga,” Kaori said. My “my boom” on this trip was to eat everything but the camera. Considering that Japanese food has become the “my boom” of virtually every advanced culinary city on earth, I wanted to trace it back to its source.

The book of the moment about Japanese cuisine is Sasha Issenberg’s The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy. Issenberg traces sushi’s evolution from Tokyo street food to one of the world’s most globalized edible concoctions, and in the process explains what makes it possible for sushi bars to thrive in almost every corner of in the world.

“[W]hile he’s happy to talk of sashimi in Sapporo or how to find unagi in Uruguay,” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Andrew Cassel writes of Issenberg, “his real point is that sushi transcends geography.”

Photo by rubyran, via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Related on World Hum:
* Japan Unveils Plan for ‘Sushi Police’
* Japan’s Latest Budget Accommodation: Internet Cafes