Remembering Your Love for Restaurants and Travel

Enjoy Japanese Cuisine The Right Way

Posted on: 20 July 2015

Japanese cuisine has become very popular in the West. Do you ever wonder if you are dining using proper etiquette? The waiter at the Japanese restaurant is not going to say anything about your manners, but if you want to learn the correct way to dine then follow these tips.

Eat with Your Fingers

Sushi is a finger food. You are supposed to remove the sushi from the serving platter with your fingers and eat it with your fingers. Eating with your fingers shows community and familiarity. The only time you would use chopsticks to eat your food is if you were with strangers.

Eating with chopsticks can be fun, so it is okay if you and your entire group would rather dine that way. However, don't fall into the purported etiquette of using the opposite end of the chopsticks to take food off of a communal plate. Your hand has been on that side, and it may not be very clean. You can use your chopsticks correctly or ask the waiter for an extra serving spoon or extra set of chopsticks.

Everything You Need to Know About Soy Sauce

The waiter will bring you a small dish for soy sauce when he brings you your sushi. Westerners commonly put a small amount of wasabi in the dish, then dilute and mix it with soy sauce. This is not how you are supposed to eat sushi.

You do place a small amount of soy sauce in the small dish, but you don't add anything else to it. Instead, you place the desired amount of wasabi directly on your sushi piece. After the wasabi is on your sushi you can lightly dip it in the sauce. Don't dunk your food into soy sauce. The soy sauce is not the star; it should only be a light accompaniment.

Nigiri sushi is the type that has a piece of fish wrapped onto a small amount of rice. If you want to add soy sauce to this dish you should gently dip the fish portion into the soy sauce, not the rice. Dipping the rice in eventually leads to small pieces of rice breaking off into the soy sauce dish. You are probably thinking that this is too hard to manage. Remember that you are not eating nigiri with chopsticks; you are using your fingers, which makes this easy to manage.

Finally, if you order sashimi (raw fish without the rice) make sure that you do not just pour soy sauce over the dish. The main flavor of the fish will be distorted if too much soy sauce is poured on top of it. To find out more, speak with a business like Athens Restaurant.

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