Japanese Ice Ouca versus Bi-Rite Creamery

Bi-Rite Creamery in San Francisco has the best ice cream I’ve had. The ice cream at Japanese Ice Ouca in Tokyo is maybe 95% as good but the presentation is so much better than Bi-Rite I was stunned. The prices are about the same at the two places. At Ouca you get a choice of three flavors (versus two at Bi-Rite). The three flavors are mixed in an attractive pattern. You get a pretty round wafer to add crunch. And you get a little bit of salty chewy seaweed to eat after you’re finished. Ouca doesn’t stand out from other high-end Japanese food, which is full of these sorts of effective small touches. In Iceland I met a Japanese teacher of English who said, “I like everything about America except the food.” American food is like barbarian food — except worse.
When she was a teenager, Jane Jacobs visited a relative of hers in isolated rural Pennsylvania. Her aunt had moved there to oversee the building of a church. The inhabitants had forgotten that buildings could be made out of stone. American cooking reveals a similar vast forgetting.