Why Tokyo Works, Discourse, Emily Hamilton, June 7, 2022

This is excellent, and you should read the whole thing—both the review and the book itself. Hamilton points out how the quirkiness of a great city isn’t something inherent in its character that has to be “protected” by stopping development. Rather, a flexible built environment with low costs of entry is essential to make room for people and small businesses.

I’m not going to blockquote anything; just read it!

Lessons From the Rise and Fall of the Pedestrian Mall, Bloomberg CityLab, Stephan Schmidt, September 9, 2021

The very mixed fad of the pedestrian mall often comes up when I and others write about making car-free streets in towns and cities. Why exactly is it mixed? Why do some pedestrianized areas thrive and others don’t? Obviously it’s complicated but this article tries to parse out some of this.

There are a lot of details here, but what sticks out is that making large areas only for pedestrians seems to have a deadening effect just like making areas (effectively) only for cars:

Bigger isn’t necessarily better: The length of a pedestrian mall is negatively correlated to lifespan, implying that longer malls suffered from a higher risk of closure and close sooner compared with shorter length malls. Research has shown that people are more likely to walk shorter, more variegated distances. Long, monotonous streets are not conducive to encouraging foot traffic.

Who’s Who: The Dictionary of ‘-In My Backyard,’ The Discourse Lounge, Darrell Owens, July 15, 2022

This may or may not be too inside-baseball for you, and I’m sure many would quibble with these characterizations. But it’s a good rundown of the terms you’ll see in housing and urbanist discourse, especially on social media, and what the heck they mean!

Sushi As We Know It Will Not Survive. Can the Restaurant Industry Reinvent It?, Bon Appetit, Aliza Abarbanel, April 22, 2022

Chef Jay Huang will never forget the day he took unagi off the menu at Lucky Robot Japanese Kitchen in Austin. “Several customers lashed out at us. They told me they’d never eat here again,” he says. “But it was a step we had to take.”

These kinds of pieces always have a touch of sensationalism; I’m not sure it was a step he had to take, given that most sushi restaurants haven’t taken it. But the underlying discussion is interesting. Some of it strikes me as a class thing; the average strip-mall joint will continue serving what it always has, while the higher-end restaurants will follow the trends and commentary in the food world.

But some of it is based on real environmental concerns. “Decades into the farm-to-table movement,” Abarbanel observes, “fish overnighted from the other side of the world remains a signal of quality at sushi restaurants across the U.S.” That does seem a little indulgent.

As out-of-touch as this sort of thing sounds to some people, I think it’s cool, and it helps to rebuild local and regional networks of commerce:

Rosella is an unconventional, unapologetically local sushi restaurant. On a cold night in late December, the omakase menu featured steelhead trout from a farm in Hudson, New York, seasoned with a hint of fiery wasabi. Butterflied Louisiana shrimp, lightly cured with salt and sugar, was burnished with a blowtorch, then brushed with soy and shrimp-head-infused chili oil. Fatty arctic char convincingly doubled as salmon. Sweet Kumamoto oysters were served in a shot glass and spiked with fish sauce, and albacore ceviche studded with calamansi and persimmon swam in a coconut milk broth.

And check this out:

Miller [the chef] waits all year until they’re at their fatty peak before putting them on the menu. “Porgy is this beautiful mild but fatty whitefish that seems like it’s made for sushi, but I don’t see it on any sushi menus,” he says. “It’s a very close relative of madai, which is a Japanese staple.”

What’s happening here is we’re replacing the brute force of highly globalized supply chains with creativity and inventiveness. I make the same point at more length here, about beef. Check that piece out if this interests you.

Related Reading:

New and Old #56

New and Old #57

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