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Nick Currie
For Nick Currie's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / THE UNRELIABLE FOOD CRITIC
Apr 15, 2016
Osaka, give us this day our decent European bread
Encountering strangers on trips back to Europe, I find myself falling into a familiar conversational call-and-response:
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / THE UNRELIABLE FOOD CRITIC
Mar 18, 2016
Osaka's crazed, cheap and cheerful supermarket chain
This is a column about cheap food, and it doesn't come much cheaper than Osaka's Super Tamade supermarket chain. When I first arrived in the city I lived almost exclusively on precooked nikku jagga, a shrink-wrapped beef, carrot and potato bowl retailing at around ¥100. Haute cuisine it isn't, but it keeps you alive.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / THE UNRELIABLE FOOD CRITIC
Feb 19, 2016
A new ceremony for tea in the rundown heart of Osaka
In Japan — especially in Japan — food and drink have always been about more than merely nutrition or a mere succession of tastes. They have also been a pretext for bringing people together in social rituals that don't have to be ancient, formal or solemn: rituals focused on food and drink can also be fresh, inventive and humorous.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / THE UNRELIABLE FOOD CRITIC
Jan 22, 2016
Downtown Osaka's faded replica of Korea's kaleidoscopic markets
There's something suspicious about the way Japan and Korea differ so much in the taste and presentation of their foods, as if a kind of sibling rivalry were going on, some struggle for distinction and specialization.
CULTURE / Music / David Bowie in Japan
Jan 15, 2016
Bowie’s portable Japan
I first learned that David Bowie had died while riding the Beetle jetfoil ferry from South Korea to Japan. Of the myriad thoughts that flooded through my mind during the crossing — for Bowie has been my lodestar, an absolutely determinant influence in my life as the musician Momus — was the bittersweet idea that I was returning to a land that provided a large part of Bowie’s inspiration.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / THE UNRELIABLE FOOD CRITIC
Dec 22, 2015
In the gutter of Osaka, but not looking at the Michelin stars
Cycling through one of the poorer quarters of Osaka, I start feeling peckish. So I park my bike in one of the rundown shopping arcades that crisscross this working-class city and duck, almost at random, into a cheap eatery. The ancient proprietress waves me to the counter and, without even asking, serves me something delicious, porky and garlicky. She spreads something out on a black plate polka-dotted with curlicues of spring onion and surmounted by a raw egg. It is (insert flavor) and (insert texture) and (insert local cultural history) ... etc., etc.

Longform

High-end tourism is becoming more about the kinds of experiences that Japan's lesser-known places can provide.
Can Japan lure the jet-set class off the beaten path?