The Dharma of a Good Miso Soup

The Side Dish Mafia’s first mission is a review series of Portland, Oregon’s prominent sushi spots, but with a specific focus on their miso soups as a universal metric for evaluation. These reviews will be empirically grounded, but also somewhat emotionally charged. If you’re unsure about the efficacy of miso soup as an instrument of assessment, please picture this scenario:

The scenario

You’re tired. You are, for now, alone. It’s your first evening in a new town and, having stopped by the Marriot to check in, change out of your airplane sweats, and sluice the remaining contents of your suitcase onto the Book of Mormon in the bottom drawer, you’re powerwalking around the block to the first Google result for “decent restaurants near me.”

It’s an unassuming sushi/izakaya with no windows. The tinted glass door has a faded “2009 Best Sushi People’s Choice” sticker from an ostensibly local publication. Tiny bells tied to the inside doorhandle by a red ribbon make a sound like pocket change and a few seconds later a hostess hustles up to greet you. You tell her “just one” and she taps a list with her pen a few times, thinks, looks around and asks, “is the bar okay?” You’re too hungry to have a preference.

After a quick scan of the spiral-bound laminated menu you ask for Sushi Dinner B and a Sapporo. The latter comes out quick, and a cool sip of beer dampens the ache in your shoulders for a moment. The sushi chef in front of you slaps down a slab of salmon and starts slicing it for nigiri, molding the little balls of rice in his palms. His process is careful, composed, with an almost elegant kind of work-worn stoicism, but cold. Whenever someone passes between the front and back of house you can, in that brief flap of the curtain, see farther back into the kitchen where a small, tortoise-headed old man is stir-frying something. There’s a fury to it. The flame is big enough to bleach surrounding shadows and he’s leaning in towards it, hunched over the wok like a spider wrapping a fly. What impresses you more than the speed of his limbs is their stamina; each time the curtain parts you see him cooking with the same rhythm, heat, his left arm shaking the wok and his right pumping the spatula. He must have been here in 2009.

A waitress breaks your observational trance to punctuate the empty space between your chopsticks and your beer with a small, covered bowl. There is no spoon. Taking the lid off, a sigh of steam fogs your face. There is a faint salinity in its scent, like the breeze in a beach town, but riding on the shoulders of quiet, husky earthiness. The cloud of miso waits in the center of the amber dashi for your chopsticks’ quick stir, but before you indulge it you bring the bowl to your face for a small sip of the stock alone. A deep, confident, complex umami. After setting the soup down and coaching the miso into formless abandon, you raise the bowl for a longer kiss. The hot bath of miso soup—that careful yet punchy saltiness, that sporadic vegetal sharpness of thinly sliced scallion, that silky and unobtrusive tofu, those savory licks of wakame—washes the day off your mouth and down your throat. In the process of sipping your back necessarily straightens, your shoulders pull back, and you assume a posture of readiness. You mix your inwards breath with soup, exhale deeply over its surface, lightly steaming your face. Your breathing is deep and you feel a warm sinking in your chest. What you experience in that moment is soup and nothing else, and as that otherwise silence hypertrophies back into the izakaya’s ambiance, you are no longer a stranger in this concert but a part of it. Miso soup tastes like home—not yours, but a home. It’s not a memory but an ideal, an invitation. To drink is to take your shoes off at the front door.

When your meal comes you eat, and when you’re finished you leave. Eventually your business in this town is over and you return back to the place you call home, and when you do and you step inside you notice, as a guest might, its particular smell, the volume of the room, the low electric hum of appliances. Everything is briefly new and briefly loud. Eventually, quickly, you foie gras the air with a podcast and get to unpacking, to do doing something, to letting your sense of self diffuse into a space that demands nothing of you. You, again, become it. Eventually you have guests and in preparation for them you clean, you curate, you prepare, and not only out of pride but out of love. You do this because you want to give them something you can never really give yourself: a welcome. Only others can welcome us. “Only others save us.” Only in the homes of others can we be given a sense of chosen belonging. That is why we make side dishes, decorate the cheese board, blanch the crudité: because to be human is to need to belong, and we only know how to give what we ourselves hunger for. Attention given to what we serve is, by proxy, attention given to those whom we serve. The altruism of hospitality exists only as a gift.

“In The Beauty Created By Others”

Only in the beauty created
by others is there consolation,
in the music of others and in others’ poems.
Only others save us,
even though solitude tastes like
opium. The others are not hell,
if you see them early, with their
foreheads pure, cleansed by dreams.
That is why I wonder what
word should be used, “he” or “you.” Every “he”
is a betrayal of a certain “you” but
in return someone else’s poem
offers the fidelity of a sober dialogue.

Adam Zagajewski (Translated)

The Identity of Miso

The institution of miso soup is, foremost, a form of hospitality. In many ways it is more a service than a dish. It is inherently simple, humble, domestic, and by nature it avoids serving as a platform for a chef’s ego; it is not a venue for creative expression, but for attention and care. The essence of miso soup is humility, warmth, and comforting adherence to expectation, but because it is defined by convention it, unlike most else on the menu, reflects little of a chef’s talent or individuality. Miso soup is not a heavily skill-dependent dish; almost all of its metrics are satisfied with a small of amount of knowledge, effort, and attentiveness. Anyone can make an excellent miso soup, but they need to care enough to try. What a restaurant’s miso soup serves as a barometer for, then, is love.

When we evaluate a soup we are attempting to glean the degree to which the restaurant cares for us, the guests. How much pride do they have in their work, and how carefully will they devote themselves to the facet of the meal that resists the influence of identity? What level of respect does this establishment show towards traditions, and how well does it understand the purpose of those traditions? Are we, in this place, guests or clients?

Too many restaurants cook as if encumbered by the prerequisites of culture, saddling their menus with a miso soup that exists only as the vestigial appendage of the tradition they appropriate—a miso soup whose purpose has been lost and whose function has atrophied into adornment. Too many diners have had to endure that flaccid slap. To serve a loveless miso soup is to smile with the mouth only.

What we of the Side Dish Mafia want to provide through this focused scrutiny is a guide for appreciating the nuances of a good miso soup, alongside where to go in search of one. We want to use objective, empirical metrics to evaluate something that in turn informs subjective inferences about its context. It is our foremost hope, however, that our passion might be infectious, inspiring not only the pursuit of good soup, but the creation of it.