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North Korea, China, commerce and safety. When US presidents go to Japan, the summit agenda virtually writes itself. Deciding what to offer them to eat, although, is a distinct matter altogether.
When the White Home is occupied by somebody with as unadventurous a palate as Donald Trump, the scope for showcasing the fragile flavours and aesthetic great thing about its cooking, or washoku, is proscribed.
That was the case throughout Trump’s first go to to Japan in 2017, when he and the then prime minister, Shinzo Abe, sat right down to cheeseburgers and fries at a golf membership – a selection that spurred a run on burgers on the Tokyo restaurant that made them.
Treating presidents and their delegations to a few of Tokyo’s best meals – in a metropolis with extra Michelin stars than Paris – hasn’t at all times gone to plan.
In 1991, George HW Bush interrupted a Japanese banquet to vomit into the lap of his host, the then Japanese prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa. The incident, during which Bush fainted, was blamed on a bout of flu, not the meals.
There was better success in 2014, when Barack Obama and Abe mentioned commerce on the world’s finest sushi restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro.
Regardless of reviews that Obama had failed to finish the 20-piece course, the proprietor’s son, Yoshikazu Ono, mentioned the president had polished off each morsel.
“He appeared to love chu-toro [medium fatty tuna] very a lot as a result of he winked when he ate it,” Ono mentioned. “He mentioned thrice, ‘That is the very best sushi I’ve ever had in my life.’”
In 2002, Japan’s maverick prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, eschewed a proper state dinner and as a substitute launched the teetotal George W Bush and first girl Laura Bush to the delights of an izakaya Japanese-style pub.
Days earlier than Biden’s arrival in Tokyo on Sunday, the Asahi Shimbun reported that Japanese officers had been fretting over easy methods to mix Japanese delicacies with the president’s penchant for the “meals of the frequent people”.
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Biden is understood to have a style for ice-cream, and reportedly devoured two – chocolate chip, then vanilla and chocolate – in fast succession whereas chatting to US troops and their households at Osan airbase in South Korea on the weekend.
Dinner at a restaurant serving okonomiyaki, a savoury pancake from Hiroshima, the place the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has his constituency, was dominated out over “safety issues”, the Asahi mentioned.
Kishida and Biden, who’s travelling with out the primary girl, Jill Biden, had been resulting from dine at Happo-en, a conventional Japanese restaurant that serves multiple-course kaiseki banquets.
The seafood-heavy menu for the 2 leaders consists of simmered Pacific lobster – accompanied by dried sea-cucumber ovary – crab, squid and scallop and, in a nod to the visitor of honour, a “particular gelato” for dessert.
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