たべもののある風景

本の中で食事するひとびとのメモ帳2代目

シリコンバレーメシ Uncanny Valley

知ってたけど、日本の報道、いよいよやばい...
感染者数減ってきてますね、だとぉぉぉ。そもそも全然検査足りてないじゃん。
ちゃんと検査方法が変わったことも報じなさいよ。「専門家」も何も指摘しないし、怖いよー。

「回転寿司が満員だった」とか、去年から屋内飲食一切禁止の街から聞くとめちゃくちゃ引きます。
だって台湾とかNZみたいに感染抑えられてるわけではないじゃないですか。

とりあえずシリコンバレーに逃げます。

I liked taking long walks to purchase onigiri in Japantown, or taking long walks with no destination at all.

Unwinding over wine and potato chips one evening, the CEO sat beside me at one of the office kitchen tables.

I went to startups and declined offers of iced tea and string cheese.

My guide led me through the communal kitchen, which had the trappings of every other startup pantry: plastic bins of trail mix and cheese crackers, bowls of chips and miniature candy bars. There was the requisite wholesale box of assorted enery bars, and in the friedge were bottles of flavored water, string cheese, and single-serving cartons of cholocate milk.

Over catered Afghan food, I met team, including a billionaire who made his fortune from the microblogging platform.

She dipped a fresh fry into her milkshake.

We pulled over at a lookout and sat on a boulder, eating curried couscous and drinking cheap champagne.

In the morning, people woke up late and padded around the mansion in pajamas, frying bacon and responding to support tickets.

On the first night, my coworkers gathered over bowls of guacamole and sweaty margaritas.

I thought about my coworkers on the other side of the door, congregating after yoga class and eating tubes of popped wild rice.

I had wolfed a turkey sandwich in the food court, and was aware that I had a slight mustard odor.

We walked to a cafe and sat on a bench outside, eating lentil salad and rehashing our conversation from the microblogging platoform.

San Francisco was going through a culinary renaissance, a competitive effort to capture the attention of young money. Chefs were not competing with each other so much as against the apathy inspired by upscale office cafeterias, fast casual, and delivery apps. To differentiate themselves, they spun the dial all the way up, treating fried anchovies like luxury items and meting out slices of sourdough bread like manna from heaven. The food was demented: cheese courses hidden beneath table candles and revealed, perfectly softened, at the end of the meal; whole quail baked into loaves of bread. It was high-intensity, sensory overload: smoked corn-husk chawanmushi, pickled French fries, green beans and cherries enrobed in burrata. Food that chef mandated be eaten by hand. Food that was social media famous. Food that wanted to be.

he asked, as we were presented with matching plates of fried chicken slathered in yogurt and dukkah.

In an outdoor kitchen, people chopped topping pizza. A lamb skittered between their legs, looking for scraps.

a champagne bar serving caviar on shrimp chips
A Ping-Pong club with truffle fries.

I retrieved additional seltzer waters for uss, tangering flavor.

The developer and I ate soba noodles and made small talk.

The salmon came off the grill and we incorporated it into the salad, gathering around the picnic tables to eat.

The tech industry would be fine, I said, dipping a piece of bread into a trough of olive oil.

Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley: A Memoirから