Bagna càuda

In Japan recently, all the restaurants are so big on Bagna Cauda Sauce which is a warm dip typical of Piemonte, Italy. It became so big all of sudden. It is usually made from garlic, olive oil, anchovies, butter and cream and apparently it was introduced to Japan by the same guy who also introduced Tiramisu.

I was thinking how this became so popular here. This sauce is very tasty I agree, but it isn's something that I would want to order everywhere. I think more than this sauce, "eating vegetables" are very big in Japan right now.

Since the world has become so convenient and there are so many pre-made meals everywhere, I think people have stopped to look back and wonder if this is really good for us. Specially in Japan, we do not have many vegetarian people like in Western countries and we are not very used to eat fresh vegetables traditionally. it is kind of "new" to us and it appears trendy to many of them.

Last night, I went to a restaurant called La Boucherie du Buppa in Nakameguro. I definitely love this restaurant (specialized in gibier and they are amazing! will talk about this restaurant later.) However, the sauce that came with fresh vegetables got me thinking. This sauce was beautiful and loved that they just don't serve normal Bagna càuda like in other restaurants and tried to be creative. They used Miso and peanut butter but in my opinion, it matched with only one of the vegetables that came with. They served very fresh and naturally sweet tomatoes, colorful radish and all those unusual and tasty vegetables but I preferred not to use that sauce most of the time which I thought very unfortunate.

I don't think this trend would last very long. I mean the Bagna càuda sauce not eating vegetable bit. I think that it will shift to something else that will help people eating vegetables as well. I hope that it will be something that brings character of each vegetables out more than Bagna càuda sauce. I don't really like the whole idea because you have so many different kinds of vegetable in the dish and they are very fresh and they all taste different! Even when we eat sashimi, we quite often use different sauce for different fish, we sometimes use ginger instead of wasabi and so on. Hope that some restaurant will start treating the beautiful vegetable in the same way too.

It may apply to other industries too? Sometimes, "trend" makes you go blind and makes you ignore your "real sensation".

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