Yōshoku boomerang
What sandos and Japanese potato salad tell us about food, culture and authenticity
Last month, circumstances collided in my imagination and my kitchen, causing me to develop a fascination with an unlikely dish: Japanese potato salad. Partly it was because the pandemic had me craving potatoes (comfort carbs) and therefore potato salad in general was top-of-mind. Potatoes are cheap and plentiful (even the organic ones I insist on buying), and though normally I reserve them for special occasions because their lofty spot on the glycemic index makes them fattening (so I’ve read), indulging in them during the pandemic seemed a harmless enough pursuit.
As I ran through potato salad possibilities in my head, I remembered a wonderful Japanese spud salad I had enjoyed pre-pandemic, at a newish Dallas ramen-and-yakitori spot, Salaryman, from chef Justin Holt. Also, I was working on a review of a Japanese cookbook, Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, which includes a delightful recipe for Potato Salada.
Hmm. I suppose I had never really thought about the fact that Japanese potato salad is a thing. Hard to say exactly what distinguishes it from other potato salads, except that it often has cucumbers and/or carrots and/or green beans in it and it’s dressed with Japanese mayo.
My son Wylie, a recent college graduate who minored in Japanese and spent a semester in Japan, explained to me why it’s called potato salada in that language. The phrase “potato salada” is an example of gairaigo — Japanese words based on a foreign language, generally western; “borrowed words.” When you hear them, they sound Japanese, but you can see their Western, often American, roots. Hambagu or hanbaagaa (hamburger) is another.
That led to a conversation about yōshoku: Japanese dishes that were originally imports, often from the West (as distinguished from washoku, traditional Japanese cooking). Their names are often gairaigo. Like korokke (from the French croquette). Or kareraisu, (curry rice from India by way of Britain). Or sandoitchi — sando, for short.
Unless you’ve been hibernating much longer than Covid-19 has been with us, you know that sandos have been a huge food trend stateside in recent years. The trend actually represents a giant culinary boomerang.
Evolution of the sando
The creation of what we call a sandwich is usually attributed to the fourth Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu. The 18th-century British statesman (and notorious gambler) didn’t think it up out of the blue, however; according to the Food Timeline, he had been inspired by pita canapés served as mezze during his trips to the Eastern Mediterranean to ask his cook for a way to eat while he continued gambling. Sliced meat between two pieces of toast was the answer, and it took off. The invention of packaged, sliced white bread in early 20th-century America was a boon to the sandwich, which made its way to Japan, where yummy-looking egg salad and other sandoitchi on fluffy white milk bread can be found, cut in half, smartly packaged cut-side up and sold in convenience stores — konbini (another gairaigo).
Sometime around 2014 (according to a 2018 Eater article) is when chefs in Tokyo began wowing diners with dramatic sandos filled with wagyu katsu — luxury marbled beef fried up like a pork cutlet, impressive looking when cut in half.
Chefs in L.A., Washington, D.C. and New York brought the trend, cutened up and made Instagram-snappy, here in 2017; both luxury wagyu katsu sandos and democratic egg salad sandos started trending wildly. The apogee, of course, was Bon Appétit naming L.A.’s Konbi — an Echo Park sando shop — Restaurant of the Year in 2019.
The trend made its way around the country; Dallas, for instance, has had them for about half a year, and now they are suddenly exploding, with a new “Instagram-mobbing, online-order-only, curbside-pickup Japanese sandwich sensation,” as D Magazine’s dining critic Eve Hill-Agnus calls Sandoitchi.
And in case you’re wondering whether L.A. is over the sando craze? Not yet! And recently Daniel Son, who first launched his katsu sando pop-up within his West Hollywood sushi restaurant Kura in the fall of 2017, debuted a take-out and delivery sando spot in Chinatown.
Doesn’t it seem inevitable that a potato salada trend will be nipping at sando’s heels? Sounds like the perfect pandemic box lunch.
Meanwhile, in the context of our national conversation about cultural appropriation in cooking and our uneasy relationship with the idea of fusion, I think there’s something valuable to be soaked up in the sando-boomerang phenom. Culinary evolution has always been about the migration of food trends — otherwise known as fusion. Without the 13th-century Moorish cooks on the Iberian peninsula who thought about dredging a piece of fish in flour and eggs and frying it, as Charles Perry wrote in one of my favorite stories from my years at the L.A. Times, we might not have Baja-style fish tacos. Sixteenth-century Portuguese traders brought the fried-fish idea to Japan, where it was adopted as tempura, and in the 1920s, Japanese fishermen who were brought to Ensenada, Mexico to teach fishing and diving techniques, also brought their tempura. It fused with a tortilla, and the rest is food history.
