Super Sushi Ramen Express: One Family's Journey Through the Belly of Japan by Michael Booth

Review of Super Sushi Ramen Express: One Family's Journey Through the Belly of Japan by Michael Booth

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Super Sushi Ramen Express by Michael Booth (2016). Published by Picador.

I was wandering the history section of my local library when I stumbled upon Super Sushi Ramen. I was poking through the small Japanese history section when I saw the name of this book and absolutely knew it was written by someone who’s not from Japan.

Granted, that doesn’t mean much in some ways, but I feel like it was all the keywords that other foreigners visiting Japan would check off. I was also very confused that it was in the history section—while we do get some history in this book, I would mainly classify it as a travel memoir or food literature.

But still I picked it up, checked it out, and read all of it when I was bored one night. It was kind of hard to get through after awhile because the writing became too mundane and predictable for me—Booth doesn’t really switch up it up, just the locations, so it began to feel like a copy paste after a certain point.

But I still read all of it when I was sitting down with it, so that’s a good sign!

Onwards with the review.

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A food journey with Booth and his family as they spend several months throughout Japan.

Booth begins his travel memoir talking about how another chef he worked with was Japanese, and that a lot of people in the country they were living and working in—which I believe was described as France—didn’t really get traditional Japanese cuisine.

This then inspired Michael Booth to try and plan a trip to Japan because he needs to experience the cuisine for what it is, and then he ropes his entire family into coming with him. His kids aren’t exactly the most open-minded when it comes to cuisine, so one of the threads to track throughout the memoir is how they come to terms with eating more out-there food for them.

So Booth and his family head off to Japan. They start in Tokyo, which is overwhelming at first, but when they start to get comfortable with the rhythm of the city, they were able to slowly discover the first foundations of Japanese cuisine.

Some highlights in this part of the trip include the fact Booth takes a sushi class at a restaurant, then has the rare opportunity to take a cooking course with an older woman who allows him into their home.

Lots of descriptions about the food are woven as we get into Japan, which made me very hungry—outside of the fish, I don’t eat seafood. The core of this narrative of why Booth is even there is food, but I found the descriptions to be superficial when I compared to other forms of food writing about Japan.

I read a lot about food and memoir, but I thought Booth could’ve dug deeper if he wanted to. This book reads more like a tourist narrative with a touch of food added into it.

But their time in Tokyo has to come to a close, and the family heads to other locations such as Hokkaido and Okinawa. Booth describes the unique culinary landscapes in these regions, and we get a hint about the native culture outside of the mainstream Japanese culture.

Not everyone is from Tokyo—heck, a chunk of the people from Tokyo aren’t even from there originally. So there’s a unique breath to Japan and its culture outside of the metropolis that everyone knows and loves.

One of my favorite parts of this section has been when a ladies’ cooking group in Kyoto finds out Booth is in town and then invites him to their cooking group. They want to learn how to make French cooking, but Booth flails in the markets in the beginning because he realizes the ingredients he knows and loves aren’t here.

So when he makes the food for them, they horrified to see the components into the cooking, then a fellow foreigner and chef there informs him the Japanese don’t cook certain foods a certain way.

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Overall Thoughts

It’s a cute book, and I’m glad I read it, but I didn’t really care for it at the end of the day. Taste is really subjective, so I’m sure someone out there really enjoyed this one.

I think it failed for me because of how it failed to commit to going deeper, and while the anecdotes are fun, it doesn’t end up feeling like something I would return to.

I felt like I knew the new information presented in the memoir, which made me feel like this was a slug at times. But it was fun, like I said.

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