Welcome to my website! Here, you'll learn what I've been working on recently, gain instant access to a (not-quite-complete) archive of my past articles, and see what I've been blogging about.
Illuminated at night, Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto takes on a new, more glamorous, kind of beauty.
House-made monaka (azuki bean and wafer cake) and frothy matcha tea at the Kyoko kaiseki restaurant Jiki Miyazawa.
My blog Walking and Talking is about the various subjects I cover: culture, food, art, Japanese-American life, health and my West Village neighborhood in New York City. Lately I've been interested in Manzanar, the WWII internment camp where the U.S. government imprisoned 10,000 people of Japanese descent, including my father and his family. I wrote this essay about my 2009 pilgrimage to Manzanar.
Eating Disorders and Nutritional News is a blog about eating disorders that I write with my co-author, Dr. Marcia Herrin. We've covered subjects as diverse as calorie postings in chain restaurants (we're against the practice), innovative research in the field, new books on eating disorders and health insurance reimbursement.
My Walking and Talking blog post on Epicerie Boulud's spring charcuterie made it into the New York Times' "What We're Reading" column. Thanks, Julia Moskin, for including me!
Steer sharing and whole-animal butchery are the topics of my Wall Street Journal article, Restaurants Steer in Same Direction.
This Edible Manhattan article (it also ran in sister publication Edible Hudson Valley), on the pioneering upstate farmstead goat cheese maker, Coach Farm, entailed a fun trip to Pine Plains, NY, where I communed with goats large and small.
Bonnie Slotnick, owner of a wonderful West Village cookbook store, is the topic of this WestView profile.
My article for the online publication The Daily, Order of Infamy, on the 70th anniversary of FDR's signing of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the roundup and imprisonment of 110,000 people of Japanese descent.
I had fun testing three online cooking school sites for this Wall Street Journal article, Getting Your Culinary Chops from Digital Masters, as well as collaborating on this look at the U.S. finals of the Bocuse d'Or international culinary competition.
Some other recent Edible Manhattan articles: my tour of Manhattan's Chinatown with Buddakan chef Yang Huang and a look at the East Village Sake shop Sakaya. In Tradition: Osechi, I look at how Japanese ex-pats ring in the New Year.
I was excited to learn that a 10th-grade class at the international school in Singapore is reading my 18-part essay on the World War II concentration camp Manzanar as part of an assignment on class- and race-based prejudice. You can read the entire Discover Nikkei series here.
My most recent contributions to the website Cravings include interviews with chef Jesse Schenker and pastry chef Shuna Lydon, as well as tributes to dishes at New York City's ABC Kitchen, Vancouver's L'Abattoir, and Sunny Spot in Venice, CA.
Here's what happened when I tested four online travel sites for this consumer column in The Wall Street Journal. No Blood Spilled in This Top to Tail, also for the Journal, is about the creative ways chefs come up with to use every scrap of local farmers' summer bounty. If you can't view the whole article online, look at this version, in my Articles section.
