THere are always posts like this

when ever someone mentions SUSHI. The most embarrassing thing for me ever was once going with a girl friend to a Benihana Restaurant in JAPANTOWN here in San Francisco. Benihana always takes groups of people and put them at the same dining table. Now it just so happened there was a family from South Carolina visiting Japantown and stopped in to try some of that fancy smanchy "Jap-OH-Neese" food. These people were very forward with everyone, and you would have thought We had sat down to their home dining table for dinner. The father checked out the chopped sticks and said..." No~ no~ No!! these won't do" (Meanwhile his 12 year old son had removed the chopsticks from the paper wrapper and were wearing them a-la walrus like up his nose...asking everyone to look at him. The Father refused to have chopsticks and demanded the wait staff bring him a knife, fork and spoon, because "WE"RE IN AMERICA and we eat the American way!!"

Since I was at their table, they kept asking me questions all through the meal about what every little thing was, and what it was. Fortunately my friend can read kanji so she was stuck with the task of explaining what soy sauce was, and how wasabi was similar to
Horse raddish. The mother wanted me to teach her kids how to use the chop sticks which was totally a useless gesture and I hardly got the chance to eat my own food because Mia and I were stuck explaining every exhausting aspect about Japanese culture and how it was different from Chinese culture. (What no Fortune cookies? Where are the dayam fortune cookies??.)

And of course I had to sit and listen to the father Joke about how sushi was called bait where they came from, and they were not "touching the shit" (Yes, this was said in a public restaurant.) It was the most humiliating experience in my life, and I swore I would never go back to Benihana's if they paid me. The food there was good... ITS JUST I got tired of the daughter pulling her eyes back and going "Look mamna, I am JAPO-KNEES"... AND having to explain why the beer wasn't Budweiser.