Japanese Food

At the new Sake Japanese Fusion restaurant at Summit Mall in Fairlawn, a cute little robot host named Peanut with a blue shirt and hat works in tandem with a human host, welcoming diners and showing them to their seats.

“Welcome to Sake Japanese Fusion,” Peanut says. After leading guests to their tables, he says: “Destination has arrived. Enjoy your meal.”

The host robot, who holds a screen above his head showing appetizing images of menu items, is the most human-like of the five robots that owners Tiffany and Leo Chen have purchased due to restaurant staffing difficulties plaguing the industry.

The four server robots are sleek, mostly black machines with flashing blue eyes, white sides and four levels of trays on which they carry food to customers’ tables.

The owners have invested nearly $20,000 in each of the five robots, which they ordered from Shanghai, China. When the restaurant

Tenterden’s much-loved food and drink festival returns this year with a new name and a whole host of new cuisines.

The festival, rebranded for the first time this year as the Tenterden FreeWheelin FEASTival, will once again bring the best street food, bars, alfresco dining, live music and entertainment, artisan produce and arts and crafts stalls to the town’s recreation ground.

This year, the visitors can enjoy even more tasty treats as the festival has been extended to four days, taking place from Thursday, May 19 to Sunday, May 22.

Returning for the first time since the pandemic, the FEASTival will bring together food from all over the world, including Mexican, Japanese, Thai, Chinese, Greek, American, French and Caribbean.

Whether you want a juicy burger, flavoursome

Who doesn’t get a sweet tooth, at least once in awhile, for a sweet onion? That thick slice of Rockies-purple red onion on a burger at Coors Field? Sweets cooked slowly and forever into a jam-like confit, sweeter than any that regular onions could make?

It’s well-nigh impossible to think of a cuisine anywhere that doesn’t use onions, but sweet onions are special. (They also are a wee percentage of the world crop.) Many sweets sell in Colorado, such as Washington’s Walla Walla, Hawaii’s Maui, that Rockies-purple Red Bermuda or even our own state’s Colorado Sweet, available here most years August through October.

But close to half of all the sweet onions that cooks buy in the United States come from Vidalia, Ga., and carry that name. Discovered accidentally (and felicitously) in the 1930s during the Great Depression, a Vidalia sports a whopping 12 percent sugar content versus a normal

There is an estimated multibillion-dollar market in Japan for life-size food models. The craftsmanship can be extraordinary.

Photographs by Kyoko Hamada

Text by Tejal Rao

A perfect replica requires imperfection. Take a grilled fish: Uniform all over, flawless in color and texture, it tells you nothing. But let’s say its silvery skin is marked with bubbles of assorted sizes, delicate crinkles and slightly uneven washes of carbonization. Let’s say the fish’s eyes are clouded over from the heat. And its markings, when you look closer, suggest it was flipped over the charcoal, showing you, under the gloss of its own rendered fat, a hot spot, where the heat on this nonexistent grill was more intense. Then, yes, maybe you want to buy that fish. Well, not that fish, which is made of plastic, but the fish it represents — the fish on the menu inside this