"Sorry, you're too black to make bouillabaisse."

Maybe it's the impossible swarm of cheap sushi joints in this town -- you can have sashimi and yakitori in both Little Italy and Greektown! -- but if one more person snarks that a non-Japanese-run Japanese restaurant is a "fail," I'm going to stab them in the eyes with my chopsticks.

It is an epic lapse in logic that the quality of food could be affected not by ingredients, or skill of preparation, or instinctive gift, but an artificial idea of race. If anyone ever so much as whispered that fine French or Italian cuisine were beyond Japanese chefs by mere virtue of their Oriental squint, they'd be cleaved in two.