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Comment by cbhl | Hacker News Reader

Taking store-bought food and adjusting the presentation to make it look homemade isn't a purely Japanese phenomenon. Even in the United States, frozen apple pie sellers will tell folks to take the pie out of the aluminum tin and put it in a glass or ceramic baking dish to make the pie look homemade.

I rather appreciate how the Japanese still care about how food is presented. (I believe the idiom goes, "you eat with your eyes first.") I hope that in the pursuit of gender equality, pretty meals don't get lost the way that they have in the states.

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> frozen apple pie sellers will tell folks to take the pie out of the aluminum tin and put it in a glass or ceramic baking dish to make the pie look homemade.

What's even more ironic is doing that completely changes how the pie bakes, likely making the result even worse. Those heavy ceramic pie plates mean it takes longer for the pie to get up to temp and cook, often means the pie sticks to the plate, and makes it more difficult to cook the crust properly along with the pie (you could prebake the crust, but not with a frozen pie). I'm pretty sure most businesses use pie tins (foil is wasteful and structurally a poor choice).

I guess the whole goal is perception and convenience, not necessarily quality.

Perhaps they mean you should bake the pie in the tin, then transfer it to the baking dish.

Japanese food art is nuts. There are specialists in the art of creating super realistic-looking fake food. This is not merely decorative, it also is set up as a display in restaurant fronts to whet the appetite and give you an idea of what's on the menu.

And boy does that make it difficult to decide where to eat.

But also easier to order. I've taken more than one waiter outside and pointed at the plastic food.

Most Japanese restaurants have menus illustrated with photographs of their photogenic dishes. Foreigners who can't read the menu items can simply point to what they want. Japan's beautiful cuisine is not just aesthetic, it's functional as well. A lot of Japanese craftsman culture is like this, both beautiful and profoundly functional. A broken ceramic vessel repaired with kintsugi not only has an extended lifetime, it's arguably more beautiful than when it was brand new.

There’s a story that many restaurants buy their desserts from industrial dessert makers and basically defrost and reheat to order. Kinda like Starbucks (and most chain coffeeshops) do for pastries.

It makes economic sense but it sucks as a customer.

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