Hold The Octopus, But I'd Like More Asparagus Cookies

February 14, 1998|By John Husar.

NAGANO, Japan — Each day, at each Olympic event, it seems as if a plague of locusts has swarmed through the concessions areas.

Usually, not a single asparagus cookie or tomato pretzel is left.

If nothing else, the Japanese taste for odd--if surprisingly delicious--victuals will leave an indelible impression upon Western Olympic visitors.

Those who are used to hot dogs and popcorn and maybe a plate of nachos at sports events are having their eyes peeled open to new culinary adventures.

The best substitutes the Japanese can offer are steaming bowls of noodles in wondrous broths, flavored with vegetables, beef or seafood.

I was at a ski race, slurping thick udon noodles with seafood tempura from an immense styrofoam bowl with some queasy American friends, when a pal began poking at tiny squares of a rubbery substance.

"What's this?" he wondered in a suspicious voice.

"Seafood," I replied, unwilling to wreck his lunch by revealing he had been eating octopus.

"I'll tell you this--Jerry Reinsdorf never would allow that," a fellow Chicagoan observed.

Breakfast at morning sports events often is the greatest challenge. Although Japanese hotel chefs gamely produce uncustomary variations of eggs--"sun-ny side up" means poached in frilly cupcake holders--most public food stands and restaurants expect you to eat like the locals do.

That means rich bowls of miso soup, made from a bean paste, with paper-thin onion slices floating on the edges. Variously flavored rice--often with saffron or curry, and sometimes with smoked fish--is abundant. Soft rolls and marmalades. Juices and plenty of fresh fruit--although the Japanese propensity for refrigerating bananas often leaves them mushy.

Most coffees come in cans, dispensed from omnipresent vending machines. Most are laced with cream and sugar--sometimes with chocolate.

Many Americans have learned to paw through bins of cellophane-wrapped breads, if only to discover what might be inside.

One hefty roll at a concessions stand contained a spicy tuna salad, loaded with cayenne, while another featured chocolate pudding.

A short French roll was sliced twice. One slice contained butter, the other chocolate pudding. It was amazingly tasty for breakfast with a can of coffee.

One wildly popular condiment is a banana cream roll. A round slab of banana bread is folded over a whole fresh banana and stuffed with whipped cream. No stand can keep it in stock for long.

Other popular pastries include churoki--bread soaked in maple syrup and fried--and a cinnamon roll stuffed with cherry jelly.

Sweets are abundant, from chocolate-dipped pretzels to taffies called "caramels." The most popular fruit-flavored taffy, as well as chewing gum, appears to be blueberry--or "bluebelly," as one phonetically challenged marketing department has labeled its product.

Almost every concessions area offers a variety of steamed Chinese-style stuffed buns in pork, curry and pizza flavors. These are well known in American Chinatowns on dim sum menus. The Japanese also are partial to tightly packed triangles of flavored rice wrapped in seaweed. It's a bit like nibbling a moist, sour, very loose granola bar.

French fries are available--from machines. Pull a paper cup from a holder, insert it beneath the food drop, put in a coin and you have a cupful of hot sliced potatoes--and not as greasy as you'd think.

Cookies abound--but none has chocolate chips. Yes, they're often made of materials like asparagus, tomato and even buckwheat noodle paste.

How good can asparagus cookies be? Well, even the finicky Bernie Lincicome helped himself to thirds.

One of the great touches occurs at the luge and bobsled course, where Bavarian music spices the atmosphere of essentially European sports.

Here Japanese concessionaires offer hot cans of fragrantly mulled wine, European-style, and now the locals have some discovery of their own.

The sight of five or six Japanese gingerly testing this foreign "glogg" emphasizes the universality of an Olympics.

So does the finger-sized morsels of squid available in every 7-Eleven convenience store.

"You just don't expect to see squid at a 7-Eleven when you're looking for pizza puffs," a bemused American said.