Tampopo: a quest for divine noodles

The movie Tampopo, which we recently viewed in class, is rich in themes about how food and life mingle. It was intriguing to me about how a movie can be made around this central idea of revitalizing a Japanese noodle bar. The owner of the restaurant, Tampopo, comes to the realization that her noodle bar is not meeting the expectations of its costumers when a hungry truck driver named Goro stops by and critiques her cooking skills. Through his help, she is introduced to people from all facets of Japanese society who collectively help her reach her goal for divine noodles and make her noodle joint "high class."

One aspect of the film I found to be innovative was the idea behind food and class. One scene

 in the movie depicts an "etiquette school" where a woman is teaching a class of presumably wealthy teenage ladies how to properly eat spaghetti as a Westerner would. She is explaining how Japanese will slurp up noodles, but this is taboo in many parts of the world. The teacher then instructs the women on how to use a fork and spoon to swirl the noodles into a bitable quantity. Yet, a westerner who is sitting across the restaurant over hears this lesson and decides to shake up the idea on the proper way to consume noodles. He outwardly slurps the noodles, gaining the attention of the class. The class, assuming he is the embodiment of a typical westerner, begin to mimic his eating habits, including the teacher. The theme behind this frame is that you can't generalize a whole culture.

In the same restaurant that the noodle lesson is going on, a business dinner meeting is occuring. The group of older Japanese men include on young man. He is depicted as a clumsy fool at the beginning of the scene, dropping a load of folders. When the waiter comes around to take their orders, all the older men follow suit of the first person who orders and get the only thing on the menu they recognize, along with a Heineken beer. Yet, the young man shines as an expert in food. He goes so far as to recall the name of the restaurant in France that his dish originates from. Also, he proves to be a wine connoisseur. This is a breakthrough moment where the theme that being high class and old doesn't mean your refined in food knowledge.