Acquired Taste
Oil Change
Imagine ordering fried chicken at a restaurant you've never been to, then taking a bite and having your mind blown by its amazing flavor. Now imagine the secret to that amazing flavor is the cooking oil — which hasn't been changed since 1960.
Apologies if you just threw up in your mouth.
Wakatori, a fried chicken shop in Japan, recently won Gold at the Japan Fried Chicken Grand Prix. The most interesting thing about this story isn't that Japan has a grand prix for dead birds, it's that the award-winning dead birds were fried in 66-year-old cooking oil.
Sorry. I just threw up in my mouth.
During a post-win interview, third-generation owner Yoshihiro Tsuchiya revealed the restaurant has been reusing the same oil since it opened. Every night they filter the oil to remove crumbs, food residue, and dirt, then top off the tank with fresh oil. According to Tsuchiya, the "aged oil" gives their fried chicken a “complex aroma” and “unique flavor” that cannot be replicated with new oil alone.
I'd rather take my chances with a pufferfish. The tetrodotoxin works faster than the acrylamide.
No one wants to learn that the food they just ate was marinated in fluid that's been sitting around since the Kennedy Administration. That's like finding out that the five-star hotel you just checked out of never washes bed sheets. They just shake 'em out, spritz 'em with Febreze, then put 'em back on the bed in the next room.
Some things are just better left unsaid.
The Flavor Base
Except Wakatori didn't leave it unsaid. They said it into a microphone and won gold with it. The thing that should've shut the place down is the thing that put it on the podium — which is where this stops being about chicken.
When something ruptures in life — a layoff, a pivot, the end of a role you held for years — the instinct is to drain the tank. Start clean. Disinfect everything the old job touched. New oil, new you.
But you can't actually drain it.
The way you read a room, the thing you do where you catch the problem three slides before anyone says it out loud, the "I've seen this movie before" reflex — none of that comes from a fresh start. It comes from years of topping off the same tank...including the years you'd rather not count. The ones where you filed down your edges to fit an environment that had no room for them.
The translating. The dialing back. The flattening.
I got laid off eighteen months ago, and for a while I treated all of it as something to scrub off. Then I dropped a line on a podcast last week that I'd apparently been seasoning for eighteen months.
I said I felt like an undrafted player waiting on a phone that wasn't going to ring.
It landed because it was true. It was true because I'd marinated in that feeling long enough to know the flavor. The flavor came from the wait, not in spite of it.
I'm not saying the suppression was worth it, that it all pays off, that everything happens for a reason. It doesn't. Some of what builds up in those years isn't flavor — it's the acrylamide. Resentment. Habits of smallness. The stuff you have to filter out every single night or it poisons the batch.
The years you spent flattening yourself aren't waste. They're seasoning. But seasoning only tastes like anything when you actually cook with it.
The work is still yours to make.
Question of the Week
What's been marinating that you still haven't cooked with?
The Podcast
I recently sat down with Aisha Ommaya on The Unemployment Diaries. A lot of the thoughts in this issue started in that conversation — same threads, just longer, with more of me thinking out loud. If that undrafted-player line stuck with you, the rest of it's in there.
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