Re:*don't* kick it up a notch! (Score 1)

I wholeheartedly agree! I spent some time in Tokyo this summer, and it was a few weeks until I really started to taste the food - everything is spiced much less, and plain rice makes up much of the diet, but there's a lot of subtlety and delicacy in the flavours. By the time I went back to the states, I realized things about food I'd been eating for years. Like sushi rice - sushi rice is flavoured slightly differently depending on the type of sushi, but until I became acclimatized, I never noticed.