Click here to read the introduction to the new weekly Voracious column: Serving Sake to a Serb.I grew up eating y?shoku – Japanese interpretations of Western cuisine. My grandmother used to fry up chicken fillets and hamburger patties, then serve them with a pool of thick curry sauce and sticky white rice. Just thinking of the dish makes me nostalgic, not to mention hungry as hell. It is ah-mazing. But, as Jonathan Kauffman observed in a feature on the city’s small y?shoku scene, people who visit these restaurants usually end up divided into “WTF and OMG camps… according to whether they’ve spent time in Japan.’I was convinced Slavko would love it anyway. Because well, I did. So I took him to The Cutting Board (5503 Airport Way) in Georgetown, a small gem that serves awesome Japanese-style curry, along with sushi and bento. J-Pop was playing softly overhead and the owner was yammering in Japanese with one of the visitors when we entered. He stopped when we approached the counter to order two bowls of beef curry with mechi katsu. Then he got to work in the kitchen, while we sat down at one of the five wooden tables available in the dining area.A server brought out two salads for us to eat while we waited for our food. They were simply prepared – lettuce adorned with corn and a drizzle of miso dressing. Slavko wasn’t blown away. “It’s just a salad,” he said with a shrug. In just five minutes time however, the server re-appeared. He set down a big bowl in front of Slavko. Two fried hamburger patties sat atop a mound of rice. Steam billowed off the accompanying curry’s surface. I beamed. Slavko didn’t look as excited. Granted, it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing dish. He took a bite. The katsu’s fried outer shell made a nice crunch sound as it crumbled and revealed the minced meat and veggies packed inside. He took a few more bites. “It’s good,” he said slowly. “But it’s nothing special.”Huh? Nothing special? I gaped at him. “It tastes like a microwavable chicken patty.” I told him it wasn’t chicken. “Well, it tastes like chicken. Actually, it tastes like a chicken patty from McDonald’s.” The curry, a thick, semi-sweet sauce with plenty of shredded beef – that didn’t impress him much either. “Like I said before, it’s good,” Slavko said. “It’s just not something I would go out of my way to eat again.”I couldn’t help but take it a little personally. I didn’t cook the food, but it holds a special place in my heart. I felt like he had insulted my grandmother’s cooking. It was when Slavko pushed his half-eaten bowl away and announced he was full that I knew he really wasn’t feeling the menchi katsu or curry. This is a guy who can inhale an entire pizza in a one sitting. Yet suddenly, he’d become a dainty eater. “Thank you for lunch,” he said sweetly. But I could tell he didn’t mean it – at least not completely.