Until last week, the world of science was unaware of the scutoid. The scutoid is a basic three-dimensional shape, like a cube or a sphere but not like either of those things. It’s more like a column with half of one end lopped off at an angle; popular accounts have described it as a twisted prism, although that’s not so helpful. “It’s a prism with a zipper,” Javier Buceta, a biophysicist at Lehigh University and one of the scutoid’s discoverers, told me excitedly. This was also not so helpful.
What matters is that mathematicians had never before conceived of the scutoid, much less given it a name. What matters even more is that scutoids turn out to be everywhere, especially in living things. The shape, however odd, is a building block of multicellular organisms; complex life might never have emerged on Earth without it. Its existence, Buceta said, “allows you to understand the fundamentals of morphogenesis and development—how cells act together when they’re forming and developing.”
Last year, I moved to the island of Okinawa, off the southern coast of mainland Japan, and discovered that the Australian café is flourishing there, too. Good Day Coffee, which is situated near one of Okinawa’s biggest American military bases, was opened by a Japanese surfer, Tatsuya Miyazato, in March of 2016. Miyazato, whom I have never seen not dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, was inspired by the cafés he encountered on surfing trips to Australia, particularly those on the so-called Gold Coast, which is renowned for its waves, and in the hippie town of Byron Bay, where the coffee beans he serves are roasted. “I get tourists from the mainland, but also from Taiwan and Korea,” Miyazato said. “Many people in Asia now understand the Australian café.”
On an early spring morning in Tokyo, I had lunch with Bill Granger, the restaurateur who is most responsible for the Australian café’s global reach. The forty-eight-year-old Australian, who now lives in London, owns eighteen eponymous restaurants in Japan, Hawaii, the U.K., Korea, and, of course, Australia. We met at a branch in Ginza, but it may as well have been his Bondi Beach flagship. Nearing noon, diners’ plates were piled high with fried eggs and what Americans would call Canadian bacon. (The rest of the world would call it bacon.) Although we were in a densely populated shopping district, sun streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
In some respects, the pudding can feel overegged; although not unexplored territory, the relationship of a single woman to a couple whom she idealises and feels drawn to as a unit, rather than as two individuals, is rich enough to make additional devices and embellishment unnecessary.