ONE late winter evening, a friend of mine seriously asked me in the hallway, “Nay, do you know the Japanese eat bamboo?”

“No, not bamboo. Nobody has panda-like teeth. It`s bamboo shoots. Many Asians eat them too. Sweet and mildly sour. Very delicious! You also should try it.”

He still looked somewhat taken aback.

It was four years ago. Yet, reflecting on it, now I also wondered what he would say if he saw a bamboo-shoot pizza. Pizza and tomato are inseparable. Tomato mixed with cheese, mushrooms and pepperoni produces a very significantly delicious combination of different tastes: sweet, salty, sour and savory. Bamboo shoot too has its own special sweet-and-sour taste. So pizza with bamboo-shoot toppings uniquely creates a new heavenly flavor! The pièce de résistance of the café — Butterfly.

Butterfly is my friend’s favorite café in Uji, a small and beautiful town just south of Kyoto. Aged and blackened. She explained that it was built with the remains of wooden buildings demolished by a fierce storm. Look close enough, visible on its solid structure were `scars` — as if wordlessly proving its maturity hardened by life. A beautiful built-in floral garden, however, was softening the gloomy solemnity of the exterior and interior. I thought that the café was aptly named `Butterfly` which is born beautifully out of an ugly worm. So was its existence morphing from old ruins to a new beginning.