Jeff Goldblum once described his first experience of eating Pocky as “almost religious ecstasy”.
“It’s like you’ve reverted to a five-year-old kid all of a sudden,” laughed his co-host Jon Weigell.
Likewise, in 2019, pastry chef Claire Saffitz stunned her fellow Test Kitchen colleagues at US food magazine Bon Appétit by admitting she had never tried Pocky before in her life.
“You know that thing that happens when like people, all your friends, are talking about something and you’ve just never heard of it? And you’re like somehow I just missed that piece of cultural knowledge that everybody has,” she said. “I have that with Pocky and with other things too.”
Undeterred, Saffitz ended up successfully reverse engineering the popular snack in what would become one of the most highly rated episodes of cooking series Gourmet Makes.