One thing I did in Japan merits a blog entry and is not terribly personal.
I went to a “real” sushi restaurant. This is sushi the way it was originally. All the contemporary exotic “fusion” and upscale adaptation stripped away, and all that’s left is raw fish, men who I pray are passionate about their work, and a very small place where you cannot take pictures. Yes, I’m serious. That’s why I don’t have pictures. Otherwise, I would have gotten a ton. The place was fascinating.
The first step was waking up and getting out of the house in time to get across town before 2:00 pm or so, when the restaurants close. We had to search for it, buried in open air markets and warehouses. Kimi, my host, had eaten there before, but was not 100% on directions. After we asked 3-4 people, we found the place, and it was full, with a a short line outside. You line up outside and wait in the cold, sipping barley tea out of paper cups.
The restaurants apparently begin preparing at 3 or 4 am, when they need to go to the markets to buy the fresh fish. The restaurants close in the early afternoon. Which is probably an artifact of some faded element of japanese culture.
These restaurants’ dining and preparation areas are about the size of a college dorm room.
There are about 10 seats at a bar across from where the men make the sushi. The fish itself is kept in a refrigerated glass case, sort of like the deli display freezer, in front of the patrons. This blocks the view of the men preparing the sushi somewhat, which is probably good. From working with his hands literally constantly, all the joints of the sushi masters’ fingers were deep red with huge bands of dead, white skin built up around them. It was gross. Somehow, I didn’t let this stop me. I was the only person in the room who could see over the counter by 6 inches.
The sushi place was run by two sushi masters. These men will apparently work together at this same restaurant for their entire lives. One man, who did all the actual rolling and serving, was a squat, quiet man who only spoke when spoken to, and whose hands danced quickly across the hardwood rolling area, deftly manipulating wads of rice and bits of tuna, eel, sea urchin, and wasabi drops.
The other was a tall, skinny guy that Kimi thought was cute.
The overall feeling I got from them was sort of like an old-time butcher. Just two quiet, hard-working men who know what they’re doing, and quietly and relativley modestly go about it.
So what happens once you are done waiting outside?
Diners go in shifts, with eah new group completely filling the just-vacated room. You sit down, a very unattractive woman gives you a hot white towel, which you are to put on a ledge under the counter once you’ve wiped your hands, and then said woman serves you a large, ceramic cup of scalding hot green tea.
Periodically, the squat man reached over the counter to give us our rolls. There are a set of waxy-looking leaves on a slanted counter forward of our eating area where he places the sushi, one piece at a time.
The restaurant is 170 some years old. I presume it changes locations, but maybe it has been consistently open and had that name at some point or another for that long. I was too entranced to pursue the line of questioning past that point. There were pictures on the wall of the sushi masters with elderly “famous” Japanese baseball players on the wall. Apparently it’s okay if they take the pictures.
I had cooked shrimp, sea urchin, tuna, fatty tuna, a bunch of other things I don’t remember, and something that looked like kimbap to finish.
The way sushi chefs are trained is a throwback in a good way, even if it makes no sense.
When one decides to become a sushi chef, one drops out of school and starts washing dishes at a sushi restaurant. Sushi “apprentices” receive shit pay, work the same shit hours that everyone else works, and get no formal training. You learn how to make sushi by watching the chefs at your restaurant make it. You work your way up the ranks by watching people a step ahead of you, and gradually your responsibilities stop sucking so dramatically. Then the day comes when you are a sushi master, and you go out on your own. I can’t think of any other profession that remains this steeped in tradition.
So that’s my uneven, hacked-to-bits-and-reassembled telling of going out for sushi. Enjoy.
