The Story of Sushi Read Online Free Page B
Author: Trevor Corson
the students why he was teaching them to make nigiri and hand rolls. The next day—Saturday—Toshi, Zoran, Jay, and all the students would load the restaurant’s catering equipment into a truck and drive to Hollywood, to the studio lot at Paramount Pictures, to serve sushi at a party for 3,000 people.
5
LIKE THE VOMIT OF A DRUNKARD
J ay wasn’t just the academy’s coordinator for student affairs. He also handled myriad other tasks for Toshi’s restaurant and school. On Friday afternoon at the end of the second week of the semester, Jay loaded eight blue insulated bins into the academy’s old van. Imported from Japan, the bins were labeled “Sanitation Listed Food Equipment.” They were designed for keeping rice at body temperature—the ideal temperature for serving sushi.
Jay drove along a wide boulevard lined with the strip malls characteristic of Los Angeles. He knew that many of the generic storefronts hid hole-in-the-wall eateries that served authentic ethnic cuisine, often next to restaurants serving fast food or Americanized imitations. Some of the best sushi in America was hidden in L.A.’s strip malls—along with some of the worst.
Food fascinated Jay. He was the kind of guy who, if he heard that the best Mexican tacos in L.A. were being served from a truck in a distant suburb, would drive out and try them. During college, Jay had worked in the kitchen of a Japanese restaurant. If he didn’t prepare a dish perfectly, the chef would scream and throw the dish back at him.
Jay’s interest in sushi had begun only about five years ago. He attended the California Sushi Academy, then worked for Toshi inthe kitchen. Next, he worked behind the sushi bar and then taught at the academy. Now, he served part-time as the academy’s coordinator for student affairs and filled in around the restaurant. The rest of the time he ran his own consulting business, giving advice to restaurateurs who wanted to open sushi bars.
Jay was American, but his ancestors were Japanese. As he’d learned more about sushi, he’d become worried about the state of sushi in the United States. He would sit at a sushi bar and see people stirring globs of green wasabi paste into their soy sauce to make a thick gray goo. They’d slather their fish with the goo, eat it, and exclaim, ‘Oh, that’s such good fish!’ Jay himself used to do the same thing.
But now Jay knew that this behavior was distressing to the chef. Wasabi is a type of horseradish, and in the quantities required to make that thick gray goo, the spiciness of wasabi overwhelms the human capacity for taste and smell. The chef might have risen at 4:30 that morning to go to the fish market and haggle over the best fish, only to see his customers slather it with wasabi so they couldn’t even taste it. Jay believed chefs were becoming disillusioned and customers were missing out. Americans liked food that was hot and spicy, but there was so much more to sushi than that.
Jay had learned that in Japan, sushi chefs might put a touch of wasabi inside a nigiri, using a larger dab of wasabi with fatty fish, and a smaller one with lean. But they never served extra wasabi on the side. They would serve a pinch on the side with sashimi—plain raw fish, without rice. But diners certainly weren’t supposed to mix the wasabi into their soy sauce and apply it indiscriminately.
Another thing Jay noticed was people gobbling up the pickled ginger as an appetizer. But the point of the ginger was to cleanse the palate between servings of different kinds of fish. Not eating a slice of ginger between each type of fish, Jay felt, was like mixing five different wines and trying to taste the Chardonnay.
He’d also see diners dunk the rice side of their nigiri in the soy sauce, instead of the fish side. Or they’d eat the nigiri in two bites instead of one. Or they’d force themselves to use chopsticks, when in fact most Japanese people just use their fingers to eat sushi.
Jay noticed, too,
5
LIKE THE VOMIT OF A DRUNKARD
J ay wasn’t just the academy’s coordinator for student affairs. He also handled myriad other tasks for Toshi’s restaurant and school. On Friday afternoon at the end of the second week of the semester, Jay loaded eight blue insulated bins into the academy’s old van. Imported from Japan, the bins were labeled “Sanitation Listed Food Equipment.” They were designed for keeping rice at body temperature—the ideal temperature for serving sushi.
Jay drove along a wide boulevard lined with the strip malls characteristic of Los Angeles. He knew that many of the generic storefronts hid hole-in-the-wall eateries that served authentic ethnic cuisine, often next to restaurants serving fast food or Americanized imitations. Some of the best sushi in America was hidden in L.A.’s strip malls—along with some of the worst.
Food fascinated Jay. He was the kind of guy who, if he heard that the best Mexican tacos in L.A. were being served from a truck in a distant suburb, would drive out and try them. During college, Jay had worked in the kitchen of a Japanese restaurant. If he didn’t prepare a dish perfectly, the chef would scream and throw the dish back at him.
Jay’s interest in sushi had begun only about five years ago. He attended the California Sushi Academy, then worked for Toshi inthe kitchen. Next, he worked behind the sushi bar and then taught at the academy. Now, he served part-time as the academy’s coordinator for student affairs and filled in around the restaurant. The rest of the time he ran his own consulting business, giving advice to restaurateurs who wanted to open sushi bars.
Jay was American, but his ancestors were Japanese. As he’d learned more about sushi, he’d become worried about the state of sushi in the United States. He would sit at a sushi bar and see people stirring globs of green wasabi paste into their soy sauce to make a thick gray goo. They’d slather their fish with the goo, eat it, and exclaim, ‘Oh, that’s such good fish!’ Jay himself used to do the same thing.
But now Jay knew that this behavior was distressing to the chef. Wasabi is a type of horseradish, and in the quantities required to make that thick gray goo, the spiciness of wasabi overwhelms the human capacity for taste and smell. The chef might have risen at 4:30 that morning to go to the fish market and haggle over the best fish, only to see his customers slather it with wasabi so they couldn’t even taste it. Jay believed chefs were becoming disillusioned and customers were missing out. Americans liked food that was hot and spicy, but there was so much more to sushi than that.
Jay had learned that in Japan, sushi chefs might put a touch of wasabi inside a nigiri, using a larger dab of wasabi with fatty fish, and a smaller one with lean. But they never served extra wasabi on the side. They would serve a pinch on the side with sashimi—plain raw fish, without rice. But diners certainly weren’t supposed to mix the wasabi into their soy sauce and apply it indiscriminately.
Another thing Jay noticed was people gobbling up the pickled ginger as an appetizer. But the point of the ginger was to cleanse the palate between servings of different kinds of fish. Not eating a slice of ginger between each type of fish, Jay felt, was like mixing five different wines and trying to taste the Chardonnay.
He’d also see diners dunk the rice side of their nigiri in the soy sauce, instead of the fish side. Or they’d eat the nigiri in two bites instead of one. Or they’d force themselves to use chopsticks, when in fact most Japanese people just use their fingers to eat sushi.
Jay noticed, too,
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