Fish

We went for sushi today at a sushi bar in some town up the coast today. It’s a bit of a shame that I don’t have more disposable income because I think I spend too much time trying to figure out how to get my favourite foods for prices that don’t do these foods justice. At home in Vancouver, I would always frequent the typical “All-You-Can-Eat” sushi restaurants that can be found all over the city – and which are usually run by either Chinese or Korean restaurant owners. In Japan, typically, I get my sushi from the kaiten-shushi restaurants where the food comes around on conveyor belts. Alternatively, I’ll wait until after 7pm when all of the prices for the ready-made food in the super market are marked down. All of these places at home and here in Japan are good in the sense that I really like sushi, but to sit down in front of a sushi chef while he prepares a meal of fresh fish is an experience unto itself.

I spent several years working in a restaurant back home – a fish and chips restaurant actually, so I’ve had experience working around fish all day. I know how precious a good knife and a clean cutting board can be. I wonder if these sushi chefs ever cut themselves at work. The chef at this place I think said that he had been living and working in the same place for over 40 years (this number sounds a bit crazy to me, so I want to think that I’ve got the number wrong, but at the same time, I remember the number being quite crazy, so I’ll leave it as is). I used to cut fish for hours some days, and I got pretty good at it; I never fully cut myself, but sometimes, when I got pressed for time and the knife was moving quickly in my fingers, a slight graze of the blade would leave the smallest cuts on the end of my fingertips. I wouldn’t notice until after when I was washing my hands. I also wonder if his hands smell like fish all day even when he’s not making sushi. I remember coming home from work and my hands would smell for hours after. There were many days when I would finish work, exhausted, dehydrated and malnourished, with cuts on my hands – usually with a few fryer burns, and my hands smelling like fish, but there was also a sense of satisfaction that I had put together good meals that many people really enjoyed.

Being a chef is such a wonderful profession and I have a lot of respect for them. I think all restaurants should have open kitchens so that we can fully appreciate the work that goes on in them. I like the idea of seeing food in front of me being turned into a meal. It’s work, and it’s art, and it’s all a little bit magical; sometimes all the ingredients may come together in the right form, but still, something could be missing. I’m reminded of a memorable phrase from True Blood, where the chef mentions something along the lines of, “you can taste it when someone puts love into their food.” Cooking requires a certain presence of mind that keeps one in tune with the food that’s coming together. There’s been many times when I go through the motions of cooking without really paying attention, and it won’t turn out the way I want – and I won’t know what went wrong. I hate this. But I think that if you really care about the food that you’re making, and really make an effort to care about the people that you’re making it for, it makes all the difference in the world. This isn’t something that’s easy to do when working at a restaurant for several hours in a day, but again, I think it is very noticeable when it’s there.
My Japanese is still terrible, so I couldn’t understand much of what our sushi chef had to say, but he seemed to enjoy talking to our more Japanese-savvy party-member, and he seemed to enjoy cooking for us as well. I think this post is a testament to this.