Garlic and Sapphires (11 page)

The sushi chef was an older man, and when he looked up and saw the fashion plate, his lined round face was illuminated with fierce joy. He bowed very deeply and intoned,
“Hajimemashite.”

The woman bowed back, but much less deeply.
“Genki-Desu,”
she said, tucking herself into a seat directly in front of the chef and carefully arranging her legs.

An older woman in a kimono appeared from behind a curtain and bowed to the new customer. Then she noticed me standing in the doorway, and said discouragingly, “Only sushi.”

“That will be fine,” I replied.

“No tempura. No noodles. Only sushi,” she reiterated in a voice that held no invitation.

“Only sushi,” I agreed. “Fine.” She led me to the far end of the bar, the one that was not occupied. “Only sushi,” she said again, warningly.

“May I have tea?” I asked, giving a sidelong glance to the chic woman, who was now engaged in what seemed like polite Japanese chitchat with the old man.

He had laid a long bamboo leaf in front of her and was grating a pale green wasabi root against a traditional sharkskin grater. Seeing this, I suddenly understood that this was going to be an expensive meal; ordinary sushi bars do not use fresh wasabi.

It took me a while to convince the waitress that I wanted whatever the chic woman was having. It took me even longer to persuade her that I could afford it. “Very expensive,” she said, shaking her head. I said that would be fine. She shook her head and went down the counter to convey my wishes to the chef, who turned to give me a long appraising stare.

He ambled down the bar toward me, smiled, and stared frankly into my face. Then he asked, “You have eaten sushi before?”

I told him that I had, and struggled to say something that would reassure him. I knew that he was worried that when the bill came I would not be able to pay it, that he was embarrassed to tell me that when he said “expensive” he meant that my lunch was likely to cost more than a hundred dollars. What could I say to him? I tried this: “I have spent time in Japan.”

This did not seem to reassure him. I tried again. I bowed and said, “
Omakase,
I am in your hands.”

A broad smile moved across his face. I had found the code. He spread the bamboo leaf in front of me and, leaning forward, said softly, “Sashimi first?”

“Of course,” I said, and he began grating the wasabi. Patting it into a pale green pyramid, he placed it precisely on the leaf, added pickled ginger, and retreated to the center of the counter to survey his fish.

From a drawer beneath the counter he extracted a wrapped rectangle and began peeling off the plastic to reveal a pale pink slab of tuna belly. As his knife moved unerringly through the flesh, the waitress glided up to me. “Notice,” she said, “that Mr. Uezu does not cut toro as other chefs do. He cuts only
with
the grain of the fish, never across it.” I scrutinized the squares of fish the chef placed on the leaf. They were the pale pink of pencil erasers, with no telltale traces of white sinew snaking through them. When I put the first slice on my tongue it was light, with the texture of whipped cream. It was in my mouth—and then it had simply vanished, faded away leaving nothing but the sweet richness of the fish behind. “Oooh,” I found myself moaning, and the waitress allowed herself a tight little smile.

The chic woman said something to the sushi chef, and he grinned and said
“Hai,”
as he bent to take something from the glass case before him. It was a small silvery fish, only a few inches long, that I had never seen before. He filleted it quickly, pulled the shining skin back in one quick zipping motion, and chopped the fish into little slivers that he scooped into two hollowed-out lemons. He placed one lemon before her, along with a little dish of chopped ginger and scallions, and then he came to my end of the bar and did the same.

“Sayori,”
he said.

“No wasabi,” said a voice in my ear. The waitress had glided up so silently that I had not heard her. She pointed to the soy sauce. “Sayori is very delicate and Mr. Uezu does not want you to eat wasabi with this fish.”

I picked up a cool sliver, dipped it into the ginger mixture, and placed it in my mouth. It was smooth and slick against my tongue, with a clear, transparent flavor and the taut crispness of a tart green apple.

“Oh,” I murmured in surprise, and again the waitress gave a tight little smile.

“You have not had this before,” she said. “Mr. Uezu has secret ways of obtaining fish that no one else can get.” I had a fleeting vision of the small, sweet-faced man rampaging through the Fulton Fish Market with a snub-nosed pistol.

“No,” I agreed, “I have not had this before.” As I said it a look of horror, quickly replaced by a less potent look of mere disapproval, flashed across her face. Following her glance I saw the man in Birkenstocks plunk his sushi rice-side-down into the soy sauce, and as he put it in his mouth we could both see that the rice had turned a deep brown. The waitress made a quick, sharp intake of breath and turned away.

Mr. Uezu was in front of the fashion plate now, prying a tiny abalone out of its thick shell and slicing it so thinly you could practically see light through the slices. He was creating a little still life, his knife slashing through the long neck of a geoduck clam until he had created little stars snuggling next to the abalone. Now he laid a bright red Japanese Aogi clam beside it, and next to that two tiny octopuses the size of marbles. Finally an assistant handed him a pair of minuscule crabs, no larger than my thumbnail, on a little square of white paper; he placed them on the plate. The woman became more animated, smiling and bowing in a way that let me know that something he had given her was really out of the ordinary. I wondered if he would deign to repeat the still life for me.

He did. The abalone was like no creature I've ever eaten, hard and smooth, more like some exotic mushroom than something from the ocean, with a slightly musky flavor that made me think of ferns. Beside it the geoduck was pure ocean—crisp and briny and incredibly clean—so that what I thought of was the deep turquoise waters of the Caribbean. Next to the pure austerity of these two, the Japanese clam seemed lush and almost baroque in its sensuality.

Mr. Uezu pointed to the miniature crabs. “
Sawagani,
” he said. “One bite, one bite. Whole thing.”

I picked up one of the crabs with the tips of my chopsticks. They had been deep-fried, and they crunched and crackled in my mouth like some extraordinary popcorn of the sea. When the noise stopped, my mouth was filled with the faint sweet richness of crabmeat, lingering like some fabulously sensual echo.

“More?” asked Mr. Uezu. And I suddenly realized that no matter what the beautiful woman might be eating, I did not want more, that I wanted to keep these tastes in my mouth, to savor them as the day wore on. And so I shook my head no, I was finished. “One handroll?” he asked. How could I resist?

He filled a crisp sheet of nori with warm rice and spread it with ume boshi, the plum paste that is actually made from wild apricots. Then he covered that with little sticks of yama imo, the odd, sticky vegetable the Japanese call “mountain yam.” It tastes as if a potato had been crossed with Cream of Wheat—changing, in an instant, from crisp to gooey in your mouth. The chef added a julienne of shiso leaf, wrapped it all up, and handed it across the counter.

It was an extraordinary sensation, the brittle snap of the seaweed wrapper giving way to the easy warmth of the rice and then the crunch of the yama imo, which almost instantly turned into something smooth and sexy. Meanwhile the flavors were doing somersaults in my mouth: the salt of the plum, the sharp of the vinegar, and the feral flavor of the herb.

“Umami,”
the waitress whispered in my ear. Again she had glided silently up.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Umami,”
she said again. “It is the Japanese taste that cannot be described. It is when something is exactly right for the moment. Mr. Uezu,” she continued proudly, “knows
umami.
”

Paying the bill, I held the tastes in my mouth, along with the knowledge that this was, absolutely, the place to bring Claudia.