The Story of Sushi (13 page)

T
hat evening at Hama Hermosa, a few people trickled in for dinner, including some friends of Toshi’s at the back bar. Fie helped Toshi serve his friends
omakase.

Fie had rolled a traditional Japanese worker’s bandana into a cord, then pulled back her shiny flaxen hair and wrapped the cord around her head and tied it. On a Japanese sushi chef, this lent a degree of machismo. On Fie, it was an unprecedented fashion statement. Standing behind the sushi bar, in her tight black T-shirt and Japanese headband, Fie radiated a whole new category of authority: she was a Westerner, she was a woman, she was beautiful, and she was a sushi chef. Toshi, a head shorter than Fie, reached up and adjusted her headband, then stood back and nodded.

Before long a pair of big Caucasian men in their fifties strode in. One was wearing a yellow baseball cap. At first they didn’t notice Fie, who stood working at the far end of the bar. They bellowed out boisterous greetings to Toshi.

“You look great, Toshi!”

“It’s good to see you!”

They ate whatever Toshi served them. Partway through their dinner, working awkwardly with chopsticks, one of them asked, “Hey, Toshi, what’s this sauce?”

Toshi glared at the men. His eyes narrowed. Finally he grunted, his voice low and threatening. “Secret…sauce.”

Then his face relaxed and opened into a huge, crinkly-eyed smile. He laughed uproariously. So did the men. But Toshi didn’t answer their question. Instead, he called Fie over and introduced her.

The men gazed at Fie, goggle-eyed. They forgot all about the sauce. They immediately purchased a giant bottle of premium sake to share with the chefs.

Everyone raised a glass.
“Kanpai!”

The men knocked back their sake and poured more.

“So,” the man with the yellow baseball cap said, leaning toward Fie, “how did
you
end up behind a sushi bar?”

Toshi sagged against the back wall of the bar and surveyed the restaurant. For twenty years, his old restaurant in Venice Beach had filled up every night with admirers. He’d been a superstar. Now his restaurant was empty. He’d been hoping business would pick up again this summer, but so far it hadn’t. Worse, the aftereffects of his stroke were still sapping his charisma. He felt exhausted after serving just a few courses of sushi.

The men raised their glasses again.
“Kanpai!”
Then they added, “To Fie!”

The man in the yellow cap rested his elbows on the bar and beamed at her, as she served them
nigiri.
He chewed slowly. “That’s good,” he said, his eyes glazing over. “It’s not Toshi. That’s Fie. I can
taste
the difference.”

They downed more sake and heaped more praise on Fie. Toshi watched from the sidelines.

“I might as well retire,” he muttered.

Fie flushed red. She pulled back from the bar. The two men apologized.

“Hey,” the man in the yellow cap said to Toshi, raising his voice, “you know how guys are with beautiful women.”

But Fie wasn’t just a pretty face. She put care into the food. Her sushi was good. Toshi nudged her back into position. She topped four
nigiri
with something red and marbled. She armed herself with Toshi’s blowtorch and seared the surface of each slice with a burst of blue flame. Toshi sagged lower against the wall and watched.

Fie applied a dab of creamy sesame dressing with wasabi to the top of each
nigiri,
then plated all four on a dark brown ceramic
platter. She was about to hand it across the fish case when Toshi hissed at her. “Fie!”

Startled, Fie turned. Toshi was scowling. He pulled her
nigiri
off the brown platter and replated them on a pair of bright white plates. Now the browned flesh stood out against the white background, and each pair of
nigiri
looked special. Fie nodded. She added pinches of chopped green onion and served the plates. The man in the yellow cap chewed, a smile spreading ear to ear. “Fie! That’s
incredible!
”

Fie allowed herself a shy smile. “It’s Kobe-style beef.”

“Beef? I thought it was tuna! Oh, that’s good.”

“You’re getting all my favorite things,” Fie said.

For their last dish, Fie served them
toro nigiri.
When they had finished, both men leaned back in their chairs. The man with the yellow cap rubbed his belly.

“That was incredible. Very, very,
very
nice.” Slowly, he nodded. “That was worthy of Toshi.”

Toshi pushed himself off the shelf. “I’m not feeling so great,” he said. “I need to head home and rest.”

The men became subdued for a moment.

“Toshi,” the yellow cap guy said, smiling again and raising his voice, “soon you’ll be back to normal!”

Toshi nodded. He hoped he was right. He slipped out through the swinging door into the kitchen. Before the door had even closed the men had turned back to Fie.

“Okay, so what nights are
you
here?”

Fie told them her schedule. The men sat for a few minutes, downing the rest of their sake. The man in the yellow cap gazed at Fie.

“God love the human race for people like you,” he said. “You’re spanning the globe.” He thought hard for a moment, then issued his final declaration of the evening.

“Life is a great big—” he paused “—pie. And you should eat it.”

O
n Monday morning, Zoran set up a sign on the sidewalk in front of Hama Hermosa: “Student Sushi Bar, 2 Nigiri $1, Rolls $3–$5.”

Hama Hermosa wasn’t normally open for lunch, but every Monday from now on, Zoran would open the restaurant’s doors at lunchtime, and the students would serve sit-down customers off the street, using the real sushi bar in the back room. Toshi insisted that students at the academy get as much experience serving customers as possible. He believed it was the best way for them to learn. Kate was excited. She hoped that serving customers again would help lift her spirits. She’d invited her mother to come.

In preparation, the students spent the morning cooking rice and loading the fish cases at the back bar with
neta.
Around noon, customers started trickling in.

Kate was nervous at first, but as soon as she started chatting with her customers she felt the same rush of enjoyment she’d felt at Paramount Pictures. She served a man who’d brought along his two sons, both about Kate’s age. Then Kate’s mother arrived. The man and his sons ordered a few items from the menu and asked Kate about the school. She explained a few things about sushi. Kate’s mother listened, intrigued. The men asked Kate to make them something special—something that wasn’t on the menu.

She made them an inside-out roll with grilled eel, avocado, cucumber, and tempura-fried shrimp. She tucked the roll in
tight, the way Zoran had showed her, and squeezed it closed. She tossed the roll in tempura crunchies. She sliced and plated it, and squeezed stripes of sweet eel sauce back and forth across the plate. She chuckled to herself. With those stripes, she should call it a zebra roll. The slices of roll held together long enough for the men to gobble them up. Kate chatted with the men some more.

Afterwards, Kate’s mother was beaming. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I think you’ll be good at sushi. You’re good at visual design.’

Kate smiled and nodded. It was like Toshi had said: “You gotta eat with your eyes.”

Unlike the catering job at Paramount, today Kate had a chance to get to know her customers. When they got up to leave, she was sad to see them go.

Kate was feeling great until Zoran made an announcement. In a few days, Toshi would be giving the students their first big test of the semester. It would be on rolls.

The day before the roll test, Zoran had a surprise for the students. He taught them how to cook fried eggs—special fried eggs for sushi. In Japanese, the dish was called
tamago yaki,
and it was a standard sushi topping. Kate was thrilled. After her popping-open rolls, her crooked
nigiri,
and her bloody fish, she was glad for something that felt familiar.

Tamago yaki
is both sweet and savory; in English, it’s usually called “sweet egg omelet.” Each student mixed ten eggs with some dashi—the kelp and bonito broth—plus some of the sweet rice liquor called mirin, along with a little sugar, soy sauce, and salt. Zoran demonstrated the tricky cooking technique. The special square pan had to be hot, but not so hot that it would brown the egg. He poured a thin layer of the egg mixture into the pan and folded the layer into a rectangular omelet. Then he poured in another thin layer of egg and lifted the first layer so the new egg would flow under it. He flipped that several times, wrapping the egg around the rectangle and building on it. He repeated the procedure over and over. As the rectangle of egg grew in size, the flips Zoran executed became more difficult and dramatic.

The skills required to fry
tamago yaki
call for long practice, so they were traditionally considered a barometer of the chef’s general mastery. When trying out a new sushi shop, a customer would order a
nigiri
topped with sweet egg omelet. If he didn’t find it up to par, it was considered acceptable for him to leave without ordering anything else. Today, most sushi restaurants buy pre-made
tamago yaki.

When Zoran finished, he had created a solid block of thin compressed layers of egg. He sliced a small rectangle off the end. It was four fingers long and two fingers wide, perfect for the top of a
nigiri.

Kate spent the rest of the class in the kitchen. Frying eggs was fun, and she was pretty good at it. None of her efforts produced a perfect block of egg, but she came close.

As the day of the test approached, one of the other two women in the class dropped out—the Japanese-American girl. Her sushi had been better than Kate’s, but she’d become discouraged and quit.

Kate had come a long way since the first two weeks of school, when every day she’d contemplated quitting. She had stuck with it. She’d been eating better, too. She’d gained 10 pounds.

But she couldn’t shake the feeling that her classmates still saw her as a flake, and judging by some of the sushi she’d been making, she was worried they might be right. She didn’t feel ready for the test.

On the morning of the test, Zoran scribbled on the whiteboard, jotting down a list of rolls. The students would make two American-style inside-out rolls: one California roll, one spicy tuna roll. In addition, they would make two Japanese-style thin rolls: one cucumber, one tuna.

“Ohaiy
!”
Toshi strode into the classroom wearing his chef jacket, shorts, and a pair of oversized basketball sneakers. There was a bounce in his step. Seeing his students gave him energy.

The students rushed to their stations. Toshi read off the list of rolls on the whiteboard, then turned to the students.

“Before we start, the most important thing—let’s make a nice square.” It wasn’t clear what he meant. He glared down the table.
“This is very important!” He paused. “Six minutes, all rolls! If under six minutes, plus three points. If over seven minutes, minus five points. Six to seven minutes, no change. And after you finish I want to see whether your station is dirty or clean. So make sure it’s all under control now.”

The students scrambled to pick up stray bits of food from the floor. They washed their hands again. Toshi issued final instructions.

“When you finish, place everything on your cutting board. Clean. Then move back.” He paused again and shouted.
“Clean!”

Zoran stood at Toshi’s side, gripping a digital track-and-field stopwatch. Toshi’s eyes narrowed. “Ready?”

In unison, the students bellowed their response.
“Hai!”

“Go!”

Zoran clicked on the stopwatch. The students threw open the lids of the metal nori boxes. Their fingers flew into the dishes of water. They clapped the excess water off their hands and reached into their canisters for rice. After thirty seconds of silence, Toshi turned to Zoran and chuckled.

“Ooh, everyone’s so serious now.”

The numbers on the stopwatch flew by. The students were still on their first roll. Zoran looked at the time.

“Two minutes thirty!” he yelled.

Kate squeezed closed her first roll. By three minutes she had started on her second. She had wanted to impress Toshi, but she was way behind. But so was everyone else.

“Four minutes!”

No one had completed the second roll. Toshi scowled. He turned to the whiteboard and erased the “6” from “6 minutes” and scrawled in an “8.”

“Six minutes!” Zoran called. No one had even begun a third roll.

“I changed it to eight minutes,” Toshi announced. “C’mon, let’s
go
!”

The students were frantic now. Kate was one of the first to complete the third roll. One more to go.

“Eight minutes!”

The students kept working. Kate and Takumi started slicing. Then Marcos began to slice. One of the other students straggled
far behind. At nine minutes, he was still pressing rice onto nori for his third roll.

“
Ten
minutes!”

Kate started plating her slices. As did Takumi.

Finally, at twelve minutes—double the original time limit—Kate finished. She was in first place!

She arranged her tray of sushi on her cutting board and stepped back from the table. One by one the others pulled in behind her. The last student to finish clocked in at 15:50. Zoran clicked off the stopwatch.

Toshi sighed. He strode around the table carrying a clipboard with scoring sheets. He examined each student’s sushi, checked the floor, then scribbled on the clipboard. Kate’s inside-out rolls looked good. But her slices of cucumber roll were popping open. Toshi returned to the head of the table, his expression severe.

“Every single roll should be two minutes,
max
,” he growled. “That’s your target. Even two minutes is too long. It’s
easy
—thirty seconds.”

The students stared at their cutting boards.

“We’ve got to be more serious,” Toshi said. He glanced around at the trays. His eyes passed over Kate’s tray. “Some of your rolls are exploding!”

Toshi demonstrated a cucumber roll. With two quick squeezes he created a boxy shaft, long and narrow with right angles. It wasn’t a roll at all, it was a block. It seemed as if his hands had hardly moved.

“Square!” he yelled. He sliced the roll and turned the slices on end. The nori framed a perfect white square of rice, and the block of green cucumber sat smack in the middle. “Centered!” he yelled. Toshi looked up at the students, then he raised his voice to a shout. “Just
make
it!”

He paused to let his words sink in, then changed the subject.

“Next Friday,” he said, “test on special roll. Everyone come up with a nice signature roll. Something special. Think about it.”

After class Kate ran into Jay. He knew she was struggling.

“How’d you do today?” he asked.

“Good!” Kate said. Then her face fell. “My
kappa
broke.”

Jay smiled. “Keep practicing.”