Between bites, I try to watch it all: Jiro’s hands, Yoshikazu’s deft knife strokes, the other chefs bustling efficiently around, cleaning the sushi plates, carrying out the next ingredients. Throughout the meal everyone is smooth and relaxed, like they’ve done this all a thousand times before. Yoshikazu watches me watching his father. Then it’s over. Jiro wipes eel off his hands and steps back as one of the younger chefs presents the egg. It’s a thick wedge of cooked egg, bright yellow and rich and heavy as cheese. Everybody retires to the kitchen. It has indeed been 25 minutes, though I wasn’t aware of the time passing. We are moved to some tables off to the side, to relax with more hot hand towels, toothpicks, green tea and melon. We take our time. We are still the only customers in the restaurant. We can maintain the fantasy that this has all been put on just for us. We finally get up and Yoshikazu sweeps out of the kitchen to present us with the bill. ¥30,000 each, plus tax. Tension dissipated, we finally break out some Japanese, to their surprise. Babbling a little, I tell Yoshikazu he should come to Ireland, where, although the weather’s a bit grim, the people are lovely. He says he’s heard of it, but the closest he’s been so far is Heathrow. Ryan talks to him about Spanish food. I ask him for a business card as a souvenir.
would have hoped for. Jiro directs us where to stand and tells his chef where to take the picture from, ever the perfectionist. Jiro smiles as we bow and say goodbye. Yoshikazu tells us to come again, and we all laugh at the joke. The food was terrific, as I could reasonably have expected it to be, but the biggest surprise was how friendly and down-to-earth, how gracious everyone was. I could see then why people would keep coming back, for the relaxed courteousness as well as the outrageously good food. Was it worth ¥30,000? No, but only because I personally don’t think anything as transitory as food should cost that much. However, if I add in the weeks of anticipation and the fun of telling people about it afterward, along with the knowledge that I had an outlandish dream and made it a reality, the whole experience is pretty priceless. David White is a fourth-year Irish ALT in Yamaguchi prefecture. He spends much of his time in a profound identity crisis, weathering a steady stream of questions about volcanoes, reindeer and the Aurora Borealis in his ‘native’ Iceland. Though he does appreciate the compliments about “how good” his English is. He’s been keeping a blog since he arrived in Japan at safaridave.blogspot.com
Then my heart skips a beat as he calls his dad over to come and take a picture with us outside the restaurant. It’s more than I The course menu... and the bill
CONNECT February Issue 2014
FOOD
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