by Unknown
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with a superb terraced apartment, two children in university, and an unshakable belief in the ideals of the revolution. When I spoke of Cuba’s shortcomings, including racism in the restaurant industry, she shook her head in denial and told me, “You should not look for the spots of the sun but the light that it gives.”
By the last days of my trip, I was surviving on little more than pizza, a bad sign. I had not become one with the restaurants of the country. I sought out the Marina Hemingway’s La Cova Pizza Nova, which proudly declares itself “the People Pleasing Pizza Since 1963.” I hung out at my hotel’s air-conditioned pizza shop, ordering pepperoni pies with Coke, a regression to childhood tastes.
I could no longer take the endless heat or the relentless red snapper. One day, shortly after noon, I was standing on a corner in Vedado, an upscale residential district of Havana, wondering where I could possibly go for lunch, when I received a sign. It was not a spiritual or a meta-physical sign. It was a real sign. I was standing in the shade of a banyan tree when an old man stepped in front of me and hammered a sign into the trunk of the tree. It read pizza, and it had an arrow pointing up the block.
Sure enough, two houses away I found another sign, this one reading pizza exquisita. In the driveway was a tiny stand offering homemade pizza for six pesos, or thirty cents. The establishment seated one, on a broken-backed rusted iron chair, and the pizza looked like one of those individual-size pan pies sold in American airports.
They aren’t so good. This one was worse. The red sauce was bitter, and I don’t believe the cheese was really cheese. I nodded my thanks to the proprietor and explained that I would be on my way, eating my pizza as I strolled. As soon as I rounded the corner, I tossed it in a pile of uncollected garbage. I understood then what I should have much earlier, that there would be no hope for the cuisine of Cuba as long as a desperate need for money was the only reason why people cooked.
GQ, december 1999
T O R O ! T O R O ! T O R O !
I do not often go to the mountaintop, seeking the way. I’m not that spiritual, or that fond of exercise. But after spending several harrowing days in Los Angeles, the land of dancing sushi chefs and “oy vey salmon sushi,” I found myself soliciting the soothing company of masters, men who can find meaning in a single grain of rice.
Phillip Yi, vice president of the California Sushi Academy in Venice—
where some rogue meat-eater had spraypainted fuck sushi on the front door—spoke to me of a venerated chef in Japan who molds his sushi so exquisitely that the number of grains of rice in each piece never varies by more than three or four.
Nobu Kusuhara, chef-owner of Sushi Sasabune in West L.A., talked about his Edo style of sushi, the serving of cool fish on warm balls of loose rice. He said the Edo style was almost forgotten, but Japanese customers in their eighties remembered it from when they were children in Tokyo.
In southern California, a visitor can learn much that is right about sushi and experience almost everything that is wrong.
I am by no means a sushi ignoramus, even though I come from Euro-centric New York, not Pan-Asian Los Angeles. I know not to turn my little dish of soy (almost always lite soy in L.A.) into an off-brown sludge by stirring in gobs of wasabi (Japanese horseradish). I know to dip a little corner of the fish, but not the rice, into the soy if I wish to accent the flavor. I know it is permissible to use your fingers to eat 1 2 6
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sushi but never sashimi, which is unadorned raw fish. I know it is acceptable to order tuna and cucumber rolls, which are eaten in Japan, but no others. While I was in California, the words California roll never passed my lips.
Still, I was experiencing difficulties grasping all the complexities of sushi, even at Kusuhara’s sensible Sushi Sasabune. Captivating as I found the establishment, his undisciplined little balls of rice were falling apart in my hand before I could get around to a second bite.
Contrary to custom, I do not eat my sushi in one bite. I take two, or sometimes, in a demonstration of Occidental defiance, three. Kusuhara slowly shook his head and pronounced my sushi eating unacceptable.
“When you put the sushi in your mouth,” he said, “you must close your eyes and feel the warm rice fall away, and then you bite into the fish.” He said my style of eating was creating tension in my mind. “When you have two bites, your mind is not concentrating on tasting the fish.
You are worrying about messing up the table.” I nodded, bowed imperceptibly, and backed away.
To most of us, sushi is raw fish painted with wasabi and served on vinegared rice. In L.A., it can be anything. The proliferation of sushi restaurants in southern California began in the early 1980s, about the time the television miniseries Shogun glamorized feudal Japanese society. That was also the beginning of an era of Japanese hegemony over Hollywood, when the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company took over MCA and Sony grabbed Columbia.
Today, sushi is as intrinsic to the Los Angeles cultural scene as mud slides and SUVs. Sushi chefs and sushi sections are so much a part of supermarket shopping that a friend told me, “I was in a check-out line the other day, and a little boy sitting in the seat of a shopping cart in front of me—he was maybe three or four—started crying because his mother wouldn’t open the sushi container for him.” Buffet tables at wedding receptions feature sushi. Children enrolled in the better private schools are offered sushi as a lunch selection—
the designation on the menu cards that their parents fill out is “SU.” F O R K I T O V E R
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Sushi is eaten at business dinners because it is perceived to be a food of the elite, or at least of people with expense accounts, which in L.A.
is the same thing. The California Sushi Academy has started training women to be sushi chefs, the equivalent of allowing women into the Catholic priesthood.
“The reason women never made sushi,” explained Yi, “is that women wore perfumes and lotions that transferred onto the raw fish. Also, it was always said that women had slightly higher body temperatures and they would start cooking the fish with their hands. But mostly it was a male-dominated industry and they didn’t want to let women in.” In L.A., and to a certain extent in New York, sushi made with toro, cut from the fatty belly of the bluefin tuna, has become the new beluga caviar. It is sold for as much as ten dollars a bite in L.A., sometimes three times that in Japan. At the tide-pool end of the edible-seafood aquarium are the implausible sushi rolls created to please customers who don’t really like raw fish but understand that they must eat sushi to remain stylish. A friend of mine who writes for television, Roger Director, admitted to me that he still orders spicy tuna rolls, even though he’s the only one in the business who still does. He said, “I started getting them three years ago, thinking they were the cosmic answer to my sushi conundrum, but they’ve worn out their welcome, and now I don’t know what to do.”
In the movie The Fly, Jeff Goldblum lures Geena Davis down an eerie alley to his laboratory, and to calm her apprehension he says, “It’s cleaner on the inside.” He could have been talking about the sushi restaurant R-23. I parked my car on a forlorn street in the old warehouse district of downtown Los Angeles and walked along some abandoned railroad tracks, searching for the spot that has become the most awesome sushi restaurant in all of L.A., at least for the week I was there. Across from the practically unmarked entrance—I suppose everybody that R-23
wants for a customer already knows the location—was a chain-linked fence topped with concertina wire. Nothing like flying three thousand miles to California just to find yourself in the South Bronx.
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In addition to the bracing locale, R-23 is beloved for its cardboard chairs. Indeed, I soon found myself seated on an object that had much in common with a grocery-store carton, although it had a chair-like appearance and was not uncomfortable. My table, constructed of par-ticleboard, was enhanced with a c
onventional white tablecloth. I thought nothing could be more depressing than the neighborhood I had just walked through until I noticed the artwork on the walls, mostly women in pain. I was seated directly under a painting of an elderly woman wearing a wedding ring, wrapped in a scarf, weeping in mourning. Kind of made me want to order fugu sashimi with the poisonous parts intact.
Our waitress had a thick Asian accent and insisted on speaking in a whisper, even though the noise level of the restaurant was incredible. I understood nothing she said until she raised her voice to push a special of pine-tree mushrooms. When I refused twice, she grew surly and service declined from unintelligible to intolerable.
The sushi was beautifully presented on a long, heavy faux-marble slab carried to the table by an extremely fit employee who must have been hired for his Olympian slab-lifting abilities. The fish was fresh and the rice so delicious that I decided to order a bowl of it. What came to the table, after a long wait, was a bowl of white rice overcooked to the consistency of gruel. Most of the other cooked food was similarly grim.
After the perils of R-23, the mundane strip-mall ambiance of Hamasaku, which is owned by legendary power-broker and sushi-eater Mike Ovitz, head of Artists Management Group, was welcome indeed. Almost all sushi restaurants are located in strip malls, which is not a remarkable observation, since almost all of L.A. is located in strip malls. The more minor the mall, the more grandiose the name, and Hamasaku is in the Santa Monica Plaza, a tiny oasis with byzantine parking rules—ten-minute, thirty-minute, and forty-five-minute spaces. Lucky me: I got one of the forty-five-minute spots.
I ordered marinated albacore tuna with “Hisao’s special dressing.” It turned out to be oversized chunks of tuna, some of them three inches long, awash in a sauce much like the creamy stuff served with F O R K I T O V E R
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pickled herring at Jewish delicatessens. Ragged slices of tasteless halibut came with a lip-puckeringly acidic ponzu sauce. Finally, I tried the sushi, made with fish that Arthur Treacher would disdain to fry. I had no difficulty leaving well within my allotted parking time.
Although sushi isn’t always thrilling, the vast majority of it that isn’t prepackaged is perfectly good. (Most plastic-encased takeout sushi is ruined by intolerable rice.) So far, much of the sushi I’d eaten in L.A.
wasn’t even up to New York standards. I moved on to the Hump, yet another fashionable spot. This one is owned by Brian Vidor, son of director Charles Vidor, and is located at the tiny, retro-feeling Santa Monica Airport. The Hump, with its fireplace, orchids, and bamboo plants, is perhaps the most attractive sushi restaurant in L.A. Nobody appears to care that the Hump—a World War II term for the Himalayas—refers to the struggle against the Japanese.
A few slices of red snapper sashimi were vibrant, and the toro was properly rich and fatty (if somewhat mushy), but the rest of the fish was uninteresting. The three of us didn’t eat much, but the bill, including tax, tip, and a bottle of flabby Hawley viognier with perhaps the most bitter finish ever found in a California white wine, came to $289.
I wasn’t the least bit full, so I thought this was the perfect night to make a few unscheduled sushi stops.
I peeked into the Marina del Rey branch of Tokyo Delve’s, acclaimed for a staff that supposedly breaks into spontaneous dance. As I walked in, “YMCA” by the Village People was playing, but the sushi chefs were doing nothing more interesting than making sushi. I left feeling cheated, like a tourist who visits Buckingham Palace and misses the changing of the guard.
Then I went to Crazy Fish, located on the outskirts of Beverly Hills and reputed to have lines out the door most of the day. Among the more than thirty kinds of sushi rolls offered, there is the Crazy Fish roll, which I could not resist. It was essentially several varieties of second-rate fish sticking out of some rice. Crazy Fish is the establishment offering the oy vey (Yiddish for “Oh, no! or “Oh, my!”) salmon sushi, and it also features the Jewish roll of salmon and cream cheese. These 1 3 0
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appear to be transparent marketing ploys designed to lure unwary customers from the Harkham Hillel Hebrew Academy across the street.
The next day, I drove to Studio City to observe the wonders of Sushi on Tap, but I arrived to find it renamed Sushi Yasuke and the staff no longer willing to tap dance. It was practically empty, and when I suggested to the blond Japanese hostess that business must have been better before the music died, she giggled and replied, “Oh, yes, but we are really tired of tap dancing.”
I had one more stylish restaurant to try: the environmentally correct Sushi Roku in Hollywood, which has a statement of guiding principles printed on the first page of its menu: “In our attempt to save the earth and its environment, Sushi Roku has been built with environment-friendly products and recycles in every way possible.” The restaurant was done up in earth tones—no ozone-depleting pastels here. The menu was written in a style that recalls fifties restaurants specializing in Continental cuisine: Hot Appetizers From The Sea, Appetizers From The Garden (including one of my favorite farm-fresh garden appetizers, tofu), Cold Appetizers From The Sea, and so on.
I ordered the twenty-three-dollar Executive Bento Box, even though no Hollywood executive who wanted to preserve his reputation would ever order a box lunch. (Perhaps a better name, reflecting its bargain price, would be the Mailroom Bento Box.) Everything I tasted was bright, colorful, and decidedly on the sweet side. Virtually all the customers were Caucasian, the males wearing white T-shirts under unbuttoned dress shirts with the tails hanging out. If people are going to dress like that in restaurants, is Earth really worth saving? Next to me, a young couple appeared to be on a first date; he seemed calm from the waist up, but his feet twitched uncontrollably throughout the meal, vibrating with nervousness. At the end of lunch, he said to her, “You have an expense account or anything?”
At Matsuhisa in Beverly Hills, friends and I were seated at a plain wooden table adjoining a similar table occupied by gentlemen with tattoos, nose rings, and T-shirts. How fortunate I was to be dining alongside Korn.
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Matsuhisa is the original American restaurant of Nobu Matsuhisa, the genius who invented Japanese-Peruvian-Californian crossbred cuisine. I seldom deviate from his signature items, even though they haven’t changed much in a decade or so, because I’m always eating with friends who haven’t been there, and I want them to taste everything I love. We had lobster ceviche, yellowtail dotted with a sliver of jalapeño, “new-style” sashimi (slightly seared, in a light sauce of lime and soy, and not so new after all these years), halibut sashimi with a dab of red-chile paste, and Matsuhisa’s ubiquitous and unforgettable black cod marinated in miso.
I returned by myself at 1:30 p.m. on a midweek afternoon, wanting to try the sushi bar, naïvely figuring I’d have no trouble getting a spot at such a late hour. After waiting thirty-five minutes crushed into a miniature waiting area, I finally was shown to a tiny seat. Where comfort is concerned, I could just as well have been dining in a subway during rush hour. The sushi, as I expected, was impeccable, but Matsuhisa has so many thrilling dishes, I don’t recommend wasting your appetite on sushi. This is the one sushi restaurant where fish on rice seems an afterthought.
The establishment where sushi has risen to a place of glory and honor is Sushi Nozawa in the otherwise undiscovered Eureka Plaza in Studio City. Here you find Kazunori Nozawa, the so-called Sushi Nazi. He is known by no other name. He is the Sushi Nazi as surely as John Wayne is the Duke.
I have grown weary of “Nazi” as a culinary descriptor. It all started with the Seinfeld Soup Nazi, and these days any restaurant proprietor who fails to fawn over his customers becomes the Nazi designee of his cuisine. There are probably still a few genuine old Nazis out there, maybe hiding in Paraguay, and though I do not wish them well, I sympathize if they are offended by all of this.
Sushi Nozawa resembles a modern European sandwich shop. The on
ly decorative touches are brightly painted red poles and a neon-rimmed fish picture behind the sushi counter, where Nozawa stands. I walked in just after 8 p.m. He glared at me and said, “Table or sushi 1 3 2
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counter?” I replied, “Sushi counter.” He nodded in the direction of a sign that said trust me. In sushi-counter vernacular, that meant I could eat only what he wanted me to eat, not what I might prefer.
Smiling ingratiatingly, I cleverly remarked, “You look trustworthy to me.”
He stiffened at the unwelcome familiarity. I meekly took my assigned seat. The unique melding of sushi and sadomasochism had begun.
According to conventional wisdom, the sushi here is the best in L.A.
Based on one visit, I’d put it in the ordinary-to-pretty-good range. The sushi rice was bland and served at varying temperatures, from cold to slightly warm. The albacore sushi came doused with a vinegary sauce.
The crab in a hand roll was too salty. I liked the briny oysters and some wonderfully smooth sea urchin roe.
Throughout the meal, which was served very quickly, Nozawa stood unsmiling. To me he seemed a semitragic figure, a samurai sushi chef reduced to serving the peasantry. Because he does not take reservations, he has no way of keeping out people who are likely to annoy him.
Most of his customers were badly dressed Caucasians, although two Asian women were the dates of badly dressed Caucasians.
The fellow sitting next to me at the sushi bar was wearing a black fuzzy sweatshirt, a black knit watch cap, and a bandage on his face. He ate the fish off the sushi, leaving the rice. He gulped water from a bottle. He soaked everything he ate with soy, leaving the counter a mess of rice, soy, and wasabi. Nozawa has a reputation for throwing out customers, but he didn’t toss this guy. Throughout my meal, I was hoping he would.
Kusuhara, the chef-owner of Sushi Sasabune, worked with Nozawa at various times, and their styles are similar. If anything, his restaurant is less grand than Nozawa’s. Outside, it has the appearance of two buildings cobbled together, one a stucco Mexican joint and the other an early California bungalow. Inside, the chairs are uncomfortable and the tables are the sort rolled out in function halls for special events. He has trust me imprinted on the shirts of his waiters.