Chapter 24
Sushi
My first thought on being asked to be a judge at the British round of the Global Sushi Challenge, an international competition to find the world’s best sushi chef, was about the quantity of sushi I would be able to eat during the course of the day.
I spent some time thinking about this because I really love sushi and am capable of putting away a quite frightening quantity. I do this by eating it quickly so that my digestive system is caught unawares and then lying very still for about ten hours nursing a stomach bloated like a hippo’s corpse.
My fellow judges at the British round of the competition will be from the Tokyo-based World Sushi Skills Institute (WSSI), along with Hideki Maeda, head chef of Nobu, the London restaurant where the round will be held, and Jack-Robert Møller, the UK director of the Norwegian Seafood Council which is sponsoring the competition worldwide, presumably with the intention of getting more of us to eat their farmed salmon.
I arrive at Nobu, London – this was a November morning some few months before I and my family left for Japan – having not had breakfast in preparation for the vast amounts of high-quality sushi I will put away. The competition is to take place in the restaurant’s windowless private function room. Here, two rows of workstations extend from either end of a judges’ table. Gathered restlessly outside the room like racehorses about to enter the gates are the nine contestants, all professional sushi chefs from across Britain, all wearing chefs’ whites.
Before they start, Hirotoshi Ogawa, the chief examiner of the WSSI, a short, intense-looking Japanese man wearing a white lab coat and carrying a clipboard, gives a pep talk about keeping workstations clean and tidy, and not wasting any raw ingredients.
‘The most important thing is not to cut your fingers. In every country so far, someone has cut their fingers,’ he says, adding that, according to the rules, ten points will be deducted for cuts.
One contestant raises her hand: ‘Can we use a strip of nori to tie the tamago to the rice?’ Ogawa-san crosses his index fingers in the Japanese manner.
‘Egg is the hardest to make as nigiri. If you use nori to hold it on then we can’t judge it. If you can’t do the egg nigiri without nori, then you are not a professional sushi chef!’ The contestants exchange nervous glances.
They will face three challenges: the first is to make two plates of classic Edo-mae sushi in ten minutes. Edo-mae is the sushi style we are most familiar with in the West – nigiri and maki, traditionally made with a specific range of fish caught in and around Tokyo Bay – but to make the fourteen pieces of nigiri and two cucumber rolls cut into six pieces each required, and to do it according to the WSSI’s exacting standards in such a short period of time, is going to be tough. The second ‘creative’ round requires them to make forty pieces of sushi in their own style, for which they have an hour. The third challenge will be to make a single piece of their signature nigiri ushi for the judges to taste.
As this last part is announced, there comes the awful, dawning realisation that these nine pieces are the only sushi I will get to eat during the entire day. As soon as Ogawa-san finishes his address, I take him aside.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ he explains. ‘It is not so good to eat the sushi from the other rounds. Perhaps there is a hygiene risk and so on.’
My stomach rumbles and I hastily downgrade my expectations for the day. He hands me a marking sheet with categories including ‘Visual’, ‘Hygiene’, ‘Taste’ and ‘Creativity’, and then turns away to test the sharpness of one contender’s knives. We are to keep a special eye on whether they rinse their hands in the bowl of vinegared water provided, he adds. They must do this between each and every piece they make, as it is essential for killing bacteria. In other food preparation situations, you might expect the chefs to wear disposable rubber gloves but these are firmly shunned by the sushi crowd. A sushi chef needs to be able to feel the grains of rice and handle the fish with extreme care. Following some unfortunate food poisoning incidents, New York City’s Department of Health has recently begun insisting that sushi chefs use them, which has made them a laughing stock in Tokyo: ‘Can’t make sushi with gloves!’ one of the city’s leading sushi chefs barked dismissively when I asked him about this.
The air is fragrant with the nutty aroma of cooked rice as the ten-minute challenge begins in complete silence. ‘In Japan, the chefs are perhaps not so creative, but they are much faster. There, we only give them two minutes,’ Ogawa confides. But still, ten minutes is not enough for the contestants today. It is incredibly stressful to watch them; the round has the frantic feel of a Generation Game challenge. At one point, I try to lighten the mood and make a comment to one of the contestants, Poppy Sherwood, from a restaurant called Wabi in Horsham, Sussex. Ogawa-san takes me aside: ‘No talking to the contestants during the ten-minute round!’ At the end of the round the contestants stand back from their hideous, ramshackle plates of sushi, spattered with random grains of rice and slices of fish which look like they’ve gone a few rounds with Edward Scissorhands. All but one of them fails this round completely.
While the contestants work on the second round – two plates of twenty pieces each, in their own style – I chat with the Norwegian Seafood Council guy. He is open about the fact that the competition is devised to promote Norwegian salmon. Salmon is nowhere near as ubiquitous in Japanese sushi restaurants as it is in the UK. In fact, up until the mid-nineties its use in sushi was virtually unheard of there. The Norwegians have spent about a million pounds on the Global Sushi Challenge, holding rounds like this in fourteen countries including Japan, France and the US, and the final to come in Tokyo. It is far more ambitious than any previous sushi competitions (with which the WSSI has also been involved) and Møller and others involved expressed to me their desire to see the Global Challenge become a kind of Bocuse d’Or for sushi, although Møller admits that this inaugural competition has not quite attracted the talent they’d hoped for.
‘The really good chefs don’t want to compete,’ he sighs. ‘After all, they have a lot to lose and what do they have to gain?’ The winner of the British round will get an all-expenses-paid trip to Tokyo for the final, where the overall winner gets a training session in Tokyo and a nice knife. Perhaps if they had made a little more of that million-pound budget available for prize money …
Nevertheless, competing today here in London are chefs from prominent restaurants albeit of a kind I would probably never consider dining at (the oligarch canteens, essentially) – Gordon Ramsay’s Maze Grill Park Walk, for instance, Saka No Hana and Sushi Samba – although there are also some I am not so familiar with, such as Sam Butler from Shrewsbury’s House of the Rising Sun. Sam does not fare very well in the first round. Lined up, his higgledy-piggledy maki look like the Shrewsbury skyline. He has my sympathy: that’s exactly how it looks when I make maki.
We move on to the second, ‘creative’ round. Though the tension remains high, this goes better. Competing chefs must be working at restaurants in the UK, but they don’t have to be British. There is a wide range of nationalities competing, including Polish, Brazilian, and one man of Chinese background who was born in Rome. There is even someone from Norwich.
Diana de Carvalho’s (a chef from Maze Grill Park Walk) sushi is delicate and attractive, but she uses both Philadelphia cream cheese and mango chilli sauce in her maki, which marks her down in my book. Wojciech Popow from London restaurant Yashin Sushi, meanwhile, has brought along another intriguing range of ingredients including chocolate, smoked salmon and Hibiki whisky jelly, all of which, he tells me, he is planning to incorporate into his single taster for the judges. I gulp nervously and offer an encouraging smile. Tai-Po Wong, from London’s Sushi Samba, is also pulling out all the stops. He has a smoker, foie gras, caviar and some freeze-dried crumbs. His final plate, while entertaining with its Jackson Pollock splashes of sauces, is a little too ‘busy’ for the Japanese judges.
There are further calamities: contestants are
supposed to make two plates of twenty pieces each but with ten minutes to go I notice that the guy from Saka No Hana has finished one, admittedly beautiful, plate but is packing up. I sidle up to him: ‘You do know you are supposed to make two plates, right?’ I whisper. His face drops, and he springs into action, hastily unpacking his equipment.
Unlike the ten-minute Edo-mae challenge, during the ‘creative’ round we judges are encouraged to talk to the contestants as they work, this interaction with diners, which usually takes place over the traditional counter of a sushi restaurant, being an important aspect of a sushi chef’s work. As one Japanese sushi chef later puts it to me, ‘French chefs stay in the kitchen, but a sushi chef must communicate with customers, they have to be monitoring them all the time.’
Sam tells me that he started a ramen restaurant in Shrewsbury, and now makes sushi, too – a career change which would be unthinkable in Japan where ramen chefs and sushi chefs almost never ‘cross the floor’. Sam’s special ingredient is beetroot. Though by now very hungry, I find myself hoping this is not his sample piece.
While the chefs work, I sit down with Ogawa to find out a little more about his career and the WSSI. Having worked in restaurants in Australia, he opened his own place back in Tokyo in 2003, in Chiba, on the eastern side of Tokyo Bay, but, unfortunately, aftershocks from the March 2011 tsunami destabilised the ground beneath the building and it had to be vacated. He could not face the idea of starting all over again, so instead took a job at the WSSI in 2012. His favourite sushi restaurant in all the world is Sakae Zushi in Chiba, he says, but many of the cheap, conveyor-belt places that I sheepishly confess to frequenting when I am in Tokyo are actually quite good ‘because they are chains so they can buy good quality fish in bulk’. We talk about the contestants: ‘I can tell that numbers eight and seven were trained by Japanese chefs,’ he says approvingly.
Finally, it is time to eat some sushi: the contestants present us each with a piece of sushi to showcase their creativity. Up until now, there has been a judging schism, the Japanese judges preferring a classic style, Møller and I tending to favour something a little more Western, but we all agree that the piece made by Wojciech is the best. The home-smoked salmon, chocolate and Hibiki whisky jelly combine unexpectedly well. But Popow the Pole is not going to the final in Tokyo. It is close, but a shell-shocked Xia Jia Tian from Rome, latterly of restaurant Kouzu close to Victoria Station, is the winner. As his name is called, he remains with the group of contestants literally unable to believe he has won until, eventually, we coax him forward to accept the trophy.
‘French food is about having a concept, about creativity, but the work of the sushi chef is more about skill. A French chef will always ask “Why?”, but in Japan there is no “Why?”’
It is now some months after the London round of the Global Sushi Challenge. I am in Tokyo for the final, where I will also be a judge. Ogawa-san had intrigued me, and I learned so much from him just in those few hours in Nobu, so I have arranged to meet him at his favourite sushi restaurant, the one he had mentioned in London, Sakae Zushi. We are talking about perceptions of sushi in the West, perceptions which Ogawa has dedicated his life to overturning.
‘Thanks to the documentary about Jiro [Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about Jiro Ono and his restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, directed by David Gelb], I think people in the West are beginning to realise that the simplicity of sushi hides the fact that it is very, very difficult to achieve at the highest level,’ he continues as we sit at the restaurant’s counter. ‘The sushi chef needs to know about a hundred different types of fish, each one prepared a different way according to the four seasons.’
Sakae Zushi is far out in the suburbs of Chiba, east of Tokyo on a busy residential street. From the outside it hadn’t looked especially legendary, although legendary sushi restaurants rarely do. Still, few have picture menus outside like this one.
Ogawa is already seated at the counter when I arrive and introduces me to the elderly bespectacled gentleman standing behind the granite counter. He is wearing a white, short-sleeved chef’s coat, a rolled cloth tied around his forehead. The chef is, it turns out, the real reason we are here.
This is Masayoshi Kazato, sixty-six, the chairman and founder of the World Sushi Skills Institute and its parent organisation, the All Japan Sushi Association. Ogawa tells me that Kazato is one of the most respected sushi chefs in all Japan. Though we are far from the high-rolling glitz of Ginza where many of the famous Michelin-starred sushi restaurants like Jiro Sushi are to be found, Sakae Zushi is a regular haunt of Japanese celebrities and politicians, including Prime Minister Abe, Ogawa whispers. The restaurant will be forty years old next year, but its master, Kazato-san, has been working as a sushi chef since he was seventeen.
‘It takes ten years to make a good sushi chef,’ says Kazato, as he forms the first of our dozen or so glistening dishes: a pretty landscape of precision-placed sashimi. ‘The essence of Japanese cuisine is this: the more simple, the more difficult it is to make.’
I taste my first piece of nigiri. It is a slight anticlimax. To my uneducated, Western palate the rice seems very lightly seasoned with only the faintest trace of vinegar and salt.
‘In Japanese sushi we foreground the flavour of the fish,’ says Ogawa, perhaps sensing that I am a little underwhelmed. ‘In the West you try to add extra flavours.’ It is clear this is a bad thing, and that low-seasoned rice is a more mature choice. At home, when I make the seasoning for my sushi rice I use around 80ml of rice vinegar for 500g of rice (uncooked weight). Ogawa scoffs at this. ‘No, no, no, you should be using no more than thirty millilitres for that much rice!’
Kazato founded the WSSI in 2010 but has been travelling the world expounding on good sushi-making practice – the washing of hands in vinegared water, among other things – since 1995. When Ogawa joined, the WSSI was still in its infancy and, initially, the two men paid their travel expenses out of their own pockets. ‘I used over a hundred thousand dollars of my own money, I have three children!’ says Ogawa. Now, the organisation enjoys government support and is expanding its certification. Around 500 certificates have been issued to chefs in the US, Australia and the UK – the pass rate is only 50 per cent apparently. Ogawa tells me they are currently developing a coloured belt system akin to that of karate or judo, with five colours to distinguish training levels of foreign chefs. A black belt in sushi might one day be a possibility.
The work of the World Sushi Skills Institute is not without controversy: in Japan there is anxiety about disseminating the secrets of great sushi to the outside world (although Jiro Dreams of Sushi did rather let that particular cat out of the bag). ‘Some chefs have complained: “Why do you go overseas and tell our secrets? That’s wrong! This knowledge must only be in Japan, they must come to Japan to learn,”’ says Ogawa. Meanwhile, outside Japan there is resentment at what can sometimes be seen as a superior attitude from Japanese chefs and instructors and a rather limited definition of what sushi is. ‘[Foreign chefs] are proud of their own skills, yes, but I’m not there to just critique them. When they see my skill, they realise that they can learn.’
A glistening hamaguri clam nigiri arrives, briefly distracting us with its angular, alien form (it looks like it was designed by Frank Gehry). I ask Ogawa to talk me through his apprenticeship as a sushi chef. He began by studying at the Tsuji Cooking School in Osaka,fn1 after that working at a sushiya in Tsukiji fish market. He talks me through the apprenticeship in more detail, it does not sound an especially joyous experience.
‘For the first two years they didn’t even let me touch a knife. I only did washing-up and ran errands. But you do this to study the tableware, which is very important in Japanese food. I did the cleaning which is also a learning experience: when you vacuum a room you understand the space. Towards the end of that I began to sharpen knives. During the third year I did basic things like skinning squid, and waiting on tables to understand the communication with the customers. Then I came here to Sa
kae Zushi for two and a half years where I learned making maki in the first year, and then the rest was spent on nigiri and finally the cutting of sashimi.’ Ogawa met his wife around that time but they did not live together at first. As with trainee sumo wrestlers, tradition dictated that he must live with the boss of the restaurant during his apprenticeship.
Kazato-san was listening to our conversation. ‘Once, when I was in Australia, I heard someone say that you can train to be a sushi chef in a single day!’ he adds, incredulous, briefly wafting some slices of mackerel over the grill. A sushi chef’s job is to bring forth the essential flavours of the fish, a deceptively complex skill which takes years to learn. ‘In Europe, they add taste by adding sauce but we extract the flavour from the fish itself. We don’t add anything.’
Eventually, Ogawa left Kazato’s tutelage to work in the ANA hotel in Sydney, where he stayed for five years as head chef before returning to Tokyo to open his own restaurant. ‘I tried to keep it very traditional in Sydney. There were so many fusion sushi places,’ he recalls with not a little disdain. ‘Some people think fusion sushi is more difficult but I want traditional sushi chefs to get the respect they deserve. I want more people to know about traditional techniques and styles. The fusion chefs were good, but I think you need to learn the basics of Edo-mae sushi first. Not many of them had, though.’
What is so special about Edo-mae sushi? Only members of the WSSI were permitted to judge it at the Global Sushi Challenge, for instance.
‘Technically speaking, Edo-mae sushi is sushi made only with fish caught in Tokyo Bay,’ said Ogawa.
‘Isn’t the water there awfully polluted?’ I ask.
‘Ha! Yes,’ replies Ogawa, blithely. ‘You see TVs floating in it, everything!’
I wonder how the sponsorship by Norwegian Salmon squared with this tradition. Competitors in London and in the final in Tokyo had to include salmon in their sushi, but salmon are not found in Tokyo Bay.
The Meaning of Rice Page 21