Takumi caught Jay’s eye and ambled over to say hello. They chatted quietly across the bar, Takumi speaking slowly in his broken English. Takumi pointed at the empty space in front of Jay.
“You don’t want to eat?” he asked.
Jay chuckled. “I’ve eaten too much sushi lately.” He sighed. “I keep thinking about that fantastic bolognese sauce you made.”
Takumi’s eyebrows shot up. The previous week he’d cooked spaghetti for the staff. Jay had been raving about it ever since. Now Jay drew an imaginary fence around his seat at the bar, marking it off from the rest of the restaurant. “Italian section!” he laughed.
Takumi laughed, too, as he headed to the kitchen.
Zoran was handing his customers a pair of rectangular plates, each with three small bowls indented in the surface. Each bowl contained a small pyramid of something mysterious. Zoran proudly described the contents to the couple; squid marinated in rice vinegar and sesame oil, seaweed sprouts marinated the same way and sprinkled with sesame seeds, and strips of scallop and tiny rice noodles marinated in sweetened sake. The seaweed sprouts were the “green stuff.”
They were delighted. “Hey,” the man said, “let’s have a round of drinks for the chefs!”
The hostess fetched the biggest bottle of beer she could find and added it to their tab.
“Thank you!” Zoran smiled and bowed. Zoran’s customers knew he didn’t drink, but buying beer for the chefs was still the proper thing to do. “I’ll be right back,” Zoran shouted, “with some Diet Coke!”
Takumi had vanished, so the only person for whom the hostess could pour beer was Fie. Zoran returned with his Diet Coke. They all clinked glasses across the fish case and bellowed out a toast in Japanese.
“Kanpai!”
Fie pretended to sip her beer. Later she would pour it down the sink. Zoran went right back to work.
Takumi slipped back into the bar from the kitchen. He snuck over to Jay, reached across the fish case, and placed a tall shot glass in front of him. It contained half a dozen olives on a skewer. Takumi glanced around, like a spy, then tipped his upper body in a quick bow.
“First course,” he said. He disappeared back into the kitchen.
Takumi’s full name, Takumi Nishio, meant nothing to Americans. Takumi liked it that way. Unlike in Japan, here he could putter in the classroom at Hama Hermosa, or back in the kitchen, and no one except the Japanese chefs had any idea who he was.
There had been an awkward moment when one of the Japanese chefs had taken him out to a Japanese hostess club in Torrance. Toyota and Honda both had their American headquarters in Torrance, and it was full of Japanese people. At the hostess club that night somebody had recognized him. He’d taken it graciously.
None of Takumi’s classmates at the academy had a clue that he’d been a rock star. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the go-go years of Japan’s economic bubble, Takumi had been a member of a Japanese boy band called CHA-CHA. They had released five albums and ten singles. On stage they were known for their choreographed dance routines and their humorous banter. Takumi had traveled all over Japan, singing, dancing, and joking on stage for crowds of fans.
At the height of his career Takumi had married Tomomi Nishimura—more popularly known by her stage name Tororin—one of Japan’s biggest female pop idols during the bubble years. As many pop stars do in Japan, Takumi and his wife had transitioned out of their singing careers and become popular television personalities. They appeared frequently on quiz and talk shows. In 2002, they were named Japan’s “Ideal Couple of the Year.”
But Takumi had grown weary of celebrity, and he’d discovered that his true passion was cooking. His wife had continued her television work, but Takumi had withdrawn from show business into the kitchen.
First he’d dedicated himself to Italian cuisine. When he’d mastered making pasta by hand, he tested salt-to-water ratios from 0.5 percent to 2 percent for cooking it, and settled on 1.34 percent. He and a friend, a famous folk singer, opened a little Italian restaurant called Monpetquoi in the trendy Shibuya district of Tokyo. Takumi installed himself as the head chef. Off the stage and in the kitchen, out of sight, Takumi would be judged solely on the quality of his food.
But it didn’t turn out that way. People came to the restaurant and ate his handmade pasta, but they were really there just to get his autograph. Restaurant critics made fun of him—how could a Japanese pop star be taken seriously as an Italian chef? In the fall of 2004, the restaurant shut down.
The experience left Takumi feeling that people in Japan were closed-minded. He saw how Westerners had welcomed sushi, embracing Japanese food and altering it at the same time. He liked that. He didn’t think most Japanese appreciated the global reach of their traditions.
If his fellow Japanese weren’t going to take him seriously at home, he would go out and explore the larger world. Now, at the age of 38, he puttered happily in solitude in the kitchen at Hama Hermosa, sautéing garlic chips in olive oil for Jay.
Out at the sushi bar, on display, Zoran continued his performance. He prepared an octopus ceviche—a South American style of raw seafood—and delivered it across the fish case with a flourish, much to his customers’ delight. Next Zoran wowed them with something he called “herb toro.”
Jay chuckled. Even at their best, sushi chefs weren’t above serving old fish. “Herb toro” was fatty tuna that had been left in the walk-in refrigerator too long. It had changed color, from pink to gray, and could no longer be served raw. Marinating it with onion and herbs, tossing it in a sauté pan, and drizzling it with miso dressing had camouflaged its age. Zoran had served it with an additional dose of charm, and the couple loved it.
Takumi reappeared. He snuck over and placed a small bowl in front of Jay on the sushi bar, omakase-style. Its contents were arranged in an elegant pyramid—a little Mount Fuji, just as Toshi had instructed that morning. But it wasn’t Japanese food. The bowl contained five mushroom ravioli, sprinkled with fried garlic chips and drizzled with olive oil. Jay waved the aromatic steam toward his nose.
Zoran sliced fish with samurai bravado. His hands flew around a wide dish of black lacquer with red and gold inlay. Slices of sashimi fell into place. Some slices became a staircase, others a fan, and still others petals in a flower.
Zoran handed the dish of sashimi across the bar. The couple was awestruck. “Wow.”
Takumi emerged from the kitchen a third time, holding something below the level of the sushi bar.
“Main course,” Takumi whispered to Jay.
It was another little Mount Fuji. Jay gazed down and inhaled deeply through his nose. Takumi had sautéed cubes of beef with fresh rosemary and more fried garlic. Jay tucked a morsel in his mouth. He closed his eyes and moaned. Takumi smiled and slipped back into the kitchen.
It was past ten o’clock when Zoran’s couple finally left. Zoran flew into a frenzy of cleaning. He stowed ingredients and sauces, returned trays of neta to the walk-in, and scrubbed countertops. He still had to prepare the following day’s lesson. He got to bed after 1:00 a.m. His alarm clock would go off at 4:30 a.m., for his weekly trip to the fish markets.
16
FRUITS OF THE SEA
A little before 5:00 a.m. the fax machine spit out the day’s price lists from the area fish markets. Zoran snatched it up and glanced down the rows of data—bluefin tuna from Spain, Croatia, and Australia; bigeye from Hawaii and Fiji; yellowfin from Florida and Vietnam; and nearly a hundred other items.
He burst out the back door clutching two bags of trash, which he tossed in the dumpster on his way to the old van. He fired up the engine, breaking the silence in the dark alley. Soon he was cruising down a deserted boulevard. Twenty minutes later the sky was brightening. Zoran removed one hand from the steering wheel and placed a call on his cellphone.
“Ohaiy gozaimasu!” he yelled into the phone.
He pulled up to an apartment complex to pick up Tetsuya Tsumoto, the head chef at Hama Hermo
sa. Tetsu padded outside, moving like a sleepy bear. He was a stocky man with puffy eyes and droopy cheeks. He was wearing a jacket even though the morning was already warm. Tetsu had come to the United States as a language student thirteen years ago and worked for Toshi as a busboy. Toshi had turned him into a first-rate sushi chef.
Zoran gunned the van and headed for the Santa Monica freeway. Tetsu’s chin dropped to his chest and he fell asleep. The sun rose over the mountains, ushering in the beginning of a hot July day.
They left the freeway and entered the seedy garment district downtown, glass skyscrapers looming overhead. They drove down an avenue a few blocks south of Skid Row. Shafts of sunlight slanted through cracks between buildings. Homeless men lay in sleeping bags or stood in clutches on the corners. Zoran turned into a warehouse lot crammed with cars and trucks. He double-parked and hopped out. Tetsu rolled out of the passenger seat and trundled after him.
The two men walked through streams of cold air falling from the open backs of refrigerated trucks. As they walked through a loading door into the warehouse, they felt the chill of the huge refrigerated space. The smell of the ocean assailed their nostrils. Their shoes squished over a film of frigid water on the concrete floor. Under a high ceiling, long tables were covered with plastic bins and Styrofoam boxes full of ice. Zoran nodded to Tetsu and the two men split up.
Shouts in Spanish and Japanese filled the room. Everywhere men were in motion—most of them rugged-looking Hispanics with mustaches. They were dressed in work boots, heavy jackets, overalls, and hardhats. One man, wrapped in an insulated winter work suit and wearing a wool cap, drove a forklift around the room as if he were behind the wheel of a sports car. He came and went with frost-covered boxes on wooden palettes.
Zoran eyed the bins. There were sardines, squid, and barracuda from the waters of California. There were butterfish, tile-fish, skate, and live Maine lobster from the East Coast. There were amberjack, grouper, and trevally from Australia and New Zealand. From Japan there were Pacific saury, blue snapper, red gurnard, largehead hairtail, chicken grunt, and many other fish that didn’t even have English names.
There were night smelt, ling cod, Dover sole, and loup de mer. There were king crabs, conches, mussels, and sea urchins. And, of course, there were salmon, yellowtail, and tuna—cuts of big tuna, graded and priced. The belly meat from bluefin that had been fattened in pens in Malta was going for $63.50 a pound.
This was L.A.’s oldest Japanese fish market—International Marine Products, opened in 1968 by the same company that built the Tokyo Kaikan restaurant. The showroom was about the size of a basketball court. In the back, behind a heavy curtain of clear plastic strips hung across a wide doorway, was a cavernous storage freezer.
This place was tiny compared with the central fish market in Japan. On a trip to Tokyo with Toshi the previous year, Zoran had visited the famous Tsukiji Fish Market, Japan’s main seafood clearinghouse. He’d walked through the maze of Tsukiji’s twisting alleys in awe. Tsukiji is easily the world’s largest fish market. It sprawls across a slab of wet concrete the size of forty football fields, and is home to the equivalent of thirty New York Fulton Fish Markets, with more than 1,600 seafood vendors.
Tsukiji is crowded and noisy, housed under dark, low ceilings, and lit by naked bulbs dangling overhead. The stalls are crammed together. Every morning between 5:00 and 9:00, the narrow alleys teem with sushi chefs and retail fishmongers hunting for fresh supplies, along with sweating workers dragging dilapidated wagons piled with seafood and men racing go-karts laden with fish. It’s estimated that some 50,000 people do business at Tsukiji each day. Enough seafood passes through the market in one day to serve more than 5 million meals.
Zoran had spent three days in Tsukiji. It seemed that everything that lived in the sea was for sale, including whale, and it came from all over the world. Japan had long since depleted many of its local supplies and had turned to the rest of the world in its insatiable demand for seafood. Zoran had watched workers drag 500-pound tuna across the auction floor. He’d seen men cutting big frozen fish apart with industrial table saws.
In L.A. this morning, Zoran tossed a boiled octopus from Japan and several other items in his shopping basket, dodged a dolly loaded with pallets, and strode over to a stack of Jacuzzi-size tanks. A worker fished in the tanks with a dip net. He dumped dozens of large, live shrimp into a bin. Zoran bent over the pile of snapping tails and culled through them. He snatched a dozen of the animals and dropped them in a Styrofoam box with a few inches of chilled seawater.
Zoran hauled his purchases to a hectic checkout counter and met up with Tetsu, who was lugging his own selections. The counter was staffed by Japanese men bundled in thick coats. Piles of Styrofoam boxes and plastic bags full of fish and shaved ice sat waiting to be delivered to restaurants around the city. Zoran handed over a check signed by Toshi.
Back in the van with their purchases, Zoran and Tetsu pulled out of the parking lot and drove past a prostitute on the sidewalk. Tetsu stared at her. It was 6:30 a.m.
“She looks sixty years old,” Tetsu said.
Zoran laughed sharply. “I’d need another cup of coffee for that.”
They raced east toward the railroad tracks. At the Play Pen Totally Nude strip club Zoran turned left and pulled into another warehouse lot. This was the competitor of International Marine Products, a newer operation called Ocean Fresh.
Zoran and Tetsu pushed through a curtain of clear plastic strips into another frigid industrial showroom. Tetsu pulled a crumpled shopping list from his pocket and bent over bins of sea cucumbers, abalone, and slipper lobsters to examine a slippery octopus leg. He straightened up, lifting the leg until it dangled free. It was three feet long. He peered at the suction cups, then returned it to the tub.
Zoran surveyed rows of fish on palettes. He passed over jumbo flounder and red perch, but he crouched by a selection of bonito. They looked like a row of heavy artillery shells, waiting to be shot from a canon. Each had one large eye staring at the ceiling. Zoran picked the one with the clearest eye. It was nearly the length of his arm.
Besides the bonito, Zoran and Tetsu collected squid, giant clam, gizzard shad, conger eel, dried baby sardines, nori, and shoots of Japanese ginger. Tetsu had also located some fatty bluefin tuna belly, flown in from a fish farm in Croatia. It wasn’t cheap, and he asked for nearly 6 pounds of the stuff. The pale slab of fat came to $230.
The two chefs strode across the wet showroom floor to settle their tab. Passing a set of double doors, Zoran saw flashes of silver, orange, and red through the small windows. Scraping sounds came from the room, and blasts of hissing.
A worker shoved through the doors, propped them open, and carted in a huge tuna fish. Frigid air burst through the opening. The chamber inside looked like a city morgue, with cold stainless-steel walls, long stainless-steel tables, cavernous steel sinks, and flexible steel wash-down hoses dangling from steel pipes. Hispanic men in floor-length yellow rubber suits bent over piles of yard-long salmon, swiping descaling brushes across the fat silver bodies with a sound like machine-gun fire. Scales flew in all directions.
They hosed the bodies off with blasts of high-pressure spray and heaved them onto a steel table, where another man wielded a long blade like a samurai sword. He pulled a fish toward him across the metal and slashed a series of precise incisions into the shining body. Seconds later he peeled a single huge slab of fat-striped orange flesh from each side. He shoved the carcass into a bin and grabbed the next fish.
In the far corner of the room stood a taller Hispanic man, older than his colleagues, and wearing a floor-length rubber apron. The market value of the single fish he was cutting was equivalent to that of twenty or thirty salmon, so he moved with less speed and more care. In front of him lay a tuna weighing probably 150 pounds. The animal’s tail had been sawed off, leaving only a bloody stump, and its gills and guts had been gouged out.
With fluid strokes, the man drew his blade through the fish, t
hen slid a massive cut of meat off the beast and onto the table. The flesh hit the steel with a slap. The swordsman wiped his blade clean on a cloth.
It was 7:00 a.m. when Zoran pulled out of the parking lot. The morning was already hot. He rolled down his window for some fresh air and gestured to the Play Pen Totally Nude sign across the street.
“Tetsu, you have an account there, right?”
Tetsu managed a weak chuckle. The only flesh on his mind at the moment was belly fat.
“Price of toro going up,” Tetsu said.
Zoran nodded. “Somebody is making a lot of money.”
A few minutes later Zoran hit congestion on the freeway. The van slowed to a crawl. The morning sun streamed into the rear window of the van, turning the back into an oven—an oven filled with hundreds of dollars of seafood on ice.
17
BLOOD AND GUTS
Zoran arrived back in Hermosa Beach with only minutes to spare. He checked the boxes of seafood. They were still cool inside. He stowed his purchases in the walk-in and rushed to the head of the classroom table.
“Today we grill saba!” he announced.
Kate didn’t know what saba was.
Zoran asked the students to read aloud from their textbook again, from the section on grilling. Japanese-style grilling was another cooking technique that a sushi chef needed in his omakase arsenal. Even a sushi chef had to admit that sometimes fish tasted good cooked.
Zoran pulled out a plastic tub and ripped off the top. Packed inside were shiny foot-long mackerel, like giant sardines. Each fish had a bullet-shaped head, a thick body, and a tail that tapered to a set of fins like an arrowhead. Wavy black stripes ran across their backs like ripples on the sea. Their bellies were silver. Until now, the students had encountered their fish in disembodied rectangles. These were whole fish.
The Story of Sushi Page 11