Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (free biff chip and kipper ebooks txt) 📗

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 only 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.

I trusted, and the food was nearly perfect. The sushi rice seemed a F O R K I T O V E R

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delicacy, even though no attention went into molding it into the perfect oblong shape found in punctilious sushi establishments. Most of the fish came in a variety of light, beautifully balanced sauces that tasted like ponzu, sweet vinegar, or honey. The salmon bore a sprinkling of sesame seeds.

When I returned the next day to introduce myself to Kusuhara, he told me that when he started out as a fish salesman in L.A., one of his early clients was Nozawa. “I was curious; maybe if I learned to make sushi, I would be able to sell fish to sushi restaurants better than anybody else.”

Nozawa taught him, and in 1980 he opened his first sushi restaurant.

Seven years ago, he and his wife, Ryoko, his high school sweetheart in Japan, opened Sushi Sasabune after finding the inelegant building they now occupy, located a few blocks from the San Diego Freeway. “When I saw it,” he said, “I thought it looked terrible, but I knew that not many people would come in and I could start slowly, only my wife and I.” He’s forty-eight now, and for the past thirty years he’s been going to the fish market every day it’s been open, waking up at 4 a.m. and sometimes helping to unload the trucks. That’s what happens when a man gets to the fish market before the fish.

No restaurant could differ more from Sushi Sasabune—in style, in locale, and especially in price—than Ginzo Sushi-Ko, located on a pedestrian walkway at the foot of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. A friend and I took an elevator to the second floor of a tiny building, ducked under some annoying cloth flaps shrouding the doorway, and were politely shown to a semiprivate room containing two tables, each of them large but not particularly ornate. The base price of dinner here is $300 per person, and a nonrefundable deposit of $100 is required to guarantee a reservation. I couldn’t imagine what they did to make raw fish that pricy, except sprinkle it with gold. And indeed they did.

I’ll say this about my $850 meal for two, which included tax, tip, and a couple of tiny pots of cold sake: it was real good. In fact, considering that most $850 meals for two served in America today consist of two martinis, two jumbo-shrimp cocktails, two sirloin strips, creamed 1 3 4

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spinach, hash browns, and a $500 bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, I’m certain it was better than most. The service was surprisingly casual but polite and almost perfect. The glasses, plates, and utensils were made of ceramic, porcelain, or lacquered wood, all lovely but probably not valuable. Our waitress told us the reason we didn’t have one of the bright-red lacquered toothpick boxes on our table was that ours had been swiped by a previous customer.

There were nine courses, all chosen by the chef. (I count the sequence of sushi that concluded the dinner as one course.) Most fun was the foie gras–and-lobster shabu-shabu; least fun was being instructed to drink the seaweed-flavored shabu-shabu broth in which we’d cooked our foie gras and lobster. We ate Japanese “risotto” with white