Caress with the index’s paddy flesh paddy, then square off the block of rice. With two fingers, shape it: give it a curl that’d make Goldie Locks blush; an arc so gentle baby’s bottoms gives it a rash. Rotate, and repeat.  21. 22. 23. Rotate, repeat. Rotate, repeat.

It takes 10,000 repetitions to achieve mastery.

26. 27. 28.

“Let me show you something.” From the bar, Joe come-hithers with a wagging digit.

He plucked the Saran wrapped rice finger without a raised eyebrow. The sliver of warm sushi rice, encased in a sheet of plastic would prompt questions from most, but it isn’t Joe’s first time. hardly

“It’s about being fast, right? You got to be quick, doing sushi. So when you first take the rice, don’t start by rolling it up into a ball. Roll it into a cylinder,” he demonstrated, whirling the rice morsel in his excuse for a right hand. It’s more the size and texture of a baseball mitt; dark and leathery, the color of chocolate, capable of fielding blinding hot grounders or crushing the skulls of children and smaller horses. It can get surprisingly surgical, too; his fingertips manipulate the grains more skillfully than a Boardwalk full of rice scribbling scribes trying to make a buck. In seconds, his sliver of rice is the correct proportion to top with sushi.

“Then, when you’re squaring off the fish, do this first.” He squared off the rice; a block with rounded corners, then with deliberate slowness, he slid his hand into First Position, the Caressing Index Finger.

From there, he slipped into the Shaping Position, adding an arc that’d make Greek architects tear out their hair and bring the finest NBA 3-point shooters to their knees.

Joe’s sushi making was a streamlined methodology, one honed with his own 10,000 repetitions. He shaved off every possible millisecond and discarded every wasted motion from his procedure. He once managed Ichiban, a speedy sushi spot that churned out 200 plus checks on nights this restaurant clawed for triple digits. He saw his share of sushi before he quit, to open his café in downtown Albany.

“Owner of Ichiban, no good,” his girlfriend Tracy said a few days ago. “He make Joe do lot of work, and Joe have to make specials, too. But he always say, Joe, you not do enough work.”

“And Joe, he always outside,” she continued, “Talking to customer. So they thinking he owner. But Owner, he has to stay inside and cook, and get mad at Joe. But he not tell them this thing, they just thinking it.”

Joe’s ruddy face was serene as he continued explaining sushi’s finer points. He was either unaware or unmoved by his previous employer’s indiscretions. “The most important part of sushi is the rice,” he said. “The rice has to be right, and it’s got to be right the first time. You don’t get a second chance.” He imitated laying the rice to the fish. “When the rice touches the fish, it sticks because of the vinegar and the sugars. It won’t stick if you try using the same piece of fish twice. And when you roll, you got to roll with your fingers tips.” His mitts became cat claws, and he mimicked raking across the table. “Don’t do it like these sushi chefs; you can’t mash rice on the seaweed, you know? It’s got to be fluffy, or it’ll taste bad.”

He leaned back in the bar chair, and stared up at the television screen through his fashionably square glasses. “Oh my god, my master, he put me through hell like you wouldn’t believe. Eight months, and all he let me touch was the rice – wouldn’t even let me make a California roll. Would you believe that?”

Harder to believe Joe’s decision to give it all up, and turn his back on the time he invested into his training, the 10,000 and 100,000 and 1,000,000 repetitions he underwent to reach his current level. Mastery might lie somewhere in the 10,000 repetition mark, but how many more does it take to know this isn’t what you want? How long after working out the finer points before reaching the point where nothing’s fine?

Joe offered one more tidbit. “Oh, and sushi is supposed to look alive, okay? So don’t make it look like a brick; give it a long tail, so it looks like its swimming. Make it look like a fish.”

No one asked Joe for his advice. No one requested his expertise. But in his café, when he stands behind a deli counter, surrounded by cappuccino machines and milk steamers and triple-shot-espresso-soy-milk-no-foam-latte shenanigans, that mastery will amount to nothing. Offering the fruit from his labors is his one more last chance to make use of his skill set, before embarking on a new 10,000 repetitions.

He returned the sliver of sushi rice in the Saran wrap. It was still warm.

Related posts:

1. Rolling With Michael
2. Heart
3. Sushi Rice

He slices the seaweed into strips first, turns, slices again. He doesn’t rush, his expression neutral as he works. He imagines the taste and look, the visual balance between nori topping and garnish.

He takes the two rice balls he made earlier, tennis ball-size, and gently rolls them over the flakes. The sticky, short-grain sushi rice is perfect for latching onto the seaweed. It lifts the shards easily, and Michael coats each rice ball without deforming the shape’s integrity.

He puts them onto a white, rectangular plate. No garnishes or sauces yet. He hands out spoons. “Try,” he says.

What’s inside? I ask.

“Fruit.” He offers nothing else. I edge into it, revealing a fruit potpourri inside. It’s a sunset splashed against a grainy, drab canvas. The palette difference is striking, and the first of many contrasts: sour sushi rice, created with painstakingly measured portions of vinegar, whole lemons, salt, and sugar, meeting a melody of mangoes and strawberries. The warm rice and refreshingly cool fruit fills the mouth with a balanced glow. Even in the texture, there’s a seesaw of the dissimilar – coarse yet delicate rice grains, crunchy nori, and yielding fruit flesh tap dance across the taste buds.

It’s good, I tell him. Sweet. Good for a spring dish.

“Better with fruit more,” Michael says. He takes a spoonful for himself. He chews, slowly, contemplating the sensation swirling in his mouth, his taste buds detecting any weakness. “Not enough sweet,” he says finally. “Need sauce.” He goes to the kitchen.

Michael isn’t the head sushi chef. It isn’t his responsibility to come up with new dishes every few weeks, but he does it anyway. In the past few weeks, he developed dishes with names like The Black Dragon, The Fancy Tuna, and Tuna Dumplings.

Work could be simpler for Michael. His pay doesn’t warrant the extra effort. He could use the same uninspired, tired plating techniques sushi chefs have used again and again, instead of carefully planning the placement of every oba leaf. He could use his downtime to read the Chinese newspaper, sitting on the empty container of pickled ginger. He could play games on his cell phone. He could sleep.

But he can’t help himself. The desire – the very need – to create overwhelms everything else, anything else, and soon, he’s back on his feet, back to the cutting board, building, tasting, imagining.

“Making specials not easy,” he said to me once. “Together, flavor need taste good, feel good, look good. But now,” he pointed to his head. “I think it, I just do it.” Creating is how he sheds the new flavor and texture combinations that torment him. It’s how he expresses what haunts the darkness behind his eyelids.

Michael comes out of the kitchen, using a plastic fork to whip the yellow contents inside of a pint container. The fork whirls, expanding and contracting the sauce, breaking and building at the same time. He stops and drizzles some of it over the Fruit Rice balls, the concoction pulled through the void by gravity, before striking grains of rice and creeping into and over the nooks and crevices. He gestures for me to try.

The sauce immediately binds the contrasting flavors with a natural stickiness and sweetness. The rice tastes fresher, the fruit taste sweeter, and everything is melded together in a fusion I didn’t realize was missing until now. “Egg, honey, mayo,” he says before I can ask. He takes his bite, and nods, satisfied. Dish completed, we quickly polish it off, until there’s nothing left but the dirty plate and the empty pint container.

This Fruit Rice Ball may never make it to the specials menu. It’s certainly not a winter dish, and the name needs some work. By the springtime, who knows what Michael will come up with? Moreover, The Boss wasn’t even here to see what Michael created, and save a sauce-stained plate, there’s no evidence of Michael’s initiative. He’ll receive no credit.

For now, though, the itch to create is satisfied. Finally, he can sit down and lean against the wall, the comfort of silence and darkness unimpeded by new flavors and textures and colors racing through his mind. Finally he can rest.

Related posts:

1. Rolling With Michael
2. The Finer Points
3. Sushi Rice

Broke, I say.

“Bloke.”

Broke, I repeat.

“Bloke. Bloke down.”

I nod my head. But broke down, you can only use that when you’re talking about your car. Everything else, you just say broke, I say in Chinese.

“Yeah, car bloke down,” he says. Then he points to an imaginary object on the table between us. “This is bloke.”

I nod again. I look down at our cutting boards, comparing my nori to his. On one, the rice is pulled across unevenly, with miniature mounds and valleys extending across the green plain. That one isn’t Michael’s.

His long, unconditioned hair lies flat against his bowed head as he works. The way he parts it – straight down the middle – makes his oval shaped face appear even rounder. Small, squinty eyes peer at the roll that’s quietly emerging from his gloved-handiwork. He starts piling on thin slices of cucumber.

“‘What do you think?’” he says to himself, slowly. His teeth are jagged, and there is plenty of space in between to work with. “‘How do you like it?’” He has an accent, but the meaning is clear. We focus on phrases he can directly apply while behind the sushi bar. The better he communicates to patrons at the bar, the better tips he’ll make.

Peering through the glass and rows of raw fish filets filed neatly one after another, the whole restaurant looks different. Facing out from behind the cutting board puts you on stage, an actor in his craft. Suddenly, you’re conscientious of your every move.

Everyone’s staring at you, the voice in your head reminds you.

Don’t pick your nose, it says. Don’t scratch your ass.

The attention doesn’t make learning any easier. Fortunately, Michael’s a patient teacher. He watches carefully, correcting the ingredients you’re placing in the roll when necessary, adjusting your form when it’s incorrect. Most importantly, he lets you make mistakes. It might be solely to give himself a good laugh, which he does nothing to hide: it’s open mouthed and barking, and there’s a twinkle in his eyes. It never feels like he’s laughing at you, though, only with you. You smile because he’s smiling. His laughter never makes you want to quit. He never laughs to flaunt his superiority.

“Inside out,” he says when he sees me building the roll with the seaweed oriented in reverse; placing the kani, avocado, and cucumber on the rice, instead of flipping it over and putting it on the seaweed. What the hell? I mutter to myself Fukinese, an expression he taught me. He chuckles.

“No no no,” he’ll scold when he watches me hack at the completed roll, butchering them into eight pieces. He pushes me aside. He shows me how it’s done; back and forth like a saw, but using speed to make the cut clean, crisp. It’s three quick movements: slice forward with knife tilted up, slide back with knife tilted down, then flat and pulled backwards as the knife strikes the cutting board.

After three sessions of practicing rolls, I ask him to show me how to do sushi.

“Qi sing,” he says in Chinese, with an incredulous look. It means “crazy.” When you train to be a sushi chef, he says, you spend weeks just doing side work, and if you’re talented, maybe rolling California rolls. Only when you master California rolls are you allowed to make rolls with fish, then after a few more weeks, the more difficult rolls – seaweed-outside and Chef Special Rolls.

I remember Danny, our previous sushi chef, saying something similar – except his training was underneath a Japanese chef, and more rigorous. For one month, Danny only cut cucumbers. They were the only things he was allowed to take a knife to, but he did it for 2 or 3 hours a day, everyday. He cut around the circumference, opening up the vegetable into one long sheet. Then he piled 5 or 6 of the sheets atop one another, and sliced them paper thin for the head sushi chef to use. That was it for the cutting for the rest of the day – then back to standing on the sidelines, watching, or washing dishes.

Yet here I was, asking Michael to teach me despite barely being able to cut properly; or knowing all the ingredients in all the rolls; or still forgetting, at times, which rolls were seaweed-inside or seaweed-outside.

For whatever reason, though, when the next order for sushi came through the printer, he signals me to follow along with what he’s doing. He cuts two pieces of fish – mackerel – and puts one down on my cutting board. With one hand, he reaches into the warmer and plucks out a small morsel of rice. His fingers deftly roll the morsel into his palm, around and around, until it’s spherical. He hands it to me. “This much,” he says, then tells me to try.

I pick up what I imagine is an equal amount.

“No,” he plucks a chunk of rice from the amount I grabbed. “Too much.”

I try again.

“No,” he repeats. He removes another chunk.

On the third try, he approves, and I start rolling the rice between my fingers. I resist the urge to put the morsel on the cutting board to shape it into a ball, like Play-Doh.

He shows me how to hold the fish gently in the left hand, then press the rice onto the bottom, using two fingers to flatten the base of the rice, nestling it into the fish. “Gentle,” he says in Chinese. “Don’t use too much pressure. Very soft.” I imitate his motions. His left hand cupping the fish gives the sushi its rounded figure.

He flips the product over in his hand, with the rice pressed into it. Using his thumb and index finger, he squares off the fish, ensuring every grain is covered evenly, save a thin white line at the very bottom.

He pulls out a dish and plates it; the mackerel looks pristine on the clean white, perfectly sized and proportioned, a gentle, gleaming curve hugging the rice.

I follow suit, and put my mackerel sushi next to his. He laughs – no attempt to hide it. It’s lopsided, the fish slipping off the rice on one side. There looks to be enough rice to engulf the entire fish. The symmetrical culinary masterpiece next to it magnifies the sloppiness.

“No good-uh,” he says. He picks it up, and starts fixing it, laughing as he does so. “Qi sing.”

Related posts:

1. Creare
2. The Finer Points
3. Sushi Rice

He wore that same expression while he battered chicken tempura in the deep fryer, rolling the thin pink strip of poultry into the tempura bits floating on vegetable oil, like snowflakes atop an ice rink.

Nor did it change when Big Chef scolded him for being stupid or incompetent. His glassy eyes absorbed the brunt without blinking, like they couldn’t fathom the situation – or didn’t want to. It was the same when Alan – skinny, Sushi Chef Alan – bullied him for the Chinese newspaper or for his seat on the empty soy sauce container. Chen’s wrists were thicker than Alan’s neck, and he could wring him out if he set his heart on it.

Instead, he acquiesced, but not without that unwavering stare, which forced Alan’s glare to the ground, his mumbled words directed at the floor as he snatched the inky paper or assumed his position on the makeshift chair.

Chen sang while working, the expression pouring from his voice compensating for its absence in his face. You often heard Beijing opera from the basement, while he wrapped large scoops of green tea ice cream into fluffy, yellow pound cake, but mostly he sang contemporary songs, while cutting vegetables or scrapping burnt scraps off the stove.

Allison asked me once, bemused, “What is he singing? Like, Chinese folk songs?”

I pictured the accompany music video to the particular tune; one of those videos with shaking bottoms and bare mid-riffs. I shook my head.

Not really, I told her.

It was Tuesday, though – his one day off a week – which explained why his blank slate of a face bobbed its way to the supermarket. As far as destinations went, he didn’t have many other options in Slingerlands, during the middle of the week. Especially without a car, and armed only with vegetable names and versatile English expressions like, “No good,” “Thank you very much,” and “What the hell?”  These days, all the chefs from The City owned laptops, so they could stream Chinese programs or movies, but realistically that kept them occupied for only so long. Even after sleeping in late and the luxury of a long, hot shower, they needed something else to occupy their time besides staring at a laptop screen with a viewable size of 12.35 inches and pixel pitch of 0.25mm.

Hopping on bus line 86 took them to the mall, but that got old (and expensive) after a while.

So besides heading to the supermarket – which lacked temptations like the Express store and the fancy gadgetry of Brookstone – what else was there to do? He’d rather work, honesty, to earn more money. Boss already told him no, though, he couldn’t work seven days a week. He wanted him to rest.

Inside the supermarket, he wandered through the bright, clean aisles. He stared at row after row of cereal boxes, canned soups, bottled Spaghetti sauces, salad dressing, and ice cream. Dessert boxes with pictures of sinful chocolate cake. Packages of uncooked chicken, categorized in seemingly infinite permutations: bone-in or boneless, skinned or skinless, thighs or breasts or drumsticks, farm raised or local or all natural – it all extended far beyond the way he used to buy his poultry (“dead or alive?”)

Every English word, every recognizable brand and vibrant packaging, the wealth of it all, reminded him of why he was here, in upstate New York. It reminded him why a 14-hour plane ride and a $1200 ticket separated him from his wife. Why 95 percent of his pay, earned through 12-hour works days, he wired across the ocean, where he’d never see it again. Why when his son married a few weeks ago, he was absent from the wedding. Instead, he was working two skillets, trying to catch up with the dinner rush.

He certainly wasn’t here because they needed his valuable cooking skills. He wasn’t a talented chef; he knew that. The first time he cooked them dinner, pork loin with bok choi in oyster sauce, the dish came out so salty, it was barely edible. The other cooks ruled it out to differences in style. He probably wasn’t used to the southern style of cooking, they figured.

For lunch the next day, he made wheat noodles in a peanut sauce – a distinctly northern dish. He spent an hour pulling and cutting his own noodles, then another 30 minutes refining his sauce, tasting it with his index finger after every ingredient, trying to get it just right.

The finished product tasted like plain spaghetti noodles doused with watery peanut butter.

He wasn’t getting paid for his culinary talents. So he compensated for it by doing anything you asked him to do.

Start keeping inventory of all kitchen items? No problem.

Wash dishes and scrub the walls? Absolutely.

Get on the 8-foot ladder and hang Christmas lights around the building in 15 degree weather? I’d love to.

He compensated with his good temperament. By never getting upset. By singing.

Chen picked something out of the grocery store – something for dessert, something foreign that looked deceptively delicious, like a chunk of Angel food cake or sweet cherry pie. He braved the cold once more, and crossed the intersection back to the unheated dormitory, where he prepared his dinner, and grimaced as he downed his own cooking. Then ate his dessert, and grimaced at how sweet it was.

He watched his second movie for the day.

He sang a little.

Then, more out of boredom then exhaustion, he laid down on the mattress with the sagging middle. The mattress where countless other chefs before him had laid their tired bodies. He pulled the sleeping bag he used for a blanket over his body, and tried to sleep, eagerly awaiting to return to work in the morning.

Related posts:

1. Heart
2. Free
3. Tempura

He switched to the rectangular strainer – a squirrel-sized hockey stick, with a steel mesh blade instead of wood. He dipped it into the yellow oil, and lifted it out, covering the surface with an even layer of tempura flakes. His left hand reached across his body, and with two quick plunges into the white batter, coated the long strip of shrimp. It looked like French fries in Europe; long, slender, dipped in mayonnaise.  He laid it atop the tempura flakes, and placed it back in the oil. Gently, he pressed it against the wall of the deep fryer, and as he released the pressure, angled the strainer so it slowly rotated, giving the entire surface area the opportunity to be coated with flakes. He repeated the rotation a few times, before letting the shrimp fully cook in the hot oil.

When he finally pulled the shrimp out, we examined his battering technique. The entire surface was coated, but not in a single, even layer.  Tempura flakes stuck out in odd places, like a Bart Simpson haircut.

“Like I said, it takes some skill,” he repeated.

Tempura Batter

1. Fill large metal bowl with 2 ½ pints of tempura batter powder.
2. Add an egg.
3. Add water, mix. The mix should be free of lumps, and a smooth, even consistency.
4. The batter serves as both the flaky coating on tempura dishes, and the coating layer on the meats and vegetables.

Tempura gets a bad rep. Partly because it’s deep-fried, and any yahoo at the County Fair can work an Oreo or a Twinkie in his deep-fryer. And partly because the responsibility falls onto the sous chef, while the head chef handles the stove. But there are enough intricacies that not only make it a valued skill, but one that requires knowledge and practice to become proficient.

The coating on the protein you serve must be light and even. There have to be enough flakes for consistency, but not so overdone that all you can taste is the batter. Coating the vegetables requires hand speed and efficiency, dipping from powder to batter to the oil with the fewest number of movements.

In fact, the whole process of creating a tempura dish was meant to be done slowly, with meticulous precision. But the popularization of Japanese cuisine has made speed a necessity.

###

Chen sifu watches me pour the batter into the oil – I keep the ladle high above my head, and the liquid seeps off the top, slides over the sides, and gravity gives it a one-two boot. It plunges into the pond of hot oil waiting calmly below, splashing and breaking serenity like the alcoholic uncle arriving late to Christmas dinner, in a fanfare of fizzles and flair. Immediately, pale yellow flakes bloom and race across the surface. The flakes drift in even, concentric circles outwards, carried by bubbles and small waves reverberating throughout the deep fryer, resembling a patchwork quilt of crisp autumn yellow.

I watch these flakes cook for a few seconds; some pieces clumped up into large, continental land masses. They’re no good to me, so I scoop them into the trash. This batch isn’t made to coat anything; they go directly to the sushi bar, and will eventually put the “crunch” in crunchy rolls. The flakes that remain are still a bit thicker than I remember, but the batch looks close enough. I scoop and place them into a large strainer resting above the other deep fryer, to let excess oil drip before giving it to the sushi bar.

It’s not until after the third batch does Chen sifu examine my handiwork.

He inspects the flakes straining to the side. He flicks his wrist once, twice, sifting through the contents.

“No good,” he says. He dumps it into the garbage can. He ushers me out of the way, and examines the batter I’m using.

“Too thick.” He adds water and mixes. Then he begins pouring it into the oil, ladle high above his head, using a small circular motion so the batter doesn’t just strike one area in the deep fryer. Among the chefs who work the deep fryer, Chen sifu is the most skilled.  No matter the volume of orders, all his protein come out evenly coated, cooked till crispy and not a second longer. Not an easy thing to manage.

I watch his flakes blossom. His don’t clump together, and are in noticeably smaller pieces than the ones I managed to come up with. The thin layer of flakes that eventually float to the top form almost a crystalline structure on the oil, a web of tempura, bonded like ionic.

“Oh,” I say. “That’s good?”

He shakes his head. “No. Still not good.” With quick flicks of the wrist, he uses the rectangular strainer to slash through the oil. He pushes the flakes towards the wall of the fryer, and cuts at it by pressing layer by layer into the steel. There are no continental land masses. He dumps the batch into the steel strainer.

“Now, not bad.”

###

I try explaining to Asuk the best I can. The words are gibberish, a guttural mix of Chinese, Cantonese, and English. It’s not pretty but it gets the point across.

Look, when you put the flakes on the strainer, it’s too clumped together. Spread it out more – it needs to be one even layer. When you start pushing towards the wall, start further away; you’ll collect more flakes that way. Don’t spend five minutes rotating; either you did it right  or you didn’t – you have to move on.

His dark, grizzled hand grasps the strainer like it’s a miniature teacup. It’s impossible to tell if his skin tone is from dirt or labor.

No, I tell him. Hold it like you mean it. I push the handle further into his hand.

He nods, readjusts, and we continue.

It’s frustrating watching Asuk work. It’s not so much he hasn’t learned properly, but he wasn’t taught properly. Chinese people, they think practice make perfect. So they’ll let you struggle on your own, barely taking note of your mistakes, only noticing if your end result is passable. If it isn’t, you’re berated. If it is, you’re grunted at. Chef barely pays him any attention when he starts his pour, so no one notices the batter’s too thin.

Practice doesn’t make perfect.

Perfect practice makes perfect.

He dips one piece of shrimp into the batter.

No – both at the same time. I demonstrate. How are you going to do 10 pieces, one at a time?

He scoops out flakes from the oil.

Too bunched up, I tell him. I redunk the strainer for him, spreading out the flakes. This is what it should look like.

He starts to place the protein onto the thin layer of flakes I collected for him. I guide his leathery mitt. Move the strainer close, so you don’t drip more batter into the oil.

When he puts the shrimp in, he remembers to start from a distance, at least. But his rotation is slow, and the long shrimp just plunges into the oil, without first getting its coat of pre-cooked flakes. He tries futilely to save the protein; thrashing and rotating, like a toddler trapped in the deep end. When he pulls the shrimp out, it’s clear the lifeguard didn’t reach him in time.

Asuk look dejected.

Don’t worry about it, I say. I pat him on the back. Just do it again. You know, tempura takes the most skill in Japanese cooking?

He pours the batter, ladle high. The flakes blossom. They march across the oil. We watch. We try again.

Related posts:

1. The Day Off
2. Sushi Rice

“Watch,” Danny instructed. His right hand scooped down, scraping the bottom of strainer. In a wide circular movement, he pulled a handful of rice out, breaking the surface. His left hand quickly rubbed the rice, before letting it slip back into the water. The right dove back in, a streamlined minnow propelling through the water, and returned, armed with another palm full of grains. “Rice must be clean, okay?” Gently he rubbed again, removing the dirt and sand from oceans away, as well as excess skin, scrapped off the rice farmer’s leathery hands as he wrestled the grain out of the muddled earth.  How many more desperate hands did these grains pass through, before it reached the restaurant in the 10-pound, white canvas bag, before Danny removed their every trace with friction and cold water?

Danny pulled out the strainer. Water immediately rushed out of the tiny holes, into the larger steel bowl that remained in the sink, while the rice grains remained. He dumped that water, save for the 30 or so grains that escaped through the holes; these he dumped back in with the rest of their brethren. “Always save, okay, Ming Jai? Don’t waste.”

He repeated the process twice more.

“Wash three times,” he said. To the right was the 10-liter Zojirushi rice cooker. A toddler could fit comfortably inside. When it no longer worked, we could donate it to an amusement park as a “Spinning Teacup” ride, maybe in a section with an Asian motif, which along with Geisha dolls and adopting Asian babies, appears to be all the rage.

Danny laid the rice net along the surface of the rice cooker, then dumped the washed grains into it. He slapped the bottom of the steel strainer a few times, making sure every grain had descended to fatten and cook in the combination of heat and water.

With a quart soup container, he filled it three times. Each time, the water hovered above the edge, molecularly bonded by surface tension. “One for each rice.” On the fourth quart, he filled it about half-way, then poured. “Plus a little.” He ushered me over, to examine the water level sitting in the rice cooker. He waved his hand a few times over the surface, leveling the playing field so everything would cook evenly.

“See?” He placed his palm flat down, gently resting atop the rice. The water level came up to somewhere between his first and second knuckle, a measurement in the exact science of rice. “Good. Enough. We come back at,” he glanced at the clock. “Three-thirty.” It was 45 minutes. He pushed the edges of the net hanging over the rice cooker inside, covered it, and pressed the “on” button.

At three twenty-five, I removed the cover, and steam billowed upwards as I pulled away. With two hands, Danny grabbed the edges of the net, and lifted out his bag, then placed it into the shallow plastic bin he laid out on the countertop.

“Oh, Ming-jai, no good,” he said. He pulled the net out from underneath the rice like a tablecloth beneath crystal glassware. The rice spilled into the plastic bin; hot, cooked, steaming. “Smell.”

I did. I smelled rice.

“Yeah. Too cooked.” He nodded his head at the barrel filled with sushi vinegar below the countertop. I opened it, and scooped out a little less than a quart, avoiding the lemons floating on the surface. I mimicked the technique Danny showed me for distributing the vinegar – pouring from the quart with my left hand, onto the plastic spoon I held in my right, and spreading the vinegar with quick flicks of my wrist.

Do you just add lemons to your vinegar?
He shook his head. “Lemon, salt, sugar… depend how you like taste. American people, like sushi rice more sweet, so I add yuzu. Japanese people like more sour.”

Afterwards, he showed me how to fold the rice into the vinegar, to give every grain of rice a chance to absorb the flavor. With wide strokes, he hacked at the large clumps of rice that refused to separate, cutting into them like he wielded a machete. He started on the right side of the bin, and worked his way to the left. Then he folded the rice, using the same motion he used for washing: long strokes to scoop beneath the grains, then out and forward.

He gave me the plastic spoon to try, and corrected me after every stroke, every fold.

“No, like this,” he motioned wider hacks with the spoon.

Or, “Ming Jai, watch me,” and he’d take the spoon back, and demonstrate the flicking action with his wrist. Never impatient, never judging for the mistakes, but an absolute insistence on proper technique. It seemed obsessive, trivial even, but these techniques were the tools of his profession, the cornerstone of his work and his living, and he cared for them as such.

Last week, he reached for the small black bag he kept behind the sushi bar, and gingerly took out a sushi knife. It had a black handle, and the blade was meticulously wrapped in cardboard. “Ming Jai, how much you think this knife cost?”

I told him I didn’t know.

“Four hundred US dollars.”

I whistled.

“You think that a lot, right? But I make at least,” he thought for a minute, trying to translate the numbers in his head, “at least 100,000 dollars with this knife. Think it worth it?” Some of that money went back home, which took care of his parents, he explained. It bought them a house. It got them off the farm, so no sushi chef would ever have to wash their skin cells from rice grains ever again. The rest of the money went to paying the agency that got him his visa, and brought him over to the United States. It was a debt he, his knife, and the rest of his tools would continue to pay for years to come.

“Okay, good,” Danny said finally, “but don’t do this,” he pointed at my right hand. I had dipped too far into the sushi rice a few times, and rice grains had stuck to my hand. “Why hand touch rice?” He showed me his hand; it was spotless. He gave the rice a few more folds while I washed it off.

Finally, he tasted it. “You always taste,” he insisted. He signaled for me to do the same. “What you think? Sour? Sweet?”

A little sour, I told him.

“Yeah, me too, I think this.” He ate another morsel; a clump of rice that had been cleaned of its thousands of miles of travel, of the dozens of grimy hands it passed through along the way. And still tasted sour.

Danny nodded his head anyway. “It’s okay. Good,” he said. He dumped the contents into his rice warmer, and took it outside to the sushi bar.

Related posts:

1. Heart
2. Creare
3. The Finer Points

I took another bite. I was sympathetic to Chen Sifu’s cooking, since I’d been told my own cooking was pretty bland. But Danny was right; whenever Chen Sifu cooked, it required hibachi hot mustard to make it an enjoyable experience. I nodded.

“Yeah. See, this guy, no good.” He shook his head, then glared at the contents of his bowl. “I think no one teach him. He just learn by watching. He…” Danny paused, and struggled for the word. He barked something at Tracy, the server, in Fukienese.

Tracy’s eyes didn’t stray from the flat screen television mounted against the wall. “Like a job. He cook like a job,” she mumbled. Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations was on. He was eating clam testes or snail gizzards or something.

“Yeah. He cook like it just a job. He only use his mind, you know? He doesn’t use his heart.” He put down his chopsticks, and placed his hands at the center of his chest. With curved pointer fingers on both his hands and jutted thumbs, he formed a small heart to illustrate his meaning. “The Old Man, he uses his heart, and that’s why his food taste better. This guy, you watch him cook, you never see him taste his food, right?”

I noticed that, and did think it odd. Or the fact when I first started learning, he never tasted my dishes, or instructed me to do so, before serving it.

“See? All great chefs: Japanese, French, Italian, always taste food. Ming Jai, you cook sautéed noodles, you gotta pick up noodle, and,” he mimicked slurping up a single noodle from a closed fist, “and taste. Listen, I know. My first teacher, he Japanese, he tell me: don’t give food to customers you wouldn’t eat yourself. Right? Japanese chef, they carry spoon with them, so they can taste all their food. They taste, then they say, ‘Okay, good.’ Problem with all Chinese chefs, man, all no good. All cook like just a job.” He simulated cooking in a wok, sautéing food with one hand and shoving the contents with a spoon in the other. “Put it down, don’t even taste it. ‘I’m done.’ Just a job to them. Stupid.”

When Danny got excited, his eyes, already large and playful, became enormous. I remember they were the size of our dinner bowls the other day, when he got carded trying to cash in a winning scratch-off ticket.

I told him it was because he looked like a 12-year old boy.

“No, Ming Jai, you don’t understand – I buy ticket from them! Shit, I give them money, no problem, no ID. I try and take money, they check ID. I like, ‘Fuck man.’”

Oh, I thought about that for a second. Fuck man, I agreed.

His eyes were like that now, and he appeared extra animated with his long, thick black hair jutting out omnidirectionally with a permanent case of bed head. The culinary arts were his passion, and he displayed it with every new dish he created. His Amazing Tuna Roll sold even faster than he anticipated, and backed up the sushi bar for an hour: he coated layers of ruddy, Big-eyed tuna with course black pepper, then layered it atop yellow soy paper that enclosed spicy crunchy tuna, white tuna, and fleshy avocado meat. When he seared the pepper into the tuna meat with the focused, blue heat of his handheld blow torch, the aroma of zesty grilled fish danced across our small dining room.

His Lobster Meat Summer Roll required no enticing to sell. Servers carried it to their table, and customers who spotted the cooked lobster meat wrapped in spring mix and orange mangos, peeking out of vinegar sushi rice and a rice wrap, simply pointed and said, “I want that.” One early Saturday evening, a table of six ordered four, and eighty-sixed our supply of lobster for the weekend. We sold 68 of those rolls in two weeks.

Of course, not everything worked out. The Grilled King Salmon Napoleon looked beautiful, with two layers of pink salmon, crisp tomato and jalapeno stacked high, then garnished with dill. But his special yuzu sauce lacked the punch he sought, and customers remarked it was a little bland. We quickly took it off the menu.

The Dancing Tuna also struggled. A cooked white tuna salad mixed with mayo and eel sauce was served in an ice cream cone, along with a “Tuna Dumpling” on the side: spicy crunchy tuna wrapped with layers of avocado, finished with a sweet chili sauce. The presentation received strange stares. Diners said they enjoyed the dish – though no one ever ate the ice cream cone, as Danny intended.

Regardless, Danny’s passion shined through every slice of fish, every garnish, his every motion behind that sushi bar; that was clear since he plated his first dish. He created height by stacking roll pieces, stylistically a French technique, instead of laying it out on the plate. He brought with him small LED lights the size of ice cubes, which he buried beneath white radish or smothered with ice, to light up sushi and sashimi platters with splashes of red and violet. The other day, he talked about a new special he wanted to try using stacked soup spoons, revealing more of his French influence.

To him, concocting cuisine required more than art, more than science. It required love in every detail. Anything less was unacceptable.

“You see even when I do sushi rice? Always, always have to taste first. Take a little piece,” he pretended to take a bite of rice. “Check to make sure okay-la. Good flavor? Okay.”

He touched his chest again. “Remember when you cook, Ming Jai, not come from your mind. Good cooking come from your heart.”

Related posts:

1. Creare
2. Sushi Rice
3. The Finer Points