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.

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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.

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1. Rolling With Michael
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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.”

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3. Sushi Rice

He waited.

I took off the three tall soda glasses, and fit them snugly into one hand. My other hand reached for the soda gun. My thumb fired off two “D’s” and one “P.” Besides the fizzle and pop of carbonation striking soda mix, it was quiet.

He waited.

I handed my patrons their respective refills. When I returned to the bar, I put him out of his misery.

What Martin? I asked him.

“Why you put the plate down like that?” he nodded to the plate of sushi I gave to my guest moments ago. The man – tall, white, with a thick head of black hair – wasn’t cognizant of any problems with the presentation. He already devoured a piece of tuna, and poised pink salmon in his finger tips, glistening from dab of soy sauce.

He continued. “You got to put the plate down the right way.” He stared at me expectantly, as if that sentence alone should clarify his meaning, and any second now, the realization of my committed sin would strike me.

Instead, I stared back at him. I waited for more details. He waited for me to ask for them. He needed the acknowledgement of superior knowledge; I saw it in his posture, that lanky slouch, hip cockeyed and slightly jutted. I saw it in his half-hidden smirk, highlighted by his brown designer glasses and the gentle red highlights in his hair.

I needed not to give him the satisfaction. It was no secret he knew a great deal more about thecuisine than myself. Still, I’d rather stew in my own ignorance than admit defeat, feeding his ego, swelling his pride.

Instead, I spent the following weeks studying the plating of the sushi chefs, especially those who created the more elaborate designs. Picking out the shape and size of their plate was like throwing up a new canvas or striking “Ctrl+N.” They started with clean and white porcelain, and from there, the design was left up to their imaginations. I stared at the pictures they painted, and the landscapes they built, yet I still wasn’t presenting the plate in the correct orientation 100 percent of the time. Finally Danny yelled at me, from behind the sushi bar.

“Look at the ginger-wasabi,” he scolded. “Wasabi should be at their right hand, right? So when they want to take some with their chopstick, very close. Don’t have to go like this,” he demonstrated, making a great show of reaching over an imaginary assortment of fish piled two feet in the air to get to the condiments.

The ginger and wasabi was the North Star of the plating. It was a minor detail at best, but being mindful of the minor details is what people prided themselves on – including Martin.

“Look at this glass,” he said to me once, after we just opened one morning. He picked up the one I just finished wiping down and returned to the shelf. It had two or three water spots, but it was a soda glass; customers would suck carbonation and syrup from the glass, not sip Dom Perignon. It’s fine, I told him. It’s good enough.

“No Chris, not good enough. We keep a certain standard here, okay? You know, all the restaurants in the City, they fire you for this.” He pointed out the door to emphasize his point. “My Godfather would never allow this in his restaurant, so that’s what we have to do.”

Martin held his level of utility as a waiter to the same standards of his cleanliness and knowledge. His pride kept him from accepting help; ask him if he needs a hand while he piles five plates on his arms, and he’ll ignore you. He won’t even respond, other than maybe a short derisive laugh as he brushes past you. When the dinner rush begins and guests are seated, he’ll rush over to get their drink order before you take out your apron and open a fresh page in the notebook.

Then at the end of the night, he’ll beckon you over to the computer. “Look,” he’ll say. He’ll bring up his list of tables for the evening. Two presses on the screen, and it switches to your respective list – which is much shorter. “You’re not working hard enough.”

It took months, but he grudgingly opened up the more we worked together, until finally he confessed,

“See Chris, I do it all for a reason. I need to know who will say, “Oh, let Martin do it,” and who is willing to work. I need to test people, so I know who I can trust.”

He made it sound like going into battle, and the more I worked with Martin, the more I realized that’s exactly how he saw it. Every interaction: from selling sake to plate presentation and banter, it was all more than just work. It was a direct reflection on him, and he took every aspect seriously. While many would look down on serving – regarding the position below their status – he held it in high regard.

He served quickly, smoothly, regardless of how many nooks and crannies he wedged plates into, to create a full-course balancing act. He presented the wasabi, ginger, and protein appropriately, without pause. He identified who would buy higher-end products, and sold it to them with minimum word count. He studied costs of food and beverage, to maximize profit for the business.

At grade schools and Kumbaya-corporate meetings, they use different euphemisms for this behavior. Flying colors, above and beyond, beyond the call of duty, rising to the challenge – anything you could identify with either flying or being under the influence of psychedelic drugs.

But for Martin, it was the price he paid for his pride. It was the cost of wanting – no, needing – to be the best.

Last December, I was driving in Nashville, Tennessee, and a license plate caught my eye: “Liv2Ryd.” It belonged to the rig of a trucker, carrying who knows what across state lines: beets, potatoes, migrant workers. What I couldn’t tell you about the cargo, however, I could tell you about the driver. This wasn’t a person who called the “Truck Driving School” one late, infomercial-saturated night, half-drunk on a case of Natural Ice. This person didn’t come across their position diving through classified ads, desperately searching for something to pay the bills. They did not hate their job.

This person was born and bred for the road. They loved the smell of asphalt during steamy summers, diner food, and conversation over one-more-coffee. Their cargo always arrived on time, whether they were headed to Las Vegas, Nevada or Podunk, NY. They didn’t believe in global position systems; their maps were etched into their minds, not dictated to them by a British voice from their dashboard. Snow, sleet, and flooding weren’t natural disasters or excuses. They were merely obstacles. If needed, they could drive for 48-hours straight, on nothing but some aspirin and a single shot of whiskey. Not all the time; because it was dangerous, and certainly not good for them.

But that was the price of pride. It was the cost of needing to be the best.

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“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.

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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