After spending damn near half a year fucking off after getting fired from the Steakhouse and bumming from every relative and friend I could possibly muster up the courage to ask for money, I decided to get back to work. My arrogance never went away at my previous job I just was able to put it on the back-burner because I truly did enjoy working there. I’d heard about a new Japanese restaurant opening up in Downtown and I figured I’d give that a shot. At that point in time all I knew about Japanese cuisine is that I liked to eat it, boy was I in for a surprise.
I never quite saw the importance of using quality ingredients. I was still stuck in the mindset that oranges, no matter what shape, size, or origin, were just oranges. I’d walked past this place Atleast 100 times over the course of 10 years. I’d always read the menu they had posted outside of the restaurant and it never failed for me to find atleast one item and immediately think to myself “what the hell is _______”? Togarashi for example, I hadn’t the slightest clue what that was when I started my ventures into Japanese culture and by the end of it all I was pouting that delicious reddish colored powder on everything I ate.
At first they stuck me on the wok. Of course my arrogant ass thought it would be a piece of cake, that is until I caught my arm on fire and burnt a plate of soba noodles. Eventually I got the hang of it and then they suddenly switched me to the sushi bar. Now this was a high quality Sushi restaurant with delicacies from all over Japan that you wouldn’t find at your typical strip mall sushi joint. Now I’ve always been a fatass and never turned down food but some of the stuff we had seasonally I was even skeptical to try. Uni was one of them. Uni is the membrane (meat) inside of a sea urchin. It was $28 for one tiny piece and most people ordered 6 or more like it was nothing. To me it looked and smelled disgusting and not to be grotesque but it had a faint similarity to cat vomit. Needless to say it took me years before I finally tried it.
Originally when they moved me to sushi I thought I would get to learn how to learn all sorts of things when in reality my sole purpose was to make rice. The word “Sushi” literally translates to “rice with vinegar” and frankly that’s all it was. While making the rice I learned that true sushi chefs in Japan spend something like 10 years perfecting the art of making rice. It takes them almost 25 years of being the right hand man to a sushi chef go even earn the title of being called a sushi chef themselves. So what does that make me then? The sushi bitch, I guess. Little did I know big things were coming for me in the most unsuspecting way.
A Chef's Journey 