Chapter 1 Part 2/4: From Fryers to Functional Fluency

Shigeki was probably between 50 and 60, but looked more like 45, had two wisps of gray hair on each side of his otherwise bald and fairly large head, sunken light-brown eyes, and wore a pressed chef’s coat, clean chef’s pants (unthinkable among cooks) and black Reebok high-tops, and smoked lots and lots and lots and lots of Marlboro Lights. He was like a hip mix between the Buddha and a Japanese Yoda, except raunchier.

Shigeki spoke understandable but accented English in a stern but deliberate tone that made me think he felt he had to be a hard-ass because he was Japanese and the chef. He seemed to have money and was close enough to retiring that he really didn’t care whether the restaurant succeeded in the long run, but was going to at least do a good job while he was there.

He, like many chefs, was an alcoholic, and made a habit of sitting at the sushi bar after closing with a bottle of Jack Daniel's chain smoking, telling dirty jokes in funny English, and sexually harassing the female wait staff. He often would rub leftover raw fish on himself before leaving at night so he could tell his wife he had been fishing when he went out to cheat on her. This always seemed dumb to me because he already smelled like raw fish anyway from the whole working in the sushi bar thing and because there really was nowhere to fish in Wilmington late at night, but what did I know.

We all got copies of the menu, and headed immediately back to the kitchen to learn to cook Japanese food. We started with various soy-based sauces, salads, tempura, miso soup and appetizers, and took notes while we learned each dish. During this process, which lasted around two weeks of a hundred hours each for certain members of the staff, Shigeki attempted to indoctrinate a mostly non-Japanese sushi bar and kitchen staff in the fundamentals of Japanese cuisine and knife skills. This was evidently a frustrating task, and on several occasions he walked through the kitchen summarily firing people.

Some of this was because some of the people were lazy, some of it was because some of the stuff was just hard. Take julienned daikon (Japanese radish), sengiri daikon in Japanese. The way this is done at the sushi bar is to take a razor-sharp 12-inch sashimi knife, cut the daikon into hand-length segments, hold one of the segments in the non-cutting hand, and rotate the blade around the segment using only the tension of the thumb in the cutting hand to produce a translucent-thin band of daikon which is then layered on top of itself and finely julienned. It was in detailed tasks like this learned through prolonged dedication (not in a ten-day crash course) that I first gained an appreciation of Japanese craftsmanship.

Shigeki also had a wonderful collection of Engrish tag lines he used to yell at people: "When you make, always make nice one!" "When you cut, cut smooooth!" and the his favorite, "I told you!" Not at least half smiling while getting yelled at was always a chore.

The only other Japanese member of the staff was an another Japanese guy who acted as the sous chef of the sushi bar. He spoke next to no English, and as none of the rest of the staff, including myself at the time, spoke any Japanese to ask him his name, everyone called him “the old guy.” He was a little more than five feet tall, wore the sushi chef get-up and paper hat cocked to one side of his head, and was the second Japanese person with whom I became acquainted.

I still remember his reaction when I read to him out loud some of the ingredients listed on a can of the Japanese spice shichimi -- like something had bitten him in the ass. This would be a reaction I would come to grow used to over the coming years.

The old guy would occasionally venture back into the kitchen from the sushi bar to make the tamago, the sweetened fried egg that accompanies sushi platters. The cooking of the tamago was the most difficult individual culinary skill I witnessed in my two years as a line cook. It involves heating a square, inch-deep copper pan to a high enough temperature to cook a thin layer of egg without having it stick to the pan but not so high as to brown the egg, folding over exactly half of the cooked layer with chopsticks, re-greasing the pan and repeating the process while maintaining the same temperature, until you are left with a half-pan "mille–feuille" of egg which is then cooled and sliced for service.

The less brown in the finished product the more skilled the chef, and tamago is traditionally ordered at the sushi bar to judge the overall quality of the establishment. I tried making it once when no one was around, and the overall quality of the establishment would have been judged to be quite low had it been served.

I spent probably close to six months working as a line cook at Mikimoto’s, and it was quite enjoyable. I again made friends with all of the Mexican kitchen staff, watched the Chinese cooks fight over the eyes when they made ginger-steamed fish heads for staff lunch (the cheek meat actually is the best part of the fish, apparently) and hooked up with at least one of the waitresses in the side parking lot.

I learned from Shigeki how to cook Japanese food, the Japanese no-nonsense approach to work, and, in retrospect, exactly what not to say to Japanese girls. And while I continued to take Japanese classes and annoy Shigeki with questions on Japanese grammar, at this point I still enjoyed cooking as much or more than my language major. As I couldn’t settle on which direction to go in, for the moment I decided to keep going in both.