🍣🍿 Jiro Dreams of Sushi

A portrait of Jiro Ono, eighty-five when it was filmed, who runs a ten-seat sushi counter in a Tokyo underground station that held three Michelin stars. He has made the same thing for most of a century and is still, by his own account, trying to get it right. His two sons work in his shadow, one of them at the next board.

Watched after lunch on the Sunday, the day after 🗓️ Birthday dinner at Salt & Ember, with a taped finger resting on a cushion. Good timing by accident: I had just spent an evening at Emil Reuter's counter watching him do one thing at a time.

What stayed is not the fish. It is the apprentice and the egg. He makes the sweet omelette for months, hundreds of attempts, every one rejected, and when one is finally accepted he cries. Nobody in the film thinks this is excessive. The rice supplier will not sell his best rice to a hotel because, he says, they would not know how to cook it.

This is 🧭 Craft with nothing added: repetition, a standard that does not move, and attention paid to things a customer will never see, such as how long the octopus was massaged.

It is also nothing like how I work. I ship twelve things a quarter to a tolerable standard and call the tolerance pragmatism.

I told Emil about it on the Thursday. He has seen it four times and said the egg is the truest thing in it.

Watched With: Jonas Reuter

• The egg, near the middle. The reason to watch.
• The fish market at dawn: every dealer is a specialist in exactly one animal.
• The seating plan: he notes which guests are left-handed and places the sushi accordingly.
• The younger son's own restaurant, a mirror image of his father's because he is left-handed too.