Just wrapped up an amazing guided dinner for six at the sushi bar, and the chef and I received a phenomenal compliment from a British gentleman who was part of the group. “In my 20-plus years here,” he said, “this has been one of the great New York nights.”
Last night’s Sushi Concierge dinner in D.C. featured a cut-open nigiri of salt-cured king prawn, under which, between the prawn and the rice, the chef had tucked a dab of the prawn’s own tomalley, augmented with white miso. I love opening people’s eyes to the imagination and technique that a good sushi chef is capable of bringing to the cuisine—if we know how to ask for it. Sushi chefs are like jazz musicians, waiting to be heard.
(Photo courtesy of Gourmet Traveller.)
“I was skeptical,” he later admitted. “What could this guy teach me about sushi that I didn’t already know?” Jack’s daughter-in-law, who’d arranged the dinner, was holding her breath.
Jack had been eating at fine sushi bars for decades, and he was already familiar with many of the etiquette tips that frequently come as news to sushi lovers. But I worked hard to win Jack over with my arsenal of insider sushi knowledge, and at the end of the meal he clapped me on the shoulder. “You passed the test!”
Phew. What Jack liked was that now he knew the whys behind his approach to eating sushi. And he discovered that with this additional knowledge, he’d now been able to appreciate higher levels of the chef’s skill and savor some of the best sushi he’d ever encountered.
This morning Jack’s daughter-in-law emailed me in thanks: “You were a true gem!” That certainly was a nice compliment to receive, but I couldn’t do my educational part of it without the exquisite culinary mastery of the chefs who collaborate so patiently with me and my clients.
One the treats Jack and his family enjoyed last night was the unusual delicacy of nigiri topped with a handful of tiny white shrimp from Japan’s Toyama Bay (pictured above; live shrimp at left). Just one of the many examples of real sushi that most chefs won’t prepare for you—partly because it’s painstaking work, and partly because it can take a degree of sophistication to appreciate, which for a chef can make it a risky item to serve. I consider it part of my job to help bridge that divide.
Undergoing an organ transplant can change everything; for one young man I met last year, the consequences of his upcoming lung transplant would include a restriction against eating raw fish for the rest of his life. With that in mind, his friends organized a Sushi Concierge dinner for him last fall, and I had the singular honor of presiding over his “last supper” of sushi, forever.
I just learned that last week he underwent the surgery for his double lung replacement. A friend of his told me that a few days before the operation, they were reminiscing about that great final meal of sushi.
The operation looks to have been a success. What wonderful news, and a most welcome reminder that, as easy as it is to become obsessed with pleasures like sushi, there is so much more to life.
The blogger Gastro Chic showed up to attend one of my recent “Sushi Concierge” dinner lectures and has just posted a lovely, detailed review of the evening. She writes:
Before you sharpen those chopsticks (a sushi bar no-no, by the way), settle down and have a sushi meal as it would have been eaten by a Japanese connoisseur 70 or 80 years ago. What’s not on the throwback menu may surprise you: no tuna, no hamachi, no yellowtail and no unagi. But what about toro, supposedly the king of the sushi bar? Nope. Corson explained that despite the hype, toro is actually a very recent addition to the sushi menu …
Photo by Gastro Chic.
Feeling happy this morning: Last night I hosted a private dinner at Jewel Bako for a gentleman named Eric and his wife Michelle, to celebrate her birthday. They were both pretty experienced sushi eaters, but Michelle in particular had been playing it safe over the years.
To Eric’s great delight, Michelle ended up trying things Eric had been encouraging her to try for a long time: her first raw shrimp, her first raw scallop, her first piece of raw octopus, and her first saltwater eel. And, for two people who didn’t like mackerel, they both ended up complimenting the chef on a special old-fashioned mackerel preparation.
At the end of the meal, Michelle said that with someone there to talk over the menu in Japanese with the chef, explain everything as it was served, and build her trust in the chef and the ingredients, she’d felt more confident getting out of her comfort zone. Success!
This is why I love being a Sushi Concierge, it’s gratifying. Even Eric, the more experienced one, commented that he was taking away a list of new things he’d learned about the cuisine and eating at the sushi bar.
The only trouble, as Eric complained to me at the end, was that “now it’s going to be awfully hard to go back to eating our regular sushi.”
Being a sushi guidance counselor is hard work—last night I hosted a nearly 3-hour dinner for ten guests (okay, I admit they were delightful) at my Monday-night dinner class series at Jewel Bako restaurant. But there are some perks. I don’t get to eat during the meal, but the maître d’ wouldn’t let me leave without taking a box of sushi home myself. Score.
The sushi in the picture—what the maître d’ insisted on sending me home with in a box, so I couldn’t really argue with him when I opened it up back home—is a more standard fare compared with the Sushi Concierge menu that I arrange for my guests and clients, which skews away from the tunas and fattier farmed fish towards lighter, leaner, and more traditional ingredients, which—bonus—tend to be more healthful and, though not perfectly so, often more sustainable, too.
What a great way to end the day. Hungry?
