Zoran produced eight more right-eyed flatfish, each about 10 inches long. He produced three hirame as well—left-eyed flatfish, nearly twice as big. The students each took a small fish.
Like yellowtail, flatfish have small scales. Once more, the students had to slice the scales off before filleting the fish. Their knives kept slipping and cutting into the flesh. One of the students quit and rubbed his knife on a whetstone.
Marcos stopped, stood up straight, and let his arms flop down to his sides. He sighed. “This is so hard!”
“Anybody getting super-frustrated?” Zoran asked.
Marcos raised his hand. Kate looked up glumly. She raised hers, too. Zoran brought over the steel scouring pad he’d shown them the day before. He smiled sweetly at Kate and whispered, “Don’t tell.” She took a turn with the scouring pad first, and scrubbed her fish in the sink.
Next Zoran showed them how to clean a flatfish.
“Lots of guts and blood in this fish,” Zoran said as he cut open the belly. Blood and organs gushed into Zoran’s metal tray. Kate glanced away, but then she turned back and watched. Zoran explained how to fillet a flatfish while preserving the precious engawa—the adductor muscle along the fins.
“See this line? That’s its spine. Cut a line along the spine.” He made an incision down the midline, deepened the cut, then brought the knife around to the edge of the fish and cut repeatedly in the direction of the ribs. He pulled the flesh away from the bone a little farther with each cut. Working carefully so as not to damage the engawa, he produced four fillets—one on each side of the top, one on each side of the bottom. Flatfish, like big tubular fish, qualified for the “five-piece breakdown.”
Zoran peeled away the skin along the edge and exposed the engawa. The adductor muscle was composed of a glistening string of pale pointy capsules of transparent flesh.
The students went to work. Kate had trouble making her first incisions. She looked around. She cleared her throat.
“Zoran, could you help me?”
He strode over and picked up her triangular fillet knife. He cut one fillet for her, partway through, and handed her the knife. He smiled. “Easy, see!”
Zoran circled the room. “What do you enjoy better,” he asked, sounding cheerful, “cutting fish, making sushi, or cooking?”
“Cutting fish,” Kate said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
Zoran chuckled. He took a few more turns around the room, examining the students’ work. He returned to Kate’s station.
“Takumi’s and Kate’s fillets are the best,” Zoran said, examining Kate’s fillets over her shoulder. “Very good.”
Kate stared at Zoran’s back as he walked away.
Takumi finished filleting his karei and tried his hand at the larger hirame. He saved the heads, of course. He also rummaged through the guts of the larger fish until he located a grayish-pink organ shaped like an ear. Later, he would marinate it in sake, grind it to a paste with soy sauce, and use it as a sauce. In Japan, hirame sashimi served with the fish’s own pulverized liver is a delicacy.
Suddenly Zoran bellowed out instructions.
“In three minutes I want you ready to make kappa-maki!” he yelled. Cucumber rolls. “Come on, come on!”
Kate gritted her teeth and rushed to set up for sushi. A couple of the students ran to the refrigerator and yanked out cucumbers. Zoran snatched one and started cutting it himself. Marcos was still fidgeting with his flatfish.
“Come on, Marcos!” Zoran yelled. “The customer has just ordered kappa-maki.” No response. Zoran glared. “Earth to Marcos!” Zoran counted down. “Ten, nine, eight, seven…Go! I want two kappa-maki on your plate in three minutes!”
The students jabbed their fingers in water, clapped, and assembled rolls. Pieces of cucumber tumbled around their cutting boards. The smell of nori and vinegared rice filled the room. When they were mostly finished, Zoran interrupted them.
“Okay, stop what you’re doing,” he said. “Is your station clean? You’re going to make a California roll—one futo-maki and one ura-maki.” A big roll and an inside-out roll.
Zoran counted down again. “Ten, nine, eight, seven…Go!”
Claps punctuated the silence. Zoran circled the room, hands behind his back.
“Kate,” Zoran yelled, “needs work on cutting!”
She frowned, lowered her head, and kept working. One by one the students completed their rolls and stepped back from the table.
“How was that for a wake-up?” Zoran shouted. He surveyed the table. Suddenly he hung his head and spoke in a soft voice. “I just wanted to see you make sushi before I leave.”
During cleanup, Zoran disappeared upstairs. When he returned, he made an announcement, “There is a catering internship tomorrow. Who wants it?”
“I do!” Marcos said. He needed internship hours badly.
“Go upstairs and talk to Toshi.”
Meanwhile, Kate forced herself to sharpen her knife. Zoran hovered nearby.
When she’d finished, she changed into tight jeans and a tank top and strode out to the parking lot. She pulled a soccer ball from her Mustang and kicked it hard against the wall of the restaurant. She was frustrated with herself, and with Zoran. It seemed as if he deliberately gave her encouragement and then followed it with criticism—building her up just to knock her back down. At the same time, she knew he was trying to help her succeed. Her own shortcomings hadn’t helped things, especially when it came to her knives. On top of all that, she hadn’t heard back from Jeff about the nightclub job. She worried that Jeff didn’t think she was good enough.
Marcos came outside in his chef’s pants, a T-shirt, and bare feet. He smoked a cigarette and watched Kate bust out a repertoire of fancy soccer moves. She bounced, sprinted, and juggled the ball with her feet and knees. The top of her pink thong underwear showed above the waistline of her pants.
“Kate,” Marcos blurted out, “you should move in with me!”
Kate laughed. She suggested instead they eat lunch at her favorite Jewish deli. “We’d have to go downtown. You want to go?”
“Hell, yeah!” Marcos said.
Ten minutes later they were speeding down the freeway in the Mustang with the windows down. Kate switched on the stereo.
“I know Zoran wants me to cry,” she said over the music. “And I’m not going to.” She pursed her lips and shook her head. After a few minutes, she added, “My parents thought I was a chronic underachiever.”
“They couldn’t just call you lazy?” Marcos said. “They had to come up with some kind of medical condition?”
“Yeah!” Kate laughed. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “So what’s this catering thing tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” Marcos said. “Toshi just said there’d be famous people there.” He imagined himself on a movie set. “You want some sushi? You’re going to have to give me your number, Miss Jennifer Garner.”
Kate laughed. “She’s already knocked up!”
“Oh, yeah.” He frowned, then bobbed his head to the music. He stared out the windshield. Somewhere out there in the haze were the hills of Hollywood. “I’ve never met a movie star before.”
34
OLD GLORY
That evening, for the first time in weeks, Hama Hermosa was busy. The wait staff didn’t walk, they ran. Customers lined up in the foyer. Behind the front sushi bar, Zoran, Fie, and Tetsu—the head chef—fired sushi out into the dining room like machine gunners in a pillbox. Tetsu still resembled a bear, but not a sleepy one. He grabbed fish from the neta case like a grizzly hunting salmon in a river. Zoran worked head down, cranking out orders as fast as he could. Fie tried to keep up.
In the back room, Toshi looked happy and relaxed. He was holding court before an audience of ten customers at the back sushi bar. It was just like old times. The frenetic activity of the restaurant swirled around him. In the center of it all, Toshi was an island of cheerful calm. He took everything in, keeping watch over his cust
omers, his waitresses, and his chefs. He constructed elaborate omakase courses and refilled sake glasses. His movements were full of flourish and he radiated stage presence. Every few minutes he laughed and toasted with his customers and bellowed out commands to his staff. Frank Sinatra crooned on the sound system.
A woman sauntered into the back room with her date.
“Toshi, how are you?” she squealed.
“Beautiful!” Toshi yelled. They sat down. Toshi screamed over his shoulder. “Filipé! Towel! Towel!”
The busboy materialized with hot hand wipes.
As Toshi prepared another omakase dish, a man sitting at the bar said, “Toshi, can we have something more upbeat?”
Toshi gyrated his hips behind the bar and screamed, “Sheila! Music!”
The hostess appeared, wearing a tight red tank top with gothic script across her breasts that said, “Fuck Off.” She strutted over to the stereo. The Sinatra was replaced by pounding hip-hop. The man at the bar nodded his head to the beat. Toshi refilled the man’s glass with sake. The man wagged a finger at Toshi and shouted, “Toshi, you’re bad, bad, bad!”
Toshi grinned and raised his own glass. “Kanpai!”
The customers shouted, laughed, hugged each other, and joked with Toshi. Toshi raised his arms high over the sushi bar and rolled together sushi hand rolls in the air. His customers gazed up, mesmerized. Toshi lifted a squeeze bottle aloft and squirted sauce onto the rolls, deepening the spell.
Two women sat down at the bar with a boy about 7 or 8 years old. Toshi leaned over the fish case. He raised his eyebrows and smiled. “You like sushi?”
The boy nodded.
“Okay!” Toshi said, and squeezed him out a nigiri. He painted it with nikiri sauce and handed it across the fish case. “This is tuna!”
Toshi turned back to his other customers and thrust the sake bottle toward them. The man held up his hands. “No more!”
“One more!” Toshi yelled, his face a theatrical scowl. The man accepted. They raised their glasses. “Kanpai!”
Toshi knocked back his glass, but the man dumped his cup of sake out onto his plate. He laughed so hard his face turned red. Toshi glared at him, pointed an accusing finger, then relaxed and laughed, too.
35
SPY KIDS
Kate still needed intern hours to graduate. Zoran was teaching a half-day course for civilians on Saturday morning. She signed up to be his assistant.
The class went well. Zoran didn’t yell at her. The only downside was that after the class, Kate discovered she’d locked her keys in the car. While she was sitting on the back stairs, waiting for the AAA truck, Zoran rushed past and then stopped. He reminded her that Toshi would be away catering a movie set that night. There would be a station free at the back sushi bar. Did she want it?
Kate felt a shiver of excitement. Takumi was usually the only student allowed to serve customers behind the sushi bar during dinner, like one of the chefs. She nodded and said yes.
That evening Kate stood at her own cutting board behind the back bar, hands clasped behind her back, a nervous smile on her face, waiting for customers. The hostess seated the first few groups in front of the more experienced chefs. Then a couple in their fifties sat right in front of her. They ordered a California roll.
Suddenly Kate’s universe shrank to seaweed, rice, and fish. She built the inside-out roll, tucking it in tight. It held together. The couple seemed to like it, and they ordered another type of inside-out roll. She made that, too. Then they ordered salmon and yellowtail nigiri. She laid blocks of neta presentation-side down, as Zoran had instructed her. She sliced the fish, laid the slices presentation-side up, then squeezed the nigiri together.
Zoran was far away, working at the front bar. Next to Kate, one of the Japanese chefs kept a kindly eye on her. He threw in an order of seared toro for her couple, on the house.
The woman got the sense that Kate was a student and chatted with her. She told Kate that their son was dating a female sushi chef from Japan! Kate started to have fun. They fell into conversation, and she made them more sushi.
In the parking lot out back, Toshi, Takumi, and Marcos hosed dirt off the van for the trip to the movie set. Marcos wiped the van dry and turned to Toshi.
“Toshi, man, let’s go pick up some ladies in Hollywood!”
Toshi scowled and strode back into the kitchen. Marcos helped Toshi and Takumi load equipment into the van. Soon they were hurtling down a six-lane boulevard toward the freeway. Toshi was driving. Takumi sat in the passenger seat and Marcos sprawled on the bench seat behind them. After ten minutes Toshi turned to Takumi.
“Did you bring the rice?”
Takumi nodded. “Yes.”
Toshi sighed. “Sometimes I forget to bring the rice.”
“What do you do then?”
“We say, ‘Today’s special: sashimi.’”
Takumi laughed, then went silent. “You’re making me nervous.” He craned his neck around and peered into the back for the rice.
The men were speaking in Japanese. Behind them, Marcos was lost in his own world. He was on his way to a Hollywood movie set, where he might meet a famous actress. This was too cool. Marcos yanked his cellphone from his pocket and started dialing. He uttered a long, drawn-out, surfer-dude “Heyyyyy, man” into the phone. His voice was big inside the small van. “Yeah, dude, I’m going to, like, Hollywood to make sushi!” He pronounced it “sooooshi.”
Toshi turned in his seat and shot Marcos a glance. He looked back at the road and imitated Marcos’s surfer-dude drawl, in English.
“Heyyyyy, man,” Toshi said. He switched to Japanese. “Give me a break.”
Takumi chuckled.
Marcos dialed another number.
“Heyyyyy!” His drawl was even louder. “Yeah, I got this catering gig in L.A., and we’re, like, going to Hollywood to make sushi!”
Toshi looked at Takumi. “He’s kind of annoying.”
Marcos kept talking. “Yeah, man, I could show you guys a fucking good time out here.” Pause. “You lazy stoners.” Pause. “I’ve got another call. Okay, peace.”
Toshi snorted.
Marcos made yet another call. When he hung up, Toshi peered into the rear-view mirror and switched to English. “Heyyyyy, Marcos, you gotta stop making phone calls.”
Marcos laughed. “I gotta talk, man!”
Toshi pondered this for a minute. “Marcos, are you still in high school?”
“Yeah.”
“So you used your summer vacation for sushi school?”
“Yeah.”
They were both silent, then Marcos spoke. “Heyyyyy, Toshi, it sucks that Zoran has to leave.”
“He doesn’t like you guys.”
Marcos was surprised. “He doesn’t?”
“Just kidding.”
In the gloom ahead, Toshi could make out big white trucks, bright lights, and swarms of people. He slowed and steered the van toward the center of the hubbub. Men with walkie-talkies stopped the van and told Toshi where to park. A helicopter circled overhead. LAPD motorcycle cops stood guard.
Marcos gaped. The whole street was closed off. Gleaming vintage cars were parked along the curb. Inside one sat two men, with bright lights shining all around them. Movie cameras pointed into the car from different directions and grips bristling with tools and equipment stood around holding curtains and poles. Marcos didn’t see anyone who looked like Jennifer Garner.
Marcos and Takumi lugged the portable sushi stand from the van into a small parking lot. They navigated around stacks of dollies, clusters of tripods and lights, battered black equipment cases, and heaps of cables.
They unpacked the 25-gallon ice chest and bottles of soy sauce. Toshi noticed that their chef’s jackets were hanging open. “Do those up,” he barked.
A man strode over to Toshi. “What are you doing?”
“Making sushi for you guys.”
“Oh.” The man relaxed. “Cool. Like, California rolls and all that?�
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Toshi nodded.
Toshi surveyed the crowd of grips and technicians working in the lot, then turned to Takumi.
“Since you don’t speak English, they’re going to think this sushi is really authentic.”
They both laughed.
Three grips converged on the sushi chefs. One set up a 6-foot collapsible table. Another rigged a high-powered spotlight to illuminate it. A third lugged over an ice chest full of bottled water and deposited it on the pavement. He peered at Toshi and Takumi. “Sushi, huh?”
When they finished setting up, Takumi laid his knife case on the table and flicked it open. Marcos froze.
“Oh, man,” Marcos said. “I forgot to bring my knives.”
Toshi glared. “What a stupid idiot! My student, student of California Sushi Academy! You forgot to bring your knives to make sushi?!”
“Sorry, Toshi.”
Toshi growled. “Sensei!”
“Sorry, Sensei.”
The lot went quiet. Muted conversations simmered among the technicians. A single cricket chirped somewhere in the bushes. Another grip strode over to Toshi. “You ready?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be your first customer. A spicy tuna roll. Make me cry!”
“You got it,” Marcos said, reaching into the fish case. He assembled a cone-shaped hand roll, his movements tentative. A man with white hair approached.
“Wow, sushi. When are you going to be ready?”
“Now,” Toshi said. “What do you want?”
“Everything,” the man laughed. “This is only the third night in a row I’ve had sushi!” The man peered over the fish case at Marcos. “A blond guy making sushi?”
Suddenly the sushi stand was mobbed. Men and women of all shapes, sizes, and ethnicities threw out orders for nigiri and hand rolls. Toshi and Marcos both worked furiously. As soon as Marcos had served one person, there was another waiting—a woman in shorts carrying a hammer, a man in slacks wearing a leather jacket, a black guy in a Hawaiian shirt and sweatpants, an Asian guy with an eye patch. They streamed in from all over the set.
The Story of Sushi Page 21
