Sushi can rightly be called the top most designer food in the word, it is a Japanese food consisting of cooked vinegared rice (shari) combined with other ingredients (neta), usually raw fish or other seafood. I had the pleasure of eating Sushi first time at an upscale Japanese restaurant in Delhi, and the taste was something quite unique and peculiar than what my palate had ever experienced before. It was one of my good friend cum mentor and his girlfriend, who are obsessively inclined towards the Orient, who introduced me to such a delight to relish.
This post is not about sushi but the art of sushi, which I came to appreciate and was mesmerized by in this beautiful documentary called Jiro Dreams of Sushi, directed by David Gelb. The story focusses around Jiro, a 85 year old world class and proclaimed as the greatest Sushi chef and his art of making sushi. David Gelb's Jiro Dreams of Sushi is indeed a definitive work of art on food and food making. This 81 minute documentary focuses on the daily ebb and flow of work in Sukiyabashi Jiro: a minuscule, ten-seat, three-Michelin-star sushi restaurant in the Ginza district of Chuo, Tokyo. The place is run by father and son pair Jiro Ono and Yoshikazu Ono. To sum up the movie, it is basically Jiro lives to make sushi, and sushi exists to be made by Jiro. Jiro comes across as a Master Musician and an opera conductor working on his piece and his artistic and creative genius no less as compared to Mozart or Vivaldi.
The movie is a meditation on art, artistic genius and yearning for perfection seen through the prism of a master chef a relentless man, who is totally immersed in his art and yearns for constant improvement with his every next work. The detailing, strategy, repetition, focus, passion and energy, the man devotes is inspirational, admirable and also, painstaking difficult. What percentage of a genius is comprised of intuition and experience, is one of the important question which the film throws up. A man at such an age enjoying his work or art is a delight to watch. One of the important sub text of the film that constantly hovers is that one day the reins of power will have to change and the restaurant will be taken over by Yoshikazu, his eldest son. The relationship between the father and the son transcends boundaries of kinship into a relationship of master and apprentice, artist and admirer and even competitive rivals.
I have never been an avid follower of Cookery Shows and never indulge myself in the food porn of Master Chef and TLC shows, but this sweet little insightful documentary was indeed a revelation in the art of food and food making. I would suggest anybody who enjoys eating or cooking, has to watch this gem. Here is the entire film...Watch the Bruce Lee of Chefs!
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