AAD 250: Art and Human Values, Fall 2013, Scott Huette

In this article, “What it’s like to eat at the world’s best sushi bar?”, Dan Shapiro has the honor and pleasure of meeting the legendary Jiro Ono, the worlds best sushi chef. Jiro Ono, an 86 year old Tokyo native, runs his sushi restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro tucked away in the basement of the Ginza Metro station. Sukiyabashi Jiro is also the first sushi restaurant in the world to receive three Michelin stars. Jiro is so well respected and renown that in order to eat at his restaurant you must set up a reservation at least three months in advance, or in other words the waiting list is at least three months long! Not only will you have to wait an eternity to just to eat here but you better have deep pockets as well because it’ll cost you ¥30,000, which is roughly $375. I also forgot to mention that he requires cash only, and if for some reason you are not able to attend your reservation there is an ¥15,000 cancellation penalty. Both the price of the meal and the duration you have to wait to eat at Sukiyabashi Jiro pretty much puts it in perspective how popular Jiro is around the world. There is also a documentary about Jiro and his passion for sushi on Netflix, “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”, which is also one of the more popular documentaries. However, instead of watching this hour and a half documentary of food porn, Shapiro decided to make a reservation and travel all the way to Tokyo to be fully immersed and experience Sukiyabashi Jiro in person. Just as he suspected, Shapiro was not disappointed and Jiro Ono lived up to his hype as sushi master of the world. Shapiro documents his experience in timeline fashion, explaining each of the 19-piece sushi courses that Jiro Ono presents. Shapiro also notes that all of the sushi that Jiro Ono makes is hand picked by Jiro himself from the local Tsukiji fish market and that he uses a special grade of rice, which is made available only to him. Shapiro goes into great detail about each dish that is served to him but I will keep it brief. After Shapiro puts down his first dish, Karei (sole) nigiri, it is instantly apparent to him that Chef Jiro has intentionally designed a custom menu to give him an experience the will not forget. The first dish is followed by a series of more nigiri containing a variety of seafood such as tuna, squid, gizzard shad, ark shell clam, salmon row, octopus, prawn, and so on. Shapiro notes that every new dish compliments the flavors of the last one. Each piece of nigiri is lightly brushed with a soy sauce glaze and sits atop a two-inch bed of rice. Shapiro finished off his dinner experience with Tamago, a sweet egg that supposedly tastes like sponge cake. In the end Shapiro is blown away by the experience and labels it as priceless.

To me, this article pretty much proves my statements in my earlier posts, claiming that food can definitely be art. In the reading we were assigned, “Food As Art”, Telfer states that part of what classifies something as art is that it must be aesthetically pleasing “an artifact primarily intended for aesthetic consideration” (pg. 5).  Well, this is exactly what Jiro and other renown chefs across the fine dining world intend to do. Jiro doesn’t only care about how good his sushi tastes, he also cares how it is presented. For instance, one of Shapiro’s responses to one of the nigiri dishes was “its shiny silver and blue-spotted skin are so picturesque that I momentarily pause in awe before popping this bite in my mouth”. In this article Shapiro also posted pictures of each course and I can tell you that each piece of nigiri was made with passion and the intention of looking beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. But this is not solely unique to Chef Jiro, it is the goal of every top chef around the world to blow you away with the presentation of each course. I know this personally because I’ve had the pleasure of working with two cooks that have cooked at Eleven Madison Park, which is one of the best restaurants into world, and every meal the cooked for me and my crew was not presented in a way like your mom would. A lot of thought went into placement of the protein in comparison to the sides. Every dish was aesthetically pleasing, to me they were works of art that also happen to be delicious.

Sources:

1. Tefler, E. (2002). Food as Art. In Neill, A. & Riley, A. (eds.) Arguing About Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates (2nd ed., Chap. 2). New York, NY: Routledge.

2.Shapiro, D. (May 3, 2012) What it’s like to eat at the worlds best sushi bar? [CNN]. http://travel.cnn.com/tokyo/eat/whats-it-eat-sukiyabashi-jiro-worlds-best-sushi-bar-282966