- What I would say to my mentors back in Japan,
(speaking in Japanese)
Good evening, welcome, how are you?
I grew up in Virginia,
northern Virginia, suburban Washington D.C.
I grew up eating pretty much what everybody else eats,
SpaghettiOs and macaroni and cheese.
Being a foreigner living and working in Japan,
especially in a traditional industry like that,
you're helpless at first, kind of like an infant.
This is okoze,
called goblin fish or scorpion fish or stonefish.
And then, you kind of go through
an adolescence or teenager year
where you're kind of rebelling against it
and then, you go to the point
where you realize that rebelling against it
isn't helping you at all,
and then, you're basically an adult.
These spines are venomous.
There are these little poison sacs
along the side of the spine.
It'll sit along the sea floor
with these spines up to protect itself.
You kind of have to, if you just graze it with your fingers,
you probably won't get any venom,
but if you stab yourself, it injects the venom.
Even when it's not alive anymore, it will inject the venom.
And this guy won't kill you but it's very painful.
There's some thrill about eating something
that's trying to kill you back.
I actually did fugu before I did okoze.
So, I was kind of over the poisonous fish nervousness
by that point.
But really, the danger is really
to the fishermen and the chef
more than it is to the diner with this fish.
So the first thing you do is to get the spines out
by cutting down on each side.
All right, I'm going to have to move fairly quickly
'cause we don't have a lot of time.
So first you got to get the eyes out, then the guts.
Oh, this one has eggs, which is nice.
My first day at Kikunoi (chuckling).
So, Kikunoi is kind of famous in Japan
for being a really, really hard place to work.
But I didn't know that.
We'll serve more than 100, 150 people for dinner,
which is large in Japan.
It's very traditional kaiseki,
so you learn a lot of traditional techniques
across all of Japanese cuisine,
not just say, sushi or tempura or something like that.
You learn the whole breadth of technique, which is great.
The first Michelin guide came out in Kyoto in 2008,
I think it was.
And they got three stars,
and they've kept the three stars since then.
Chef Murata is passionate about showing
what's incredible about Japanese cuisine
and spreading it around the world.
That's probably the reason why they let me in.
They told me 16 hour days, which was actually not true.
It's more than that.
I wasn't ready for that.
I wanted an immersive, tough experience
but nobody's prepared for that.
Most of the kids who go there quit in the first two weeks.
These are Japanese kids, of course,
coming from top-level cooking schools,
or were the children of famous chefs.
And they quit in two weeks, most of them.
I've done a lot of octopus,
and this is the only way I've ever done it, so.
Let me get some of that ink off.
And these are the eggs of the octopus.
Here, you can see where the membrane is broken,
you can see the individual eggs,
they're very small, very tasty.
This is a coarse, flake-style sea salt.
You don't want to use like, kosher salt
'cause it'll give it a strange flavor.
I think after about six months, your body kind of adjusts,
and it gets little easier in terms of physically.
And then, you start to get more responsibilities
and then it gets tough again.
I think not knowing what's going on so much,
and not understanding when I was being chewed out
in Japanese, at least at first,
kind of helped me, maybe to stick it out.
I ended up staying there almost seven years.
I probably didn't settle in until about my sixth year,
in terms of not just the language
but also just fitting in in the social environment at work.
Now this octopus is squeaky clean.
All the slime is out and we cut into pieces.
And you can either leave the siphon on the
tentacles, I'd take it off,
I'd take it off and butterfly open the head,
and then split the tentacles starting here at the back.
And this one's already had the beak removed in Japan.
So, they'll kind of attack each other
and you'll get this like,
bite marks if they don't remove the beak, so.
(thudding)
It's almost like, if you give someone a massage,
kind of like, a deep massage,
and you kind of feel that there's knots in their muscles,
that's what it feels like.
(tapping)
This is zarame.
This is basically a Japanese version
of demerara or turbinado sugar.
It's a raw sugar or washed sugar from southern Japan,
where they do sugarcane production.
You put in the tentacles
by kind of dipping them and pulling them out a little bit,
and dipping them and pulling them out.
And that's to get a nice curl on the tentacle.
Then the head can go in too.
After working in Kikunoi for seven years,
I was thinking of coming back to the United States,
but I realized that in the U.S.,
sushi is by far the most important Japanese cuisine.
Just to have the professional skill,
I wanted to train in sushi for at least a few more years.
So I went to Tokyo and trained at Sushi Aoki in Ginza
for another three years before I came back.
Kaiseki in Kyoto, is not just a tasting menu.
It's a cultural experience.
And it's plugged into all these cultural
and craft elements in Kyoto.
And then you go to Tokyo,
and it's more like a restaurant here,
where you're trying to just put together a meal
that makes people happy.
It's nowhere near as demanding.
I think what makes the menu here at Shoji
different from other omakase restaurants
is it's a combination
of the kaiseki and sushi.
So that tai has got to be 10 years old, I'd say, maybe 13.
For tai, there's kind of sweet spot
at about two and a half kilos,
where if it's too small, it doesn't have enough fat.
And if it's too big, it's still good
but you get a little bit less yield
because the tendons get larger
and you can't use the parts
that have a lot of tendons in them.
This is kohada, gizzard shad.
You sort of have to go through learning,
not just the language but you know, body language,
and what's expected of you in the workplace in Japan,
which is totally different from here.
Work in Japan is your life.
When in Western culture, I think, in general,
I know in America, you can mimic, you can mirror people.
And it'll get you a lot of places
that if you feel uncomfortable in a social situation
or you don't know how to act,
if you mirror the person you're with, it's a good guide.
In Japan, it's a very bad thing to do.
The thing is, in Japan, it's hierarchical.
So every relationship,
you're either above or below somebody for the most part,
especially at work.
If say, a chef is telling you something to do
and you mirror even their body language, that's very bad.
I mean, if they know that you don't know what you're doing,
they might put up with it.
But most of them would be just furious.
Also, once you get some responsibility
and you're responsible for some of the younger cooks,
if you mirror the way they talk to you,
they'll assume that you're below them,
and they won't listen to you
and they'll actually start talking down to you.
You have to learn how to act in different situations,
and you have to think
what you're supposed to be doing in that situation.
There's so many different kinds of eel around the world.
As far as Japanese food goes,
there's three major ones that you eat.
There's the anago, the unagi, and the hamo,
which is this guy.
Hamo is a kind of eel,
it's sea eel but it's not the normal sea eel, anago.
It has the same richness that eel has,
but it also tastes like a white-flesh fish.
In western Japan,
people are passionate about it during the summer.
If you go there,
you'll have it a thousand different ways every place you go.
Hamo is not just a great fish
in terms of its quality and its flavor,
but it's a great achievement in Japanese cuisine.
It took a lot of ingenuity and skill
to develop a technique to make hamo edible.
After I learned how to do it,
I didn't want that skill to be a dead-end.
And I want to pass it along
to the people that work here also.
All the eel are funny.
It's not like a normal fish.
It's more like an animal
that then went back into the ocean or something,
and lost its legs.
This one is from Awaji-shima, Awaji Islands,
which is off of Osaka.
There's sort of a strait between Kyushu
and the main island and Shikoku.
And it's very nutrient-rich
but also fast-moving ocean currents.
And all the fish from there,
are particularly fatty but not flabby
because they have to be athletic
to survive in the fast currents.
It's one of the best places for fish in the whole world.
On the inside, eels smell like an animal
smells on the inside.
They don't smell like a fish smells on the inside,
particularly hamo.
This part looks kind of normal compared to a regular fish.
But instead of taking off the whole filet,
we're going to butterfly it.
And this part is different.
You come from this side.
And this is the kind of part, the difficult part
'cause it's very thin.
And you don't have a whole lot.
Okay, that was the first difficult part,
getting out the backbone.
The ribs are also difficult to remove.
Well, the hardest thing is cutting the bones
because you have to cut through the flesh,
through the bones, but not through the skin.
And the bones are hard, they're calcified.
They're not soft like some other eel bones are.
But you need a very thick, heavy knife
to get through the bones.
You know, it's almost like playing the violin.
You have to learn how to do it step by step.
The knife is a honekiri-bocho,
which means bone-cutting knife.
So this is the bone-cutting knife.
If you look at the edge, you can see it's quite thick,
about a quarter-inch thick.
It's heavy and there's no weight in the handle.
The handle is just wood.
It's basically weighted like a machete.
And you need that weight to get through the bones.
(cracking)
You're hearing the bones
cutting through.
Yeah right there, there's about 10 bones.
So, maybe 80 rows of six bones.
So, hundreds of bones.
You want to cut about every millimeter or two,
and that makes the bones small enough
that you won't notice them.
Even if you're not serving hamo itself,
the muscle control that you need to do it,
is an important training step when you're becoming a chef.
I think what makes the menu here at Shoji
different from other omakase restaurants
is it's a combination of kaiseki and sushi.
I wanted to learn Japanese cuisine,
but I wanted to learn it in a way and to an extent
that no one had done before.
So I needed to do something that nobody had done before.
This is okoze, sliced very thin.
A little bit of its skin has been blanched
and is in the middle.
If I were doing French cooking,
I could work five days a week and 12 hours a day.
But no, I'm doing Japanese cooking,
so I have to work six days a week, 18 hours a day.
So this is the hassun,
which contrasts something from the ocean
and something from the mountain.
This octopus is from Sajima island in Tokyo Bay,
poached until tender.
And new potatoes from Hudson Valley
with snap pea, also from Hudson Valley.
Hamo with bainiku, which is pureed pickled plum.
You have to really, really want to do it.
You have to be passionate about it or you're gonna quit
'cause it's so difficult.
I kind of couldn't quit, even if I wanted to.