Anyone who knows me knows I am a huge fan of Anthony Bourdain. From his books to his various shows, adventures in street meat and 3 star Michelin restaurants, I get a vicarious kick outta this guy. I was watching "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" this past week, and Bourdain was a guest on this particular episode.
The host asked: "If you could have one last meal, where would it be?"
Bourdain said "Jiro's."
I had just watched the movie "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" earlier that day, and was somehow not surprised.
The movie is about 85-year-old Jiro, a sushi chef, a master, and his lifetime of striving for perfection. It showed his demanding approach to ingredients, to preparation, to planning for his customers' visit, to actual execution. Bourdain, who loves Tokyo, had visited the restaurant as part of filming his tv series in 2008, and it obviously left an impression on him.
But back to Jiro for a moment. Here is a man who had a very short childhood, with little to no relationship with his father. He started working as a child, and spent virtually his entire life making sushi. I don't know where his desire for perfection came from. Maybe having had so little, he found solace in the simplicity of the act of making sushi. His three sons had been raised not to go to college, not to become engineers or doctors, but to follow Jiro in making sushi. It was as if he knew and wanted nothing else, and assumed the same for his children.Jiro said "I have spent 75 years doing the same job every day and I have never not loved doing it."When I heard that, I actually felt a bit sick to my stomach - I could in no way imagine doing the same job for that long. But there was a slight subtlety here - the film had two sets of subtitles and while one used the term "job", the other used "craft".Ahhh, the craft. The OED defines craft as: an activity involving skill in making things by hand. Sushi is definitely made by hand, so it involves skill of some sort. I certainly could make sushi by following an SOP but it would be pretty pathetic. I wouldn't know how to find the best ingredients, even with a decent buying guide. I could make the rice or the egg (tamago) from a recipe but it would be sub-par and I probably wouldn't enjoy eating it myself, let alone serving it to others.How long would it take to develop a reasonable competence in a new skill, such as making sushi? Probably years. How is a reasonable competence assessed? Assured? When is "good enough" and who decides that? We usually say it is the customer who determines "good enough", but for Jiro, he was the judge. I think this is an important point. We are trusted by our customers to make the decision of "good enough" on behalf of them. We are the judges. And if we aren't our own toughest judges, our own harshest critics, then how will we not disappoint our customers? By striving for perfection, even if true perfection is unattainable, at least we hope we can be satisfied with our work. And by extension, we hope our customers will be satisfied as well.From "Kitchen Confidential": "Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman - not an artist."Art has its time and place, where beauty is in the eye of the (individual) beholder. But there is always room to improve your craft, whatever it may be.
AMac
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