Jiro Dreams of Sushi

The tasting menu is built like a concerto. Jiro spent ten years working out how to structure a full course, arriving at a three-movement shape: classic items like tuna and kohada open the meal, a middle stretch of seasonal daily catches follows like an improvisation, and sea eel, a pickled-gourd roll, and egg close it out as a fixed finale.

Ten seats, no menu, thirty thousand yen. Sukiyabashi Jiro seats ten people in a Tokyo subway station basement and serves one omakase course a night — no à la carte, no substitutions.

Every vendor at Tsukiji specializes in one thing. Jiro buys tuna only from the tuna specialist, shrimp only from the shrimp specialist, rice only from a dealer who — by his own account — turns down other restaurants that ask for the same grade.

Ten years of towel-wringing before you touch a fish. Apprentices spend a decade on the most menial tasks before Jiro lets them near real preparation; making the tamagoyaki correctly is treated as a rite of passage in its own right.

Rice is served at body temperature, on purpose. The restaurant developed its own technique for holding the vinegared rice at that exact temperature through service, since Jiro considers the rice-to-fish balance the single most important part of the sushi.

Tuna stocks are declining, and Jiro says so on camera. The one substitution he can't imagine making is tuna itself — everything else in the sea, he says, might need a substitute eventually; tuna, he doesn't think so.