The Ramen King and I (4 page)

Even then, it was just an inkling. I told the sushi chef:

“I like your fish. I like your rice. But what I love is that I can taste the relationship between your fish and your rice.”

The chef stopped what he was doing. Then he put down his knife and stared at me. He introduced himself.

“My name is Tetsuo,” he said. Motioning to the waitress, he added, “This is my wife, Junko.”

Junko smiled warmly now. “Nice to meet you.”

When I told them my name, Tetsuo shared that he and Junko were originally from Kobe, and that they had opened Hamako in 1984.

“Those were the days,” he lamented. “Japanese businessmen on expense accounts were always stopping by. A business card was all the sign we needed.”

“Where did you learn Japanese?” Junko asked.

I told her about studying at International Christian University, and how, after business school, I worked as a management consultant for six months in Fukuoka Prefecture, on the southern island of Kyushu.

Tetsuo screamed again, but this time it was at Junko.

I wondered if I had misunderstood. Because the meaning of what I thought I heard was, “Go ahead and register him!”

I had not misunderstood, because right after that, Junko walked over to the telephone and pulled out a small notebook. She opened the book, waving a ballpoint pen in the air.

“What did you say your name was?” she asked.

I repeated it.

“Hmm,” Junko said. “We already have a regular customer named Andy.”

She thought for a moment.

“I know. We’ll give you a nickname. We’ll call you Hakata Andy.”

Hakata is the city in Fukuoka Prefecture where I worked as a management consultant.

Junko closed the notebook and clasped her hands together.

“Hakata Andy,” she said, “now you can make a reservation.”

 

 

W
hen I got home I logged on to Chowhound and wrote about the visit to Hamako. I noted agreement with the previous entry about the monkfish liver—not pasty like at other places—and heaped praise on a piece of
mirugai
that was still squirming as it slid down my throat. I bragged about getting the nickname and being able to make reservations.

The subtext of my post was, “I am totally in with Tetsuo and Junko.”

Before my second visit, I called ahead and said it was Hakata Andy. I made a reservation at the counter, and when I arrived, table-bound patrons stared enviously as Junko ushered me toward Tetsuo’s station.

“Hakata Andy!” he said.

I ordered
omakase
, even though I didn’t have a picture of my five starving children. Over the course of an hour, Tetsuo threw sixteen pieces of sushi—including abalone, oyster, and squid with
shiso
leaf—onto the wood tray in front of me.

In
Shota’s Sushi
, when a contestant in the All-Tokyo Rookie Sushi Chef Competition serves a truly great piece of
nigiri
, the next few frames in the comic depict the judges in various states of sushi bliss. Their eyes bulge and their mouths pucker. They look possessed. Then they’re shown hovering over an ocean, as if the sushi has transported them there. Images of shrimps, lobsters, fish, or whatever else they’ve just eaten spin around their heads. While savoring a particularly fine piece of
uni
, one the comic’s judges finds himself hurtling through outer space. “It’s like I’m flying in a universe of amazing sea urchin flavor!” he exclaims.

It wasn’t quite like that at Hamako, and shortly before I asked for the check, I found out one reason why.

“Hakata Andy,” Tetsuo said, “I am about to give you the second-best piece of fatty tuna you will eat in your life.”

With that, he reached his pudgy hand over the glass case and dropped a soft mound of pinkish flesh onto my tray. I pondered the tuna, chopsticks in hand, for some time before gathering enough courage to ask the obvious question.

“How come not first best?”

Tetsuo did not look up from his work.

“You’re not ready yet,” he said.

There are many people who would refuse to patronize a restaurant in which they’re expected to earn the chef’s highest-quality cuisine. What I learned on my first night at the Hamako counter was that I was not one of them. Rather, I committed to becoming Tetsuo’s sushi disciple. I submitted to his will, devoting months to learning his rules. Still I couldn’t help but wonder: What was it about me that made me want to be worthy of first-best fatty tuna?

The biggest challenge early on was appreciating the holy status of the counter. One day a former business school classmate called to say that he was in town from Tokyo and wanted to get together for dinner. He had to wake up early the next morning to catch a bus to Yosemite National Park, so I called Hamako and asked for a reservation at six thirty—right when the restaurant opened.

“I guess you’ll be sitting at a table, then,” Junko said.

“Can’t we sit at the counter?”

“No. The sushi counter opens at seven o’clock.”

It wasn’t clear what she and Tetsuo had to do to “open” the sushi counter. I thought about it and wondered if the policy was Tetsuo’s way of showing that he valued himself. It was as if he were telling customers, “If you want to spend time with me, make it prime time. Don’t be scheduling me in.”

There were rules about the sushi, of course. No “funky” rolls. Nothing spicy. Customers were expected to place orders up front—no follow-on requests. On several occasions, I heard patrons cheerily ask, “What’s fresh tonight?” and then watched as they were ushered out of the restaurant after a scolding from Tetsuo. Junko once revealed to me that she arranged the soy sauce dishes at every place setting so that Tetsuo could see them from his station. When he spotted customers dragging his art through a wasabi mud bath, he cut them off from premium fish.

The most important thing I learned, though, was that sitting at the Hamako counter entailed certain responsibilities, and that chief among them was massaging Tetsuo’s easily bruised ego. Often he would complain about a sushi bar around the corner that was regularly packed with young, beautiful people. “How can that be?” he would ask. “Their sushi chefs aren’t Japanese, and they serve ridiculous rolls stuffed with multiple kinds of fish.” Deep down he must have known that most Americans love ridiculous rolls stuffed with multiple kinds of fish and don’t care about the nationality of their sushi chefs. But I guess he had a hard time accepting that, because he would always follow up with a self-deprecating comment about how his sushi was not what it used to be.

“My hands are getting weak,” he would say. “I guess I should retire.”

I always told him that his sushi was as great as ever, which it was.

 

 

T
here’s one date at Hamako I remember.

The woman was Japanese, and she was a fit model for an international clothing chain. We were sitting at the Hamako counter when Tetsuo began doing his pity-party routine about the sushi bar around the corner. This time, when he got to the part about how his hands were getting weak and how he should retire, he went one step further.

“Junko and I have bought a home near Lake Tahoe,” he said. “We’re going to close Hamako in December and retire there.”

I almost spit out a hand roll. He was speaking in Japanese, so I double-checked that I had heard him correctly.

“Did he just say that he’s going to close the restaurant in December?” I asked my date. It was just four months away.

“Yes,” she confirmed. “That’s what he said.”

That’s why I remember her, because she confirmed it.

I looked up at Tetsuo.

“You’re going to close Hamako?”

“In December,” he repeated.

Part of me was sad. But another part was happy, because Tetsuo had apparently shared the news with me before telling anyone else. Was it a sign that he was beginning to see me as worthy of first-best fatty tuna? When I got home, I wrote another post on Chowhound. The title was “Hamako Closing?”

The next night, my cell phone rang. It was Junko, and she sounded upset.

“Hakata Andy, did you write something about us on the Internet?”

I wondered how she had gotten my phone number, but then I remembered her asking for it during the registration process. I also wondered how she knew about the post, given that I had written it under a pseudonym. There was no use denying it.

“Is there a problem?”

“Our phone has been ringing off the hook. People want reservations.”

At any other restaurant, it would not have been a problem. Junko assured me that it was a problem at Hamako.

“The calls are disrupting Tetsuo’s sushi making,” she said. “He’s angry, and he wants you to erase what you wrote from the Internet.”

“Chowhound doesn’t let you erase a post from their site,” I said.

It was the truth.

“I don’t know what a post is,” Junko replied, “and I don’t know what a site is, but can you just erase it?”

“I can’t. It’s impossible.”

Junko made a clicking noise with her tongue. “Then you’ll have to apologize to Tetsuo.”

I felt shame for telling the world that I was close to them. (Even though I posted using a pseudonym, people on Chowhound knew me from the annual Chowhound picnic in Golden Gate Park.) But I was unable to admit that to myself, let alone to Junko.

“Why should I apologize? I mean, Tetsuo never said the information was top secret.”

Junko paused, and then she said the thing that, when I think about it, sometimes makes me cry.

“Hakata Andy, maybe you shouldn’t come back.”

 

 

 

I
told myself that I would just go to other sushi restaurants, and for a long time I wandered from sushi bar to sushi bar. I numbed out on sake bombs and inside-out caterpillar rolls. I sat at the kinds of sushi counters where multiple non-Japanese sushi chefs work in assembly lines, and frat-boy customers toast them with an endless supply of drinks.