Modern Conveniences

A counter restaurant's main visual feature is, not surprisingly, the counter, a long bar of wood that guests sit at while the chefs work directly across from them. Although we have tables and a tatami room too, the counter is definitely the focal point. Unlike Western cooking, where the atmosphere of a nice restaurant is concentrated on providing a sterile environment where servers melt in and out bringing dishes from the magical faraway realm of the kitchen, counter chefs work right in front of you, trying to accomplish inherently messy jobs with elegance. One of the reasons for the popularity of this system must be because so much Japanese cuisine is served raw or with minimal preparation.

One common denominator on both sides of the Pacific is the fantasy that chefs prepare all the food from the dirt/ocean up; guests like to imagine chefs visiting farms and selecting individual vegetables, buying whole fish directly from the fishermen, creating all the sauces from scratch. The reality, which sometimes needs to be concealed to keep up our cool image at the counter, is that all restaurants rely at least partially on pre-prepared foods. I was let in harshly on that fact back in the States when I went on a hunt for the recipe for my favorite restaurant's best dessert sauce, only to find out it came in a bag.

Japanese cuisine is no different. One of the things that surprised me was the fugu situation. Fugu requires careful, time-consuming preparation by a licensed chef, and it's not practical to do it yourself when you're putting out the volume we are. It turns out you can order your fugu already disassembled and skinned with all the little bits wrapped up and boxed. Each fugu has a license number (in case we end up killing someone after all), and all we have to do is get it out of the box and cut it up the way we want it. We just take care to unpack the fugu when nobody is in the restaurant so the guest can still imagine his chef choosing each fugu carefully at the fish market and we can actually get our work done, and everybody's happy.