The impact of the 2012 review
It's easy to forget now, but sushi was an afterthought in the stratusphere of fine dining back in 2012. Anecdotaly, there was a broader perception that primarily non-cooked food required less skill and cost.
Of course, this ignored the fact that rice is cooked, sushi takes decades of skill and focus to master, and there's much more to the cuisine than a California Roll.
So when Pete gave Ichimura three stars in the New York Times, that was a big deal. It signaled that great Sushi does belong in the conversation with the Per Ses and Le Bernardins of the world.
For many people who subscribe to The Sushi Legend, that probably was not news. But for the people that sit on their couch reading the New York Times every morning? It was.
Eater covered the review. So did Mediate, the Times of India and a little known blog called 'The Sushi Legend' that published its first ever review 2 months later.
I asked Pete that - as he looks back 11 years later - what his perspective is on that review and the impact it had on sushi in New York:
[Pete's comments are included verbatim in italics]
Pete:
I truly don't know what its impact was but I can tell you what I was trying to do. At the time it seemed to me that a lot of New Yorkers who were pretty sophisticated about other kinds of restaurants didn't know how to talk about sushi-yas. You always heard the same cliches—"so fresh it jumps off the plate" or something like that. And you heard people say that sushi chefs didn't do any "real" cooking—the idea was that they just bought the fish and served it. After my first meal at Ichimura at Brushstroke, I knew that I wanted readers to understand that there really were an array of methods and distinct preparations that the chef would then modify and adapt. So I tried to find out what Mr. Ichimura was doing that made his sushi stand out.
His publicist ended up putting me on a phone call with Mr. Ichimura and a bilingual manager at Brushstroke and I just fired all my questions at them. That was my first real education in the meaning of Edomae and the various techniques associated with it like konbujime. Then I had a separate conversation with David Bouley about aging and curing fish and the ikejime method of killing them. The review was really trying to say, Look, there is a level at which sushi making becomes just as nuanced, technique-driven and personal as any other style of cuisine.
Me again: For what it's worth, I still hear "so fresh it jumps off the plate". Most ingredients require time to develop flavor and - in many cases - time and methods like Kobujime (as Pete noted) only enhance the flavor.
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