Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

of an era of Japanese hegemony over Hollywood, when the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company took over MCA and Sony grabbed Columbia.

Today, sushi is as intrinsic to the Los Angeles cultural scene as mud slides and SUVs. Sushi chefs and sushi sections are so much a part of supermarket shopping that a friend told me, “I was in a check-out line the other day, and a little boy sitting in the seat of a shopping cart in front of me—he was maybe three or four—started crying because his mother wouldn’t open the sushi container for him.” Buffet tables at wedding receptions feature sushi. Children enrolled in the better private schools are offered sushi as a lunch selection—

the designation on the menu cards that their parents fill out is “SU.” F O R K I T O V E R

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Sushi is eaten at business dinners because it is perceived to be a food of the elite, or at least of people with expense accounts, which in L.A.

is the same thing. The California Sushi Academy has started training women to be sushi chefs, the equivalent of allowing women into the Catholic priesthood.

“The reason women never made sushi,” explained Yi, “is that women wore perfumes and lotions that transferred onto the raw fish. Also, it was always said that women had slightly higher body temperatures and they would start cooking the fish with their hands. But mostly it was a male-dominated industry and they didn’t want to let women in.” In L.A., and to a certain extent in New York, sushi made with toro, cut from the fatty belly of the bluefin tuna, has become the new beluga caviar. It is sold for as much as ten dollars a bite in L.A., sometimes three times that in Japan. At the tide-pool end of the edible-seafood aquarium are the implausible sushi rolls created to please customers who don’t really like raw fish but understand that they must eat sushi to remain stylish. A friend of mine who writes for television, Roger Director, admitted to me that he still orders spicy tuna rolls, even though he’s the only one in the business who still does. He said, “I started getting them three years ago, thinking they were the cosmic answer to my sushi conundrum, but they’ve worn out their welcome, and now I don’t know what to do.”

In the movie The Fly, Jeff Goldblum lures Geena Davis down an eerie alley to his laboratory, and to calm her apprehension he says, “It’s cleaner on the inside.” He could have been talking about the sushi restaurant R-23. I parked my car on a forlorn street in the old warehouse district of downtown Los Angeles and walked along some abandoned railroad tracks, searching for the spot that has become the most awesome sushi restaurant in all of L.A., at least for the week I was there. Across from the practically unmarked entrance—I suppose everybody that R-23

wants for a customer already knows the location—was a chain-linked fence topped with concertina wire. Nothing like flying three thousand miles to California just to find yourself in the South Bronx.

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A L A N R I C H M A N

In addition to the bracing locale, R-23 is beloved for its cardboard chairs. Indeed, I soon found myself seated on an object that had much in common with a grocery-store carton, although it had a chair-like appearance and was not uncomfortable. My table, constructed of par-ticleboard, was enhanced with a conventional white tablecloth. I thought nothing could be more depressing than the neighborhood I had just walked through until I noticed the artwork on the walls, mostly women in pain. I was seated directly under a painting of an elderly woman wearing a wedding ring, wrapped in a scarf, weeping in mourning. Kind of made me want to order fugu sashimi with the poisonous parts intact.

Our waitress had a thick Asian accent and insisted on speaking in a whisper, even though the noise level of the restaurant was incredible. I understood nothing she said until she raised her voice to push a special of pine-tree mushrooms. When I refused twice, she grew surly and service declined from unintelligible to intolerable.

The sushi was beautifully presented on a long, heavy faux-marble slab carried to the table by an extremely fit employee who must have been hired for his Olympian slab-lifting abilities. The fish was fresh and the rice so delicious that I decided to order a bowl of it. What came to the table, after a long wait, was a bowl of white rice overcooked to the consistency of gruel. Most of the other cooked food was similarly grim.

After the perils of R-23, the mundane strip-mall ambiance of Hamasaku, which is owned by legendary power-broker and sushi-eater Mike Ovitz, head of Artists Management Group, was welcome indeed. Almost all sushi restaurants are located in strip malls, which is not a remarkable observation, since almost all of L.A. is located in strip malls. The more minor the mall, the more grandiose the name, and Hamasaku is in the Santa Monica Plaza, a tiny oasis with byzantine parking rules—ten-minute, thirty-minute, and forty-five-minute spaces. Lucky me: I got one of the forty-five-minute spots.

I ordered marinated albacore tuna with “Hisao’s special dressing.” It turned out to be oversized chunks of tuna, some of them three inches long, awash in a sauce much like the creamy stuff served with F O R K I T O V E R

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pickled herring at Jewish delicatessens. Ragged slices of tasteless halibut came with a lip-puckeringly acidic ponzu sauce. Finally, I tried the sushi, made with fish that Arthur Treacher would disdain to fry. I had no difficulty leaving well within my allotted parking time.

Although sushi isn’t always thrilling, the vast majority of it that isn’t prepackaged is perfectly good. (Most plastic-encased takeout sushi is ruined by intolerable rice.) So far, much of the sushi I’d eaten