I ate at this sushi-ya two days ago. The chef genuinely cares about his craft and will direct you on how to eat the sushi and when to drink sake.
It was a great experience trying to speak to him in my broken Japanese with the help of his wife.
I believe this place is quite unique, and not because of the food (which is incredible in itself). Most of the experience comes from the strong characters of the chef and his wife.
If you have the chance to visit Tokyo and happen to be in Shibuya around lunch I highly recommend this place.
Edit: I went there because a friend forwarded me the article and they were very interested in reading the article
$25 for lunch, $80++ for dinner. (I don't know much about restaraunt pricing in the US, but I think I get the reason that almost every Tokyo place does this. You pay for your own lunch, every day. Dinner, however, is generally paid for by someone else -- coworker/client/company/boyfriend/etc. Accordingly, restaurants plan for a bit of price insensitivity there, where lunch is a bloodbath of every store trying to capture additional custom at ~1,000 yen.)
I have the highest respect for sushi, and good sushi is some of the most delicious food I've ever eaten. At the same time, it's hard for me to justify the cost. Why does it cost $25 to loosely prepare a small amount of raw fish?! There is so much incredible food that I can get for $10 a pop, and it actually involves cooking. And for $25, I can get a full meal at a fancy sit-down restaurant. What accounts for the crazy price differential? Just the price of fish? Why?
Sure, there's people like Jiro, but it just ends up reminding me of the xkcd "photo conoisseur" comic: https://xkcd.com/915/
- The owner going to the market every morning to select what he thinks are the best fish and then haggle for them
- Bringing it back, holding it until a customer orders without letting it spoil
- When ready, preparing it extremely quickly so that it doesn't lose its flavor at room temperature and so that nobody gets sick
- The apprenticeship of the owner's employees (or his past apprenticeship if you'd rather)
You can get perfectly serviceable sushi for $10, even in Tokyo, at a neighborhood joint for lunch. This is not that kind of establishment. Similarly, one can easily pay $1, $10, or $50 for a hamburger, here or in your town. COGS is not the primary driver of the price difference.
There are sushi chains that offer two pieces for ¥108. I would much rather spend the ¥2500 to go to the shop mentioned in the article. It's like saying you can't justify the cost of a gourmet burger when McDonald's has a dollar menu.
Right, but they're universally awful. You only start getting sushi that tastes like it should around the $25 mark. I'm just curious what accounts for the fairly extreme price difference, especially given that most of the actual flavor in sushi comes from the fish itself. Is it the price of the fish? Respect for one's craft? Tradition?
I'd love to eat good sushi more often, but again, it's hard to justify that kind of price for such a quick and small meal, given the other things you can find in that price range. I've mostly relegated it to occasional celebrations at this point. It's a splurge.
(Reading back on it, I realize my initial post came off as too aggressively negative. I'm not venting. I actually really am curious about what goes into the price of sushi, and whether it's priced appropriately based on the skills and ingredients involved, or if it's instead treated and (over)priced as a luxury gourmet food like foie gras.)
I think it simply boils down to labour cost plus cost for the more expensive seafood:
* Sushi chefs need to be highly trained to make good Sushi, ~5 years. => Can't just pay them the basic 800 yen/hour, it's rather going to start at ~3000 yen.
* You need a few helping hands besides the chef. Fish, egg and even the rice is relatively labour intensive. Remember, it's not just plain rice, it's rice cooked with traditional methods to exactly the right point, mixed with vinaigre with an assistant venting by hand to give it a drier surface.
* Good Sushi needs to be prepared right before consumption, so the Sushi chef will spend at least a few minutes for each portion.
Adding all this up propably comes out at around 5-10 bucks labour cost for a decent portion of Sushi. Add to this the fish, the rent and some markup and you're at your $25. Nothing remarkable really, it's the same for most other high quality foods in large cities.
> Sushi chefs need to be highly trained to make good Sushi, ~5 years.
I just remembered an excellent book I read about an American sushi school, called "The Story of Sushi", where each student was made to learn to filet dozens of different kinds of fish with precision. So I can see why training to be the best of the best would take a long time. But how much of this experience is really necessary to make a standard, delicious nigiri platter? Most people don't go for the exotic options; they go for tuna, salmon, eel, etc. Do most sushi chefs even filet their own fish?
> Remember, it's not just plain rice, it's rice cooked with traditional methods to exactly the right point, mixed with vinaigre with an assistant venting by hand to give it a drier surface.
True, but how much of this detail is really necessary for the flavor, as opposed to fussiness and pride in the craft? In other words, in a blind test, would most people be able to tell the difference between quickly-made sushi rice and sushi rice made "exactly right"?
> Nothing remarkable really, it's the same for most other high quality foods in large cities.
I have to disagree! What other gourmet "fast-ish" food, suitable for lunch, costs $25 in a major city? In all the cities I've been to, most of the famous local fare is in the $10-$15 range at most. I've eaten some of the best food in the world for $10 a pop, easy. (Franklin's BBQ is a good example: hours of grueling work, $10 for half a pound of the best brisket in the world.)
GRANTED: I am speaking from a Californian perspective, so none of this may even apply. I am sure you can get some great $10 sushi in Tokyo and that $25 is reasonable for a more gourmet option, but here, you really have to go $25 and higher for sushi to taste good.
> But how much of this experience is really necessary to make a standard, delicious nigiri platter?
That's exactly like ask why you should hire an engineer that has a degree vs someone who's gone though a coding bootcamp. If you're only doing standard things in a standard way then it's fine (this is by the numbers cooking, which most kitchens/restaurants prepare), so not every line cook needs to be a chef. They just need one in charge of the menu. Sushi is very close to the source ingredient, so for great sushi you do need every person that deals with the fish to be a full chef.
From everything I'd read and seen over the years. Yes, the good ones ($25+ a meal) do filet their own fish.
Also, food cost is a much bigger part of sushi because it's raw. Even a few hours fresher or few minutes less at room temperature makes a big difference, whereas cooked foods are much less sensitive to that kind of fluctuation.
> Franklin's BBQ is a good example: hours of grueling work, $10 for half a pound of the best brisket in the world.
The problem is that high quality sushi isn't by the numbers, but brisket is. You need to adapt quality sushi from day to day and fish to fish. Where brisket as long as you have good enough base ingredients you'll get an excellent brisket. It's more like a high end steak. You don't add many ingredients so even if you're the best chef in the world you can't make up for a mediocre steak.
I'm not exactly sure what your argument is. Sushi is local to Japanese culture, and just as you thought, Japan has some pretty decent Sushi for ~10$ (1000 yen), that already beats 99% of Sushi in foreign countries. I wouldn't call it gourmet, but it's prepared by a chef who knows what he's doing. That it costs more in California, where you don't have Tokyo's crazy Tsukiji wholesale fish market that allows them to have the world's best and freshest fish for reasonable prices every morning for 7 days a week, and where the job market for skilled Sushi chefs is much more a seller's market, doesn't surprise me.
You already acknowledge that sushi is a commodity item you can get anywhere, at various price points, but it tastes better when you pay more.
Why is it so confusing to you that quality food costs more? Yes ingredients matter (more so in sushi than most food), yes it requires a lot of skill to prepare. Not only that, the type of sushi restaurant cited in the article, the chef serves the customer directly as he prepares the food. Surely you can see why that'd cost more?
A lot of effort goes into the perfect piece of sushi.
I was staying with friends in Shinjuku and one who was a chef at a hotel regularly got up at 4-5am to get to Tsukiji fish market in time to get a good fish.
Then there's the rice. Cooking it for just the right amount of time, not squishing any grains, etc.
There are a lot of different variables, and you're trusting the person to get them perfect as opposed to "good enough" in exchange for a bit more money.
I can't see where your confusion is going from but hopefully this cleared things up a little.
Interesting. In China there are often "restaurant skirmishes" when the bill comes over who will pay it. That is, the person who pays the bill gets the face. They can get quite intense. Does this happen in Japan as well?
No, in Japan it is more hierarchal e.g. your boss will pay for everyone if you go out for lunch together. Amongst friends it is common to just split the bill.
Lunches tend to be less food than dinner, but that aside, lunches tend to be cheaper than dinner in the US as well--presumably because people tend to be more price sensitive at lunch. I'm not sure I can do a good job of articulating the reasons. It's partly as you say. I think it's also partly because the lunch specials in Chinatown or the sushi lunch are competing against sandwiches and other similar luncheon fare to a degree that they aren't for dinner.
This one specifically had 2 courses for sushi, one for 2,600 yens and the other for 3,100 yens (the difference being more sushi)
This was the price for lunch, not sure in the evenings
It's about 10,000 to 15,000 yen. (Source: http://tabelog.com/tokyo/A1303/A130301/13014691/ <-- incidentally, this is the site to get information from about Japanese restaurants. Not maximally helpful if you don't read Japanese though.)
Have you got a Google Maps link to the place? I usually put stars on Google Maps on places I want to visit, and I definitely plan on visiting Japan in the next few years.
An email can take a long time to reach your inbox, which would make it fairly frequent to have users wait more than one minute (up to several hours) to log in.
In foreign languages with a polite form of "You" (such as French or German), there is an additional question: should a website use the polite of familiar form.
And it's widely accepted that a website should use the polite form.
In Japanese, besides there being a lot of different levels of politeness, using "you" is still considered too direct in general. In conversation, it is to be avoided in almost all cases. It's common to refer to people by name, or by omitting/implying the subject instead of saying 'you'.
There are really interesting problems that you come across when you build multi-lingual interfaces.
Is it really widely accepted? I'm still weirded out when people use the polite form. Let alone computers, that's just silly.
Why would a computer/website be polite to me? They have no concept of these things. Just using polite forms doesn't mean you're being polite, you have to mean it. A computer is as of yet incapable of having intentions.
Why would a computer use the familiar form? It seems to me that I would uncomfortable if a computer, or worse, a web interface actively maintained by team of strangers, started to address in language that suggested a certain level of intimacy.
It might just be my youngness and general disapproval of the polite form speaking here. I really think English has gone in the right direction by removing their polite form in favour of being polite without senseless grammatical contortions.
It's a minor point but actually English has only the polite form. Stiff upper lip, and all that. "Thou" is the singular, but it isn't used much any more.
The computer isn't being polite to you, the company whose website you are on, is. In the same way your computer isn't being casual and friendly with you - the person who wrote you the email is.
Whether it's an app or a website, it's all just a conduit - and I don't think it's farfetched to say that by and large companies use polite forms when referring to their (potential) customers.
I don't really buy this idea that it's not "really" a camera.
Think of it like this: A still camera has a number of small receptors. When you take a photograph, you wind up with a bunch of numbers that average the amount of light that hit each one. It's not a perfect record of the light that was really there-- does that count as a "real" picture? A video camera takes a series of slices at particular moments in time. Information about events that occur between those slices is lost, either blurred out of existence or ignored entirely. Does that count as "real" video?
So, this camera can record a single line once at a precise instant in time. If we want to turn that into a moving picture, we can either parallelize the camera, or serialize the event. So let's say we put together a hundred million of these cameras using mirrors and amplifiers and whatever else we need to record video of a single pulse of light happening once. Let's say we also use a single camera to record video of a hundred million pulses of light which we know will have a variance of less than the resolution of the camera. Let's say we crunch the data from both of these "cameras", and they come out as identical.
Which one is the "real" video?
Anyway, there's a much more salient reason why this wouldn't work for a moving object: As the man pointed out, at this rate, even a speeding bullet would not move perceptibly.
I could be wrong, but as long as the object is moving at "normal" (e.g. significantly less than the speed of light) speeds, this approach would work for moving objects too.
The "video" of the pulse of light going through the bottle is actually the result of sending trillions of light pulses through the bottle, taking pictures at very precise (recorded) times and syncing them all together.
They are not sending trillions of light pulses, otherwise they'd be making a very long movie. If they want to do a 10 second video, they just need to send 240 pulses.
They send a pulse and take some kind of picture at some particular point in time. If you watched the video you'd know that these pictures are taken so quickly that the exposure is incredible low - this means the image is incredibly dark.
They repeat this process of taking some kind of picture at some point in time trillions of times - this produces the terabytes of data that was mentioned in the video.
From these terabytes of data, which are essentially incredibly under exposed (dark) pictures of a bottle they use computers to add them all together based on their time and produce a video (which is actually trillions of different pictures added together to compensate the massive amount of under exposure).
Note, the "time" of the picture is related to when the pulse of light was "released".
right but doesn't this depend on how fast you can send and receive those trillion light pulses? if that can be done in sufficiently short time, the object in motion will have only moved by a small amount, and it will look like it has been elongated in the direction of travel, like a motion blur.
The above is my uninformed and optimistic speculation.
Nope, because a single frame of the video is the result of many trillions of light pulses.
Each time a picture is taken the exposure is so low that the image is incredibly dark. These means they must take lots more and "add them together" to produce a bright image.
If the object is moving it would be impossible since every new image would have the object in a different place, and when you added them together to counteract the fact each image is so under exposed (dark) the object would be blurred.
Right. But the point of high speed photography, like the apple bullet that is disingenuously compared in the video, is that you avoid motion blur. My 200 fps camera can take a trillionth of a second snapshot, with some, um, motion blur
Little background here (I'm French and grew up in Paris):
MacDonald's branding in France are really different in France than it is in the US, especially in Paris. Food is quite tasty, meat is fairly good, and even the colors are different: the flashy red/yellow has been replaced by a classy green/black two years ago.
And this specific MacDonald's is one of the biggest and best located in Paris (Champs Elysées)
Money laundering may have been a plausible explanation for a random US MacDonald's, it's really far fetched for this one.
> (...) the colors are different: the flashy red/yellow has been replaced by a classy green/black two years ago.
I believe it's the same case pretty much in whole Europe. In all countries I've been to for the last two years or so (Poland, Czech Rep., Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland), the McD branding involved dark green background rather than vivid red one.
> Food is quite tasty, meat is fairly good (...)
That's generally correct, too. I have no idea about U.S. but here it seems that most of the shady reputation fast food gets is not because of the quality of ingredients, but the way they are processed to make the meals, i.e. almost exclusively fried with lots of added fat.
In that situation, he does not get to choose wether or not his salary is disclosed