Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [128]
More sashimi, more sushi, some tiger shrimp, what looked like herring - so fresh it crunched. I didn't care what they put in front of me any more, I trusted the smiling chef and his crew, I was going along for the full ride. More frozen sake . . . more food. The last few customers got up and lurched to the door like us, red-faced and perspiring from the booze. We continued. There had to be something we hadn't tried yet! I was beginning to think that some of the cooks were calling their homes by now, telling their families get in here and get a load of these gaijins!! They're eating everything in the store!
After course twenty or so, the chef slit, brushed, dabbed and formed the final course: a piece of raw sea eel. Earthenware cups of green tea were delivered. Finally, we were done.
We left to the usual bows and screams of 'Arigato gozaima-shiTAAA!!!' and picked our way carefully, very carefully, up the stairs, back to the physical world.
I left Philippe at Les Halles, had a couple of cocktails at an empty faux-Irish pub and staggered back to my apartment. I had to get up early for the fish market.
Tsukiji, Tokyo's central fish market, puts New York's Fulton Street to shame. It's bigger, better, and unlike its counterpart in Manhattan a destination worth visiting if only to gape.
I arrived by taxi at four-thirty in the morning. The colors of the market alone seemed to burn my retinas. The variety, the strangeness, the sheer volume of seafood available at Tsukiji amounted to a colossal Terrordome of mind-boggling dimensions. The simple awareness that the seafood-crazy Japanese were raking, dredging, netting and hooking that much stuff out of the sea each day gave me pause.
A Himalayan-sized mountain of discarded styrofoam fish boxes announced my arrival, as well as a surrounding rabbit warren of shops, breakfast joints and merchants servicing the market. The market itself was enclosed, stretching seemingly into infinity under a hangar-type roof, and I will tell you that my life as a chef will never be the same again after spending the morning - and subsequent mornings - there. Scallops in snowshoe-sized black shells lay atop crushed ice, fish, still flopping, twitching and struggling in pans of water, spitting at me as I walked down the first of many narrow corridors between the vendors' stands. Things were different here in that the Japanese market, workers had no compunction about looking you in the eye, even nudging you out of the way. They were busy, space was limited, and moving product around, in between sellers, buyers, dangerously careening forklifts, gawking tourists and about a million tons of seafood was tough. The scene was riotous: eels, pinned to boards by a spike through the head, were filleted alive, workers cut loins of tuna off the bone in two-man teams, lopping off perfect hunks with truly terrifying-looking swords and saws which, mishandled, could easily have halved their partners. Periwinkles, cockles, encyclopedic selections of roes - salted, pickled, cured and fresh - were everywhere, fish still bent from rigor mortis, porgy, sardines, swordfish, abalone, spiny lobsters, giant lobsters, blowfish, bonito, bluefin, yellowfin. Tuna was sold like gems - displayed in light-boxes and illuminated from below, little labels indicating grade and price. Tuna was king. There was fresh, dried, cut, number one, number two, vendors who specialized in the less lovely bits. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of gigantic bluefin and bonito, blast-frozen on faraway factory ships. Frost-covered 200-300-pounders were stacked everywhere, like stone figures on Easter Island, a single slice taken from near the tail so