Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [129]
Unlike the low-tide reek of Fulton, Tsukiji smelled hardly at all. What scent it had was not of fish, but of seawater and the cigarettes of the fishmongers, I had never seen, or even imagined, many of the creatures I saw.
Hungry, I pushed into a nearby stall, the Japanese version of Rosie's diner: a place packed with rubber-booted market worker seating breakfast. The signs were entirely in Japanese, with no helpful pictures, but a friendly fishmonger took charge. What arrived was, of course, flawless. Here I was in the Tokyo version of a greasy spoon, surrounded by a mob of tough-looking bastards in dripping boots and the requisite New York-style rude waitress, and the food was on a par with the best of my hometown: fresh, clean, beautifully, if simply, presented. Soon, I was wolfing down sushi, miso soup, a tail section of braised fish in sauce, and an impressive array of pickles. Beats two eggs over.
I loaded up with cockles and squid for the restaurant, bought some knives for my sous-chef back in New York and, head aching, stopped off at Akasuka Temple where the ailing apparently waft incense smoke over their afflicted parts. The smoke did nothing for my head. I bought aspirin - which incongruously came with free candy and pamphlets advertising patent medicines- and took a taxi to Kappabashi, Tokyo's Bowery.
It was the perfect metaphor for Tokyo: ringing up some wine glasses, cocktail shakers, tablecloth clips and cake molds, the clerk at the restaurant supply store added up my bill on an abacus - but computed the tax on a calculator.
I was really beginning to worry about my head when I finally bumped into Philippe again at the restaurant. Can this still be jet lag, I asked him. The pain seemed to be aspirin-proof. Am I dying?
'Oh, you mean "the helmut"?' he asked, circling his own head with his fingers to indicate the exact location of the pain. He shrugged, 'C'est normal.'
It's never a good thing when a Frenchman says 'C'est normal.'
I knew he'd been up early too; I'd heard him knocking around his room as I left for the fish market. Here it was, seven at night, as usual I was starting to fade, my English degenerating into monosyllables, experiencing hot flashes, sweats, and chills. I asked Philippe, hopefully, if he'd had a nap since the morning. He looked so damn fresh, crisp and debonair in a smartly cut suit, positively rosy-cheeked, and in the middle of some Byzantine accounting and scheduling problem which would have caused me difficulty when my faculties were at their peak.
'Oh, no,' he said, cheerfully. 'When I am in Tokyo I don't sleep much. I just take my vitamins and go.'
The following night was my last in Tokyo. Philippe took me out to a shabu-shabu joint in Shibuya, Tokyo's Times Square. It was Friday night and all the painstakingly observed customs and practices of the workday went out the window. The streets were packed with herds of insanely drunk businessmen and teenagers. In Tokyo, it's apparently okay, even de rigueur, to go out with the boss and the boys from the office and get completely, stuttering, out-of-control drunk. In such circumstances, after a night of drinking and karaoke, it's okay to vomit on your boss's shoes, take a swing at him, call him an asshole. He'll probably throw you over his shoulders and carry you home. Everybody was drunk. Everywhere, lovely young women brushed the hair out of their violently heaving boyfriends' faces as they leaned on all-fours into the gutters. Suit-and-tied salary-men projectile vomited, lurched, sang, caroused and staggered like bumper cars down the humanity-clogged