Recipe for excellence
What does it take to be the best? A
sushi master survives Boston's food wars to share lessons
Chef Ting Yen has been in Mumbai for
a week, and has spent long hours in the kitchen of Yuuka, a speciality
restaurant at Palladium, where he comes in every few months to helm affairs.
Otherwise, he is in Boston managing two restaurants, one of which -Oishii
-serves the Kinzan Sake which The New York Times called “a work of art and
totally delectable“. Yen, 52, nudges us to take a bite of his avocado sushi
while sharing wisdom on how to achieve his level of excellence.
DON'T SHY FROM BACKBREAKING WORK
“I was 14 when I told my father, a
second-generation sushi chef, I wanted to be a chef, too,“ says Yen. “He planted
a slap across my face“. At the time, being a chef wasn't considered a lucrative
career. Yen, in contrast, was happy when Kevin, his 23-year-old, said he wished
to carry on the family tradition.
When young Yen stuck his ground, his
father handed him the toughest challenges to gauge his dedication. “I was given
a whole bucket of squid to clean. It was winter in Tokyo, and freezing.“ He
received help from no one. Even after everyone had gone to bed, Yen was mopping
the floors. The restaurant business, he says, is hard work. It requires
patience and strong legs -you have to be on your feet all day. “And, no
holidays. You work the hardest on Valentine's, Christmas.“
NO TASK IS TRIVIAL
At Yen's restaurants, says Kevin,
who accompanied his father on this Mumbai visit, a young chef's first job is to
stand at the frying station. It's a litmus test of sorts. “It has the highest
output. So, if you can handle that, you can do anything,“ Kevin says.Although,
it's the sushi bar where everyone wants to actually move to.This has meant,
says Yen senior, that several young chefs quit after day one.
Yen himself took three years to even
start making sushi. “I spent all that time learning to polish the cutting board
so that it had a perfectly smooth surface. I had no idea why I was being made
to do that. It was ages before I was even allowed to even cook the rice,“ he
adds.
DEMAND PERFECTION
Part of Yen's training involved
going shopping for his father's restaurant.This meant looking for the right
ingredients and testing them. “You will fail the first two times, and that's
okay. It's a long process,“ he says, warming the room with a smile when we say
we heard how he spent nine months testing Indian spices before deciding on
Yuuka's recipes.
“I tried all the spices that were available
in the Indian supermarkets to understand how to mix flavours,“ says Yen. His
home became a lab for dosas, samosas and a variety of fish masalas.
It was the same laborious effort
that went into deciding which market should the restaurant's staff shop at. “We
went everywhere from Vashi and Crawford Market to the fish pier,“ says Yen,
adding that often, trips were made to the same place as many as six times just
in case they had missed something out -“they are very busy places and have so
many people“. The trips weren't easy, but it was necessary to get the best of
what was available in order to be the best.
KEEP STUDYING
He has been a sushi chef for four
decades. And he continues to study his craft. “We are constantly bringing in
cookbooks and studying them at the restaurant. You have to be in touch with
what's out there,“ he says. Cocky is what you can't afford to get. “There are a
lot of great chefs out there. I am not the best one,“ says Yen, who admits to
spending at least half an hour every day practicing his cutting skills.
“Cutting fish is the hardest. You need to know its anatomy before attempting to
cut it since fish bones can ruin your knife.“ Working on the Japanese sayuri
fish (“which is the size of two pinky fingers“) is still something he finds
arduous.
BE ATTENTIVE TO THE OFFICE
While experiments in the kitchen are
plenty, Yen follows a routine he has stuck to for 20 years.He wakes up at 7 am,
and is at one of his restaurants by 9.30 am. At Oishii Sushi Bar, his 12-seater
restaurant at Chestnut Hill, he checks on his staff's preparedness for the day
before driving to Boston, which he must reach before his chefs come in.
The routine from Tuesday to Sunday
stays unchanged. Monday is his day off. And that's when he goes shopping for
flowers. “I buy all the flowers that deck up my restaurants, from the ones kept
on the tables and sushi bar, to the front desk, and even the bathroom,“ he
smiles.
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Gitanjali Chandrasekharan
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MM11APR15
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