The dialogue

When a family books my sushi class, I make one decision before we even meet: I teach to the youngest guest. I pitch the lesson to their level, and I talk to them more than to anyone else. If the youngest is engaged, the whole family is. Last Saturday, the youngest guest was Isaac. He was six years old, and he did not eat sushi yet. A family of six, and one request Greg and Chelsea came to Tokyo with their four children, ages 6, 9, 11, and 12. A few days before the class, Greg wrote to me. The three older kids loved sushi, he said. Isaac did not eat it yet, but Greg hoped he would enjoy learning […]

A sushi chef makes sushi at the counter. A sushi evangelist helps you understand it, enjoy it, and make it yourself. Both matter, and they are different jobs. Guests often ask me, halfway through shaping their second piece of nigiri, whether I am a sushi chef. I answered that question in I Am Not a Sushi Chef. This post goes one step further. If you want to learn about sushi in Tokyo, who should you learn from? Here is how I see the two roles, what each one gives you, and where each one falls short. What a sushi chef does A sushi chef’s skill is built over many years behind one counter. It is deep, precise and focused, and […]

Today’s guests were Sue and Susan, two friends traveling together from Oregon. Partway through the class, while we were shaping our fourth or fifth piece of nigiri, Sue mentioned, almost in passing, that she’d done a homestay in a town in western Japan forty years ago. She still has a photograph on her phone of a dish her host mother made for her back then — she pulled it up to show me — and she told me that the local sushi she ate during that stay has stayed with her all these decades, more vividly than almost anything else from that trip. I hadn’t expected the conversation to go there, but it explained something I’d noticed from the moment […]

Today’s guests were Melissa and her family, introduced to me by a guide’s favorite kind of connection: a guest from a few months back, recommending me to a friend. Sarah F. had taken the class herself in March with her own two kids, and in September she wrote to tell me Melissa would be in touch. From the moment Melissa’s family arrived, it was obvious which two members of the group had been waiting for this part of the trip the most. Her daughter El, twelve, and her son Endrix, ten, had the particular kind of eagerness that’s hard to fake and impossible to miss. I’d decided, before they ever walked in, that today’s class would focus tightly on nigiri […]

    A beginner’s guide to the usuba, deba, and yanagiba, the sharpening stones that keep them sharp, and how to shop for both on Tokyo’s Kappabashi kitchenware street. By Kenji Kitabayashi, sushi instructor, Tokyo Omakase Sushi Class My own career as a sushi maker began with three knives: the usuba, the deba, and the yanagiba. If you’re serious about preparing sushi or sashimi at home, these are the three traditional Japanese knives I recommend starting with — each one built for a single job, and each one shaped the way it is for a specific reason. Below, I’ll explain what each knife does, what to look for in blade material, which sharpening stones to pair with them, and how […]

      Why Tokyo Omakase Sushi Class’s Founder, Kenji, Is a One-in-a-Million Talent Tokyo Omakase Sushi Class is a Tokyo sushi-making school run by a founder with an unusually distinctive background. Kenji has spent his career deliberately working toward becoming what might be called a “one-in-a-million” talent, building expertise across several unrelated fields. This piece sets out to demonstrate why Kenji’s career can genuinely be described as one in a million, using a widely recognized benchmark — Michelin restaurant experience — as a point of comparison, and Fermi estimation as the method. A Note on Method: Fermi Estimation The estimation technique used throughout this piece is known as Fermi estimation: a way of approaching questions with no direct statistical […]

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” — Steve Jobs, Stanford University Commencement Address, 2005 ・・・ There was a stretch in my twenties when I was lost about my career. Not quite a company man, not quite independent. Ashamed of being no one in particular, I read compulsively, as if the answer might be hiding in the next book. Back then, reading whatever Kazuyo Katsuma, the accountant-turned-author, or Takafumi Horie, the famous IT entrepreneur, or Kenichi Ohmae, the McKinsey consultant counted among the world’s business gurus, published next was a kind of lifeline for me. At the same time, […]

A guest asked me once, halfway through shaping her second piece of nigiri: “Are you a sushi chef?” It’s one of the most common questions I get, sometimes stated more bluntly — “Have you worked in restaurants?” I have a standard answer by now, and I give it the same way every time: no, I haven’t. Here’s what I have done instead. I say it plainly because the honest version of my story is more interesting than a fabricated one, and because, somewhat to my own surprise, it almost never turns into the problem I once worried it would be. Here is the honest version. I spent years in an accounting career, and somewhere in my late twenties, on weekends […]

I’m cautious about the word Zen. It’s one of those words everyone feels they understand and almost no one can actually explain — least of all me. So I won’t try to define it here. The only thing I can say with any confidence is that whatever Zen is, it has something to do with giving your full attention to whatever is directly in front of you, right now, and nothing else. Here is what I’ve noticed, across several hundred sushi classes, about how that attention gets found. The average person checks their phone somewhere around 150 times a day. I didn’t know the exact number until I looked it up, but I didn’t need to — you can feel […]

For three years in high school, I gave up almost everything that wasn’t a textbook. No time spent with friends, no long conversations, no meals shared for the sake of sharing them — just a desk, and the belief that if I studied hard enough, I would get into the university I wanted. Looking back, it was a life badly out of balance. But it was carried by one quiet promise I kept making to myself: once I got there, I would finally learn how to enjoy being with people. That promise came true faster than I expected. I moved to Tokyo that spring, into a one-room apartment barely big enough to turn around in. Most of my new friends […]