Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a new documentary about Jiro Ono, the sushi chef (or itamae) behind the Tokyo sushi restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro. It's the only sushi restaurant to have been awarded three Michelin stars, and Ono is considered by many people to be the best sushi chef in the world.

The sushi we get here in the U.S. is rarely that great; the real deal is in Japan, at restaurants dedicated to sushi, where the chef serves the day's best fish to each diner individually. (The best sushi meal I've ever had was served this way at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market -- a huge hangar where, every day before dawn, sushi chefs bid in a massive auction for fresh tuna.) If you're curious about what makes great sushi so great, check out Trevor Corson's The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket. Corson follows a group of sushi students through a 12-week training program; you can listen to him talk about the book on NPR.

But the very best chefs train for years, not weeks -- an apprentice itamae might spend five years learning to make the perfect sushi rice before moving on to slicing ginger and toasting seaweed. You can get a sense of the degree of perfectionism involved in this clip from Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, in which Bourdain visits Sukiyabashi Jiro. You can watch as Ono makes sure that each ingredient is at the right temperature -- the rice should be at body temperature, for example, so Ono holds it in his palm for a few moments before adding the fish. Bourdain's verdict? "I'm ready to die now."