Around midnight, I parked my car in the driveway on my quiet street, with only the noise of the neighbor's sprinklers to keep me company. I trudged towards the door with my flour-dusted work shoes, hoping that the charged adrenaline of restaurant work would fade and that my brain would quiet down. But these days, I'm always reflecting on the huge volume of culinary skills I have been learning (and trying to perfect) within a relatively short amount of time. And that leaves me thinking about what I can do better. And when I think about this, I often have flashbacks of the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a documentary about a famed sushi master and his restaurant in Tokyo. There is one part of the film that features a sushi chef who tells the story of how he made an egg sushi recipe 200 times in 4 months, presenting it to the head sushi chef. Each and every one was rejected, until he finally built up the skill to create the egg sushi to the chef's standards.
For anyone learning the culinary trade, you're lucky if you only have as few as 200 humbling failed egg sushi moments, and you're in debt to the people who are patient enough to teach you how not to repeat them. Tomorrow: wake up, drink coffee, repeat. Practice makes perfect.
Reader's note: Jiro Dreams of Sushi is currently available to watch on Netflix, as of January 2015.
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