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As soon as Shiro has that diploma, he sets off for Tokyo and an apprenticeship at Yoshino Sushi Honten in the Ginza district, one of the city’s three most famous houses of Edomae.įor the first 18 months, Shiro reports every day to the Yoshino branch in the Ginza subway station, under the watchful eye of Jiro Ono. By the time he’s a teenager, he’s eager to become a sushi apprentice, though his father, being an educator, insists he finish high school first. His fascination with sushi only grows as Shiro gets older. The plan is based on the predominant nigiri-style sushi, and when the system expands throughout Japan, to cities like Kyoto, so does Edomae sushi. The occupying American forces have devised a system of rice consignment to revive the nation’s restaurant industry. Edomae sushi is made with whatever can be harvested from Tokyo Bay, which spreads out before the city.
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It’s called Edomae, meaning “in front of Edo,” the old name for Tokyo. The Kashibas’ hometown, more than 200 miles west of Tokyo, was spared the ravages of World War II, but in its aftermath, the capital city’s style of sushi has spread throughout the country. And every time, young Shiro marvels at the chef, how he’s able to wield a long, well-sharpened knife and carve from the fish before him something beautiful, something that will make his customers happy. The family isn’t wealthy but occasionally sets aside enough money in the week’s budget to go out for sushi. The four-year-old son of Kanichi Kashiba, an elementary school principal, sits transfixed by a chef in a white happi coat. “Our sushi budget with Shiro-san was more than our mortgage, way back when,” one diner, a doctor, confides, just as the man himself takes his post behind the counter. Shiro places one diminutive creation after another on your rectangular ceramic plate until you cry full, usually sometime around the 15th course. At Sushi Kashiba, it’s almost entirely nigiri, slices of raw fish pressed over rice.
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Each sushi chef develops his or her own omakase, which can vary by night or even by customer.
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It’s also an invitation for that chef to showboat-to display the full breadth of his skills, to share the tastes he finds most exciting. Omakase is Japanese for “I leave it up to you,” a promise that you’ll set aside your own nitpicks and aversions and let the talents of the chef carry you through the night. Here, at his latest semieponymous restaurant, most customers order the omakase, entrusting themselves fully to the man who once presided over the city’s very first sushi bar. This is especially true of the man most people simply call Shiro-san, who arrived 50 years ago this fall and built himself into a Seattle sushi legend, thanks to his way with raw fish and an almost puckish geniality.