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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>He placed a slice of ika (squid) on the black marble surface in front of me. “One, two, three,” he counted. “Every second that passes, it declines. That’s why I want you to eat it immediately.”

This urgency to eat it fast in his shop doesn’t make much sense in with regards to the tradition of sushi he supposedly serves, considering he said that they were served from street stalls — which would have to wait for customers and would be out in the open sun with poor refrigeration (probably nothing besides some ice buckets)…

>The first time I was about to eat a piece of raw clam sushi after drinking some sake, Yajima said something to his wife in Japanese, so she could translate. “Chew it a bit but don’t swallow,” she said. I obeyed. “Now sake!” Yajima barked.

Yeah, so they were drinking sake while eating sushi from steet stalls?

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The modern form of sushi (edomae nigirizushi) is basically fast food made out of freshly caught fish, so you make it and serve it the same as any other street-vended food based on raw fresh meat. The carts also had a covering on them - nobody left their fish out in the hot sun.

Also, real wasabi acts as an antimicrobial agent, which is a historical precedent for modern sushi chefs pre-applying the proper amount of wasabi to each piece before giving it to you.

The taste does change after it's been prepared. They're being a little bit "soup nazi" with the whole counting of seconds bit, but it is better to taste it freshly made.

It actually makes zero sense to wash the sushi down immediately with sake as it changes the flavor of what you're eating, not to mention the varying flavors and mouthfeels of both sushi and sake. If you have to drink something, make it water - but don't drink a lot before or during the meal or you'll get too full to finish all the sushi.

Sake is considered a rice dish in Japan, and sushi (in this article) is nigiri and not sashimi, so sake would be like an extra rice dish, which is atypical for Japan. I don't see why you couldn't drink sake at a street stall, though, if in America you can drink liquor out of a brown paper bag.

> It actually makes zero sense to wash the sushi down immediately with sake as it changes the flavor of what you're eating [...]

I got the impression that was the intended purpose here, though; you can enjoy the flavours separately, but in the case of the briny sushi that he was served the addition of the sake created a different flavour that was worth trying.

I think it makes perfect sense. The alcohol solves different flavor molecules than water, and having both present can actually activate new flavors. This doesn't work with a whole mouthful of sake, of course...

Sorry for the meta, but three downvotes?

Somehow making some orbservations about what an article says without attacking anyone in this dicussion is controversial?

> Some were rudimentary and fairly common; others were unique to him; still others recalled sushi’s origins as Edo-era street food.

Not that it's productive to complain about a person's (possible) lack of internal consistency in a story like this anyway... This isn't an article, say, giving advice on building secure software where errors would be dangerous.

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