His Master’s Poise

But it’s just three in the afternoon. The tables are empty, the bar is closed and the air sags with the ennui that comes from waiting for the evening.

Chef Kazuhiro Koizumi is already at work and smiles benignly as his pupil for a day walks into the kitchen, looking the part. Koizumi, who hails from Niigata (a three-hour ‘‘Shinkansen whoosh’’ from Tokyo), is cleaning the sticky rice and, after failing to breach the language barrier, points towards a mountain of lettuce. Thankfully, his juniors, Sanjay and Atul, are there to fill in Koizumi’s ponderous blanks. The flora, which I wash and clean thoroughly, is for a teppenyaki salad.

‘‘The rice must never be cold or hot, just a little warm,’’ says Sanjay, as Koizumi, who is packing the rice into a pressure cooker, nods for extra emphasis. The chef, who’s been making sushi for the last 20-odd years, says that warm rice is perfect for malleability. The other things on top of the checklist? Hygiene and freshness.

Every sushi chef dips his hand in vinegar water before handling the fish, which aids both in keeping the food cool and thwarts germs on the hands from contaminating the fresh fish. And they are quick when it comes to dealing with seafood, most never talk while preparing sushi.

Koizumi, who’s by now moved on to breaking some eggs and lacing them with soy sauce and sugar, beckons me over. We’re going to make the egg roll.

Out comes a compact, squarish pan, about the size of my palm, into which the chef spreads out a little of the viscous yellow liquid. As the heat works on it, Koizumi the Magician takes a pair of chopsticks, lifts one half and folds it over the other. He then pours some more egg mixture in the pan and repeats the process five times till each layer is neatly folded on top of the other. What you have at the end is a small, rectangular, yellow block. The chef then pulls out a bamboo mat and binds the roll to make it more firm.

For a man eternally cursed by the temperamental Fluffy Omelette Goddess, this is inhumanely skillful, efficient and otherworldly. Only a Japanese could have done something like this.

‘‘Now, break, we meet in some time,’’ says Koizumi, and so, I roam around Spices, pecking at oatmeal cookies and watch a dirty grey Arabian sea pound the Marriott’s ramparts. As the sun slides into the Arabian Sea and the mellow lighting comes on, the restaurant starts humming with activity.

There is ice to be poured into niches (the seafood is placed on ice), lobsters to be implanted on huge blocks of ice, warm sticky rice treated with vinegar to be procured from the kitchen and enticing bottles of sake and wine to be strategically positioned.

At the counter, I’m surrounded by sushi ingredients, all packed and labelled—pink salmon, indecisively-coloured greyish-white crab meat, reddish brown tuna, mushroom, white pumpkin and the deceptively pleasant-green wasabi.

The orders have started coming in and Atul, who’s preparing sushi for guests, asks me to have a go at making some salmon sushi.

I dip my hands in vinegar water (the vinegar also prevents the rice from sticking to your fingers) and set about making my medium-long ‘finger’ of rice.

The fact that the grains stick to each other helps, but I’m geometrically challenged and the desired rectangular form forever eludes me. After Atul pats it into shape, I apply a pinch of wasabi to the little bar of rice.

The salmon now mocks me. Tender morsels of the fish have to be artfully arranged on the rice bars and you neither cut it or slice it. ‘‘Just pull your knife back from the fish,’’ says Koizumi, who’s by my side now. But all I can do is hack and for some three whole minutes, I try and figure out whether I’m left-handed or right.

It’s a pointless exercise and I can only beam in admiration as Koizumi effortlessly carves up the biggish salmon piece into beautiful slivers and places them on the sticky rice. It’s like haiku—the pink sliver on the pure white rice.

The next project is the even more alluring maki sushi, where one is confronted with another insurmountable task. Of spreading the rice on a thin layer of roasted seaweed (nori), placing a long morsel of fish or vegetable, rolling it up as tight as a cigar with the help of the bamboo mat and cutting it into similar-sized pieces.

My effort is colourful alright, but it resembles poodle poop. But I bravely offer it to my master, who is not happy with the rice sticking out and the woeful lack of visual balance. He deigns to pop a piece. And smiles—the taste is not too off the mark.

Many many miles away, there is a ripple in the Pacific and the gods atop Mt Fuji look at each other and nod.