jiro dreams of sushi address
On my way back from vacation, I watched the movie “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” for a second time. I first watched it in 2012 before my first study trip to Japan. You can watch the movie for free if you’re an Amazon Prime member, by the way. The film focuses mainly on Jiro Ono, a now 90-year old sushi chef in Tokyo who has received the rare and coveted Michelin 3-star rating for his restaurant. As you can read in the transcript of the film [Jiro] is always looking ahead. He’s never satisfied with his work. He’s always trying to find ways to make the sushi better, or to improve his skills.Even now, that’s what he thinks about all day, every day. That reminds me of Lean thinking, especially the drive for Kaizen, or continuous improvement. As Jiro says, there’s always room for improvement: I admire how somebody like Jiro can do the same thing, follow the same routine, every day for decades, trying to perfect his craft. Later in the film, we also see Fujita, a tuna dealer, who talks about the need for continuous improvement and the self-reflection that’s necessary.
Dunning and Kruger proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will: fail to recognize their own lack of skill fail to recognize the extent of their inadequacy
jiro dreams of sushi wife fail to accurately gauge skill in others
sushi juegos online recognize and acknowledge their own lack of skill only after they are exposed to training for that skill Then, as you learn more, you realize how much you don’t know. This can lead to the “imposter syndrome.” “Psychological research done in the early 1980s estimated that two out of five successful people consider themselves frauds and other studies have found that 70 percent of all people feel like impostors at one time or another.” Interesting thoughts for the practice of Lean and Kaizen, eh?I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Please scroll down to post a comment. Click here to receive posts via email. Learn more about Mark Graban’s speaking, writing, and consulting.Back in September we learned that L.A.-based chicken chain El Pollo Loco had split with its creative AOR BSSP and invited several area shops to compete for its business. Those parties included a unit called GM Plumbing and VITRO, which won the review for an account that was worth $27 million in 2012. The MDC Partners shop has now released its first creative work for the brand with the help of director David Gelb, who helmed the excellent 2011 doc “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” and the consistently good (if you’re into that sort of thing) Netflix series “Chef’s Table.” Like his previous work, this one is all about culinary authenticity that comes “Fresh From the Grill.” It’s also got a bit of that L.A. flavor—no, not the Golden Globes kind. Brothers Jake and Victor Camozzi, who joined VITRO last February to launch its Austin office, led creative on the campaign.
“It’s a new direction,” Jake said regarding the new work. “In the past they were a little more comedy-based, but this is a lot more documentary-style and anthemic. They are a legitimate brand with a great heritage and history that’s part of the fabric of L.A.” The chain, which initially started in Mexico, opened its first California location in 1980 and now includes 400 such branches. “It started with one place on Alvarado Street with one guy cooking really good chicken,” Camozzi said, “and we wanted to bring it to life as almost a love letter to the city.” Victor Camozzi said that the agency thought of Gelb as an ideal director for the campaign: “As soon as we jumped on the phone he said, this is directly in my wheelhouse, shooting food in a way that looks real but not like the visual tropes of other food shooters out there.” Jake adds that the history of the company “made our job really easy” and that the team also collaborated with Jorge R. Gutierrez, an illustrator who created the mural that plays a prominent role in the above spot and directed the 2014 animated film The Book of Life.
My father taking a picture of the @elpolloloco mural. I think, for maybe a few minutes, he was a tiny bit impressed. — Jorge R. Gutierrez (@mexopolis) January 4, 2017 The Camozzi brothers told us that future spots will delve deeper into the Pollo Loco story, and VITRO will also be handling social media for the client, though that work is still in development. “There’s no denying the immense influence that the vibrant personality and character of LA has had on El Pollo Loco, and it became clear to us our campaign needed to tell this hometown story,” said VITRO CEO Tom Sullivan. “We’re proud to debut ‘Road to Authenticity’ which highlights the quality and authenticity of El Pollo Loco through a beautiful and enticing travelogue showcasing exactly what inspires everything they do and have done for over 30 years.” In the meantime, here are two more recent :15 spots.David Gelb went halfway around the globe to make his first feature, a documentary about master chef Jiro Ono, whose 10-seat Tokyo restaurant boasts three Michelin stars.
But in a way, “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” which opened in Washington on Friday, is a homecoming. “My parents took me to Japan for the first time when I was 2 years old,” Gelb said by phone from Los Angeles. That was in 1985, when the filmmaker’s father, Peter Gelb, was assistant manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Its music director at the time was Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa, and the orchestra performed in Japan frequently. “I would come along with my mom, as well,” the filmmaker said. “So I started eating cucumber rolls when I was 2 years old.” Sukiyabashi Jiro, which has a tiny space in the basement of a Ginza office building, does not serve cucumber or any other kind of roll (“maki” in Japanese). “Real sushi chefs don’t even see that as sushi,” Gelb said. “It’s a whole different category of food.” The restaurant charges about $300 for 20 pieces of nigiri, which balance toppings (usually but not always raw fish) on hand-shaped lumps of delicately flavored rice.
Each of the 20 pieces in a course is different. “It’s just an incredibly satisfying and thrilling sensation to eat a perfectly balanced piece of sushi,” said Gelb, who admitted to a squalid past in which he regularly ate low-grade sushi. “After working on this film, I began to realize that the true art of sushi lies in these high-end restaurants. So now I go maybe once a month, but I pay five times as much.” Like many high-end Japanese businesses, Sukiyabashi Jiro didn’t encourage non-Japanese patrons. “Originally, Jiro didn’t really like foreign customers that much,” Gelb said, “because they didn’t know that much about sushi.” Since Michelin published its first guide to Tokyo eateries in 2008, however, Ono now “loves to show foreigners the potential of sushi,” Gelb said. “If people are willing to come to the restaurant and try sushi his way, he’s always glad to have them.” Sushi made Ono’s way is the essential subject of Gelb’s documentary, which was filmed mostly in Sukiyabashi Jiro.
(There are side trips to a spinoff location and to Tokyo’s massive Tsukiji fish market, as well as to a reunion of Ono’s childhood friends.) Ono and his apprentices, who include middle-aged sons Yoshikazu and Takashi, demonstrate everything from making egg custard to massaging octopus flesh to make it tender. Originally, Gelb planned “a movie about sushi, in all of its different forms.” Then he was introduced to Ono by a Tokyo food critic, Masuhiro Yamamoto. “Everything that I wanted to convey about sushi could easily be presented from Jiro’s perspective,” the director said. The film became more personal when it came to focus on Ono, who was 85 when the movie was shot in 2010, and older son Yoshikazu, who will someday inherit the business. “It’s a human story, set in the world of sushi,” Gelb said. The director never filmed when the restaurant was in operation, although he does include one scene in which Jiro prepares a meal for invited guests. Rather than emphasize the bustle of the restaurant business, Gelb highlights Ono’s craftsmanship.
The depiction of the chef’s work and outlook is surprisingly intimate, especially since it was accomplished through translators. (Gelb described his Japanese as “poor.”) Gelb prepared the translators with the topics and questions to be covered and did pre-interviews with Ono and his staff. “The first few days of the production, I didn’t even bring the camera with me,” Gelb said. “This was just so they could get used to me being around.” The filmmaker also enlisted Yamamoto to ask some of the questions. “I knew that their rapport, and their history together, would bring out more candid answers from Jiro,” Gelb said. “If we missed something,” Gelb added, “we would shoot another interview, until we got it right. That’s something we kind of picked up from Jiro. Keep doing it over and over again until it’s right.” The director owes more than a taste for sushi to his father, now the general manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. The elder Gelb, who has produced numerous TV shows and documentaries about classical music and musicians, indirectly introduced his son to filmmaking.
And, of course, to classical music. But the use of compositions by Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Philip Glass in “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” is not simply a matter of personal taste. “It was all about elevating the elements of the movie to [Ono’s] level as much as possible,” Gelb said. “The way that Philip Glass’s music is repetitive but always building on itself and escalating — Jiro’s work ethic is sort of analogous to that. He is doing the same routine every day and looking for that one step of improvement.” Ono’s “whole ethos is about mastery of simplicity,” Gelb said. “So we don’t use any sort of graphics, or any special effects in the film, beyond speeding things up and slowing them down. It’s just a very simple movie, with elegant camera work and music. We want the film to feel like a movie that Jiro would make, if he were a filmmaker. Just very simple and pretty. But deep at the same time.” So Ono’s sushi is a metaphor for the director’s approach to filmmaking?