Our Q&A with the brilliant comedian behind Juan Likes Rice & Chicken. If you’re a bit tired of the food world's self-seriousness, you are not alone. Actually, Seth Meyers, Fred Armisen and Bill Hader are on your side. In the newest season of their Emmy-nominated mockumentary series Documentary Now!, these three comedic talents have parodied Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the beloved food film focused on an 85-year-old perfectionist sushi chef. In the episode Juan Likes Rice & Chicken, which airs on IFC tonight at 10:00 p.m., writer Seth Meyers puts a basic dish on the ultimate pedestal. Set in Colombia, Juan’s Rice & Chicken is a Michelin-starred restaurant that is a 45-minute walk from the nearest road. Inspired by Jiro, Juan’s menu is extraordinarily simple, but created with only the very best—and well-massaged—ingredients. With a riveting storyline centered around Juan’s son Arturo, played by Fred Armisen, and cameos by Jonathan Gold and David Chang, you will definitely want to watch.

We chatted with Seth all about Jiro, the episode and the food industry today: How did you choose Jiro Dreams of Sushi? We went into this season realizing that this kind of food porn documentary is a genre that exists now, not just with Jiro, but with things like Chef’s Table on Netflix. I think our directors wanted to do the sort of intense shots of food that you salivate over in documentaries.thai food delivery london w2 Have you visited Sukiyabashi Jiro?naru sushi winnipeg online menu No I have not. sushi san francisco lombard streetI would like to very much. where to buy japanese pickled ginger

My wife and I had reservations for the one in New York that his mentee opened (Sushi Nakazawa) and then my wife got very sick with a cold. So we couldn’t go and I still hold it against her. Do you think Jiro would watch Juan Likes Rice & Chicken? What do you think he’d say?I have so much love and respect for him watching the film, but one thing you don’t get a great sense of is what his sense of humor is. So I wouldn’t venture out on a limb and say whether he would like it or not. How did you get from Japan to Colombia? One thing that led us here is that we wanted to do the entire episode in a foreign language. We were then limited by the fact that of our two cast members, Fred was the only one who had one of those. Spanish gave us a wealth of opportunities. Do you have a particular tie to this dish? I feel like we live in the age now where simple food is treated with a lot more respect than it ever has been before. I read an article about how a food stand in Singapore was awarded a Michelin star and I thought that this is a perfect time for this episode to come out because that’s exactly the kind of thing we’re poking fun at.

Were Jonathan Gold and David Chang hesitant to mock their industry? David Chang was the easiest sell on earth. I basically got on the phone with him and gave him a two-sentence description of this episode and he was saying "yes" by the time I was done. We had seen the documentary with Jonathan Gold (City of Gold), which had led us to think he would be perfect in this and he writes beautifully about food. So fortunately for us, they were both people who had a good sense of humor about what was happening in their industry.At Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, sushi chef Yoshikazu Ono buys an octopus and watches it rudely stuffed into a plastic bag; alive and straining its tentacles in a vain bid to escape. Wild shrimp, pale dappled brown, are so fresh they leap out of their crates, while eel and halibut swim hopelessly in boxes. The eerie carcases of prize tuna are auctioned in a bizarre fish trading floor.If the fish can’t get away, neither perhaps can Yoshikazu, who wanted to be a fighter pilot, but instead was persuaded by his father Jiro to train, like him, as a sushi chef.

Jiro is in his mid-eighties, Yoshikazu is in his early fifties, and both have worked ceaselessly in the art of sushi; Yoshikazu since his teens, his father since the age of 10. This month they take unlikely starring roles in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the funny, touching documentary of their work that was a sleeper hit in the US last year.It’s unusual to see lives dedicated to food portrayed in such detail – and with such affection. The film-maker David Gelb followed “Jiro-san” in Tokyo over two separate months in 2010, having conceived of a Planet Earth-style treatment of different gastronomic subjects, starting with his own favourite food, sushi. “When I was first researching the project [the chef] Daniel Boulud insisted I use Jiro; he sees that he is a genius,” Gelb says. Indeed, Jiro is very much a chef’s chef – Joël Robuchon visits the restaurant once a year, and he has fans from Eric Ripert to April Bloomfield. “Jiro is a craftsman who has dedicated his life to finding perfection in sushi,” Bloomfield says.

“He represents the old school in a world where people seem to want to do things faster and cheaper.”The omakase menu at Sukiyabashi Jiro, the chef’s tiny 10-seater (and three Michelin-starred) basement restaurant, costs Y30,000 (about £215) and consists of 20 different pieces of sushi. It’s not cheap, but neither are Jiro’s methods or his ingredients. Yoshikazu is deputed to buy the fish at the market, where carefully chosen specialists are in turn trusted to supply only the very finest produce. The restaurant has its own rice dealer, Hiromichi, who has an entertaining cameo in the film, but such is the importance of this particular rice to the sushi that the exact variety was kept a close secret from Gelb. “They cook it under high pressure so it gets very fluffy but [this variety] retains its shape.” The rice, Gelb says, is crucial to balance the fish: “When I first ate there, it’s as if I’d never eaten sushi before.”In Jiro, we see the small, six-man kitchen team sweating their way through a long list of daily chores: drying seaweed sheet by sheet over hot charcoal, massaging the (now dead) octopus by hand for 50 minutes to make its flesh more tender, marinating the fish, perfecting the rice, practising the cut of the fish and the assembly of the sushi over and over again.

“Never complain about your job” is Jiro’s motto, and well before the film’s close you know he means it.Anybody thinking of opening a restaurant will find an acute warning of the self-denying edge that perfectionism can teeter on. Tim Anderson, who won MasterChef in 2011 and whose own southern Japanese restaurant, Nanban, is set to open in London this spring, says: “As a chef myself, [the film] is both inspiring and heartbreaking; Jiro’s perfect sushi is only made possible by great sacrifices … I can’t quite decide if it’s a lifestyle I aspire to, or one I’m thankful to not be living.” Meanwhile Michael Voltaggio, the celebrity chef-owner of Ink in West Hollywood, liked the film so much he had a screening of it for his entire staff. (“They ordered pizza,” Gelb says.)The common idea of the unhealthily hardworking chef does pall completely when you consider Jiro’s story. Aged nine, his bankrupt parents told him he had to fend for himself, and aged 10 he started working in sushi street stalls, progressing to an apprenticeship at a large and prestigious sushi restaurant before eventually opening his own place.