David Gelb's mouth-watering documentary takes us downstairs at a Tokyo metro station, where 85-year-old masterchef Jiro Ono is quietly devoting his life to sushi perfection Watch Jiro: Dreams of Sushi here Click here to put a question to director David Gelb in a live webchat Reading on a mobile? Click here to watch video One of the best lines in Jiro Dreams of Sushi could have come straight out of another great Japanese film – Tampopo, the brilliant "noodle western" that is the funniest film ever made about food. Where Tampopo was a satirical paean to ramen, Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a fascinating documentary about a Michelin three-star restaurant in Tokyo, called Jiro, which serves top-quality sushi – and only top-quality sushi – starting at 30,000 yen (£210) for a 20-piece tasting course. A food critic quips that, because the meal can be eaten in only a quarter of an hour, Jiro is minute-for-minute the most expensive restaurant in the world. Yet with its 10 seats, total lack of decor and bizarre location in a featureless, fluorescent-lit corridor down a set of stairs in Ginza metro station, Jiro is as unassuming as its master chef, 85-year-old Jiro Ono.

For 75 uninterrupted years, since before the outbreak of the second world war, every day except for national holidays and the occasional Sunday, Jiro has spent all of his time devoted to doing just one thing: making sushi. "I wasn't much of a father," Jiro says. "More of a stranger." His dedication to his tradecraft is guaranteed to put you and everyone you know to shame. In Jiro's regime, apprentices – one of whom is his eldest son Yoshi, who at 50 is considered still too green to take over the family business – must spend 10 years learning to use their knives before they're allowed to cook even eggs. To become a shokunin, a skilled craftsman, someone who does the same exact thing every day to the highest possible level in the neverending pursuit of perfection. We meet a cast of obsessives – the rice guy, the shrimp guy – who lead us to the film's centrepiece, the great singing tuna auctioneers of Tsukiji fish market. With the market about to be moved to a soulless new venue, this section of the film amounts to a historically important bit of documentary.

And if you don't want to punch the air yourself when Jiro leans forward with 75 years of fire in his eyes and fervently extols the "harmony of fish, sushi rice and soy sauce", then your blood runs colder than anago.Though the election subject matter made “The Bunker” an obvious candidate for the season premiere, a part of me wishes season two of Documentary Now! had started here, with “Juan Likes Rice And Chicken,” which more strikingly embodies Documentary Now!’“The Bunker” was undeniably good, but it almost seemed too easy and like Documentary Now! wasn’t quite digging deep enough. Though significantly more understated than the season premiere—especially in terms of the performances—“Juan Likes Rice And Chicken” is actually a funnier episode than “The Bunker,” finding humor in all the right places.A parody of 2011’s spectacular Jiro Dreams Of Sushi, “Juan Likes Rice And Chicken” centers on Juan, a maestro of arroz con pollo, a simple dish with a very complicated process thanks to Juan’s obsessive desire for perfection.

Juan serves from a limited menu—coffee, a banana sliced in half, rice with a dollop of butter, and chicken (sometimes)—in his remote three-star Michelin-rated restaurant where no detail goes overlooked. sumo sushi menu philadelphiaThe original documentary, directed by David Gelb, follows a similarly rigid but passionate master of his craft: Jiro Ono, whose acute attention to detail earned his humble sushi restaurant in a Tokyo subway station the coveted three-star rating. comprar sushi online recifeThere’s an over-the-top excessiveness to Jiro’s precision, to his compulsive determination to perfect, and Documentary Now! sushi grade fish scotlandhas a lot of fun exaggerating it all. sushi grade fish quincy ma

“Juan Likes Rice And Chicken” jumps right into the humor, showing a pair of American tourists on their grueling 40-minute trek through the Colombian hills to get to Juan’s restaurant only to find out that there is no chicken being served that day. sushi grade salmon bostonJuan’s chicken selection process consists of giving himself five minutes to catch a chicken in a pen (if he’s unsuccessful, then fate has spoken and the chicken gets to live). kracie popin cookin sushi buy onlineFinding the highest quality ingredients includes a whole slew of seemingly meaningless rituals to which Juan has nonetheless assigned all the meaning in the world. sushi grade fish marylandHe makes sure every banana feels and sounds right.

Every coffee bean is individually examined: Is it your friend or your enemy? But just as Juan is unwaveringly precise in his measurements and ingredients, Documentary Now! remains unwaveringly precise in its comedy. There isn’t too much exaggeration or too little; Played as straight as possible, the jokes land effortlessly.It helps, of course, that Jiro Dreams Of Sushi lends itself perfectly to the Documentary Now! doesn’t try to force humor upon its original subject material. It doesn’t take an existing work and then merely “make it funny.” Instead, Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Seth Meyers, and their writing team find and probe the humor and weirdness that’s already there. All the parts of “Juan Likes Rice And Chicken” that seem the most outlandish are some of the parts most strongly rooted in reality. The doc reveals that Juan has increased the massage time for individual chicken breasts gradually from 30 minutes to an hour. In Jiro Dreams Of Sushi, Jiro decides that the octopus must be massaged for a full hour instead of merely 45 minutes.

Just about every oddity in “Juan Likes Rice And Chicken” acts as a pretty clear analog to a detail from Jiro Dreams Of Sushi. doesn’t need to add weirdness so much as hold up a mirror to the weirdness that’s already there.Alexander Buono and Rhys Thomas mimic Jiro director Gelb’s indulgent, delicious camerawork that is hard to describe as anything other than “food porn.” (Gelb continued this style of food filmmaking in his Netflix series Chef’s Table.) They similarly use bold, cinematic camerawork to complement the bravado of the main subject, with a classical score that makes everything all the more lavish. Those technical aspects make “Juan Likes Rice And Chicken” a visually and sonically immersive experience. The central characters all speak in Spanish with subtitles, adding to the episode’s authenticity. No detail goes overlooked.is always comprehensive when it comes to the particular mechanics of mimicking original works, but that technical precision isn’t what makes Documentary Now!

the strange sensation it is. Anybody can ape a particular look and sound. gets to the heart of its subject matter, finds what makes the original documentary compelling on a character or story level and then plays with that. Jiro Dreams Of Sushi isn’t just about its mysterious and almost mythical main character; it’s about the complicated relationship between him and his two sons. Here’s where “Juan Likes Rice And Chicken” shines, too. Armisen plays Arturo, Juan’s son who has worked for a decade as an apprentice at the restaurant and who’s burdened with the looming task of having to someday take over the family business. Then there’s Diego, the other son who Juan says is dead but in reality is only dead to him, because he left to start his own restaurant that’s in every way the opposite of his father’s. His restaurant—Diego’s Fun Restaurant—has no rules other than just having fun and a special house sauce that’s full of Captain Morgan. Arturo, meanwhile, lives by his father’s overbearing rules, having to bury coffee beans in the dirt and bang bags of rice against trees and listen to bananas and shoot chicken breasts from high-powered cannons.

As strange as it sounds, the father-son dynamics at play in “Juan Likes Rice And Chicken” are grounded and compelling, taking the episode from mere parody to something more. Last week, Armisen and Hader were practically playing bit characters. This week, Armisen delivers a subtle but brilliant performance that resonates on an emotional level.certainly hasn’t shied away from casting big names—Tim Robinson, John Slattery, and Jack Black all appeared in season one—the general approach to casting seems to be less about Armisen and Hader getting all their funniest pals to be on the show (the route a lot of fringe comedies seem to go these days) and more about finding people who are going to look authentic within the world of the documentary and give naturalLuis Fernando Hoyos, like Armisen, doesn’t work too hard to try and make Diego a funny character. He plays it straight, and it works. There’s restraint to the performances, which aren’t obviously comedic ones but are funny nonetheless.