With a title like Jiro Dreams of Sushi, one expects lots of shots of sushi in the process of being made and consumed. In this regard, director David Gelb doesn’t disappoint: The film every so often practically swims in close-up shots of freshly made sushi—sauces still dripping from the fish—as well as Wong Kar-wai-like slow-motion montages of chefs cutting and massaging fish, stirring rice, and applying sauce on top. If nothing else, Gelb’s documentary is food porn par excellence, and there’s no way you won’t leave this film not hankering for some sushi of your own—unless, perhaps, you’re a vegetarian. Thankfully, the film has other, um, layers underneath its surface food fetishization. The Jiro of the film’s title is Jiro Ono, an 85-year-old sushi chef and a legend in his field. His Sukiyabashi Jiro restaurant seats only 10, but it’s considered the best place for sushi in Japan, with a full meal costing upward of 300,000 yen ($300); the three stars it has been awarded by the Michelin Guide only sweetens its prestige.

“No one ever has a bad experience there,” says Masuhiro Yamamoto, a food critic who’s prominently featured in the film. In Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Gelb details, among other things, the painstaking process that goes into creating these mouthwatering pieces of sushi—from picking the pieces of fish for the day to getting rice from his usual provider, and from formulating his menu for a given day to presiding over his band of chefs as they serve the sushi to his customers, many of whom have had to reserve their precious seats about a year in advance. The man is incredibly precise in his process. Not just any fish will do; in fact, at the fish market he frequents, he often participates in a tuna auction in order to procure the ones he wants. And in the kitchen, he makes sure to always have a taste of whatever sushi is made in order to make sure they all suit his palate. It’s not too difficult to sense Gelb’s personal connection to this subject, beyond just a love of sushi.

For Jiro, the making of great sushi is an art akin to, say, filmmaking, but even filmmaking requires great discipline in addition to the kind of deep-seated passion that inspires artists to create in the first place. The film portrays that discipline not only in the sheer detail with which it observes his processes, but also, to a certain extent, through technique: the repetitive nature of the sushi-making montages (with camera placements and editing schemes often repeated), and even the prominent use of Philip Glass’s by-now-familiar minimalistic style on the soundtrack. Jiro Dreams of Sushi works most potently, then, as a feature-length metaphor for the joys and agonies of artistic creation. (In a sense, one could see this film as a corollary to Brad Bird’s Ratatouille, another film which immersed the viewer in the culinary arts in order to depict and comment on the creation of art.) The film is rather less effective as a portrait of the human beings underneath the exalted artists;

Gelb clearly puts his subject on a pedestal, and threads where a more probing documentarian might have gone much deeper are generally either evaded or dropped. (What, for instance, of Jiro’s oldest son, Takashi, who professes to a love for flying and car racing, and who is expected to carry on the family business? jiro dreams of sushi how expensiveDoes he imagine a different path for his life than the one he is on right now—especially considering his younger brother owns another branch of Sukiyabashi Jiro elsewhere in Tokyo?)sushi take out brighton The film may not be much more than hagiography, but it’s no less engrossing for that. sushi take out brighton

And you certainly have to hand it to Jiro: He’s been more or less working in the restaurant industry since he was nine, and even at his old age, he still sees the making of sushi as his own personal search for perfection. how to make nigiri sushi at home“I’ll try to reach the top,” he says at one point in the film, “but no one knows where the top is.” how to order nigiri sushiFor most artists, I imagine, that sounds about right.jiro dreams of sushi coverWhen it comes to sushi, you either love it or you don’t. yo sushi dubai head officeSure it’s an acquired taste, but at least we all know what sushi is.

Well apparently this Chinese student didn’t, and when she and her friends visited a rather famous sushi house while studying in Japan, she ended up pissing off the owners and went online to rant on Weibo (the Chinese Facebook) to bad mouth the sushi masters thinking that her friends would back her up. Instead, she was met with a backlash of public shame and many called her a disgrace to her country. If this story doesn’t make your Monday just a little more tolerable, it’ll at least put you in the mood for sushi. Chinese student Chuhan Lin was studying in Japan when she and four friends decided to try sushi at a branch of the famous Sukiyabashi Jiro restaurant in Roppongi, Japan, made famous from the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. The restaurant was managed by one of Jiro’s sons and is known the world over for pretty much the best sushi ever. To eat at this restaurant, you have to make a reservation and pick what you eat before you get there so that they make sure they prepare all the items you order as fresh as possible.

Well Lin and her four friends, all Chinese students, showed up 40 minutes late and never even apologized. In the restaurant they have a common locker where patrons can store all their things while they eat. One of Lin’s friends wanted to get her wallet from the locker, but didn’t bother to ask the staff to assist her like any normal person would. When someone did find her trying to break in to the communal locker, she was told off, and we are sure the language barrier didn’t help much either. It turned out that two of Lin’s friends didn’t actually even like raw fish. Why the hell would they go to sushi then, right? Her two friends ended up bailing to eat deep-fried pork somewhere else down the street- how classy. With only three friends left and a pre-ordered meal waiting for them, they cancelled everything and asked the sushi chef to just cook all the raw fish and package it- to go. That was strike three. The sushi master, probably pissed at these unappreciative kids, asked, “Is sushi served cooked in your country?

If you can’t handle raw food, you should have informed us when you made the reservation!” So Lin replied, “Who knew!? I didn’t make the reservation!” In her post, she ranted about their poor treatment saying, “If we were Abe! If we were Obama! Would he dare to show such an attitude?” She posted her entire experience on Weibo, thinking that her Chinese friends would agree that the restaurant treated her badly. Instead, her rant turned into a public shaming with many netizens calling her a “national disgrace,” probably for her embarrassing amount of cultural unawareness. She eventually took down her post, saying that, “the whole world is scolding me.” It was reported afterwards she went back to the sushi restaurant and apologized to them to which they responded she is always welcome back when she develops a taste for sushi. So if you are going to try something new today, maybe look it up a little and ask about it beforehand so you don’t get caught in any sticky situations.