"Good chefs are notoriously exacting about how a customer ought to experience a dish that may have taken months, years or even the arc of an entire career to perfect. Gordon Ramsay will not serve ketchup. Marco Pierre White, as the apocryphal tale goes, ejected dozens of diners who asked for more salt or pepper. Alice Waters never accepted requests for items that were out of season."
"For Kim, whose Sushi J restaurant has operated for seven years, the decision is not one of cost. Instead, he said it reflected a theory about customer palettes, suggesting that not a single person who asked for extra soy sauce in the early years of his business ever became a regular. Why? Because they remembered the taste of my sushi as the taste of soy sauce, not the sushi itself, he wrote."
Some chefs enforce strict rules about how dishes should be experienced, refusing condiments or out-of-season requests to protect culinary intent. A Kitimat sushi chef posts a sign forbidding extra soy sauce for rude or intoxicated customers and maintains that extra soy sauce will not be served even for large payment. The chef views the policy as preserving the intended palate of each dish and believes customers who ask for extra soy sauce remember the sushi as soy-flavored rather than the chef’s work. The stance aligns with sushi’s perfectionist omakase tradition and has drawn both support and criticism.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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