The long way round
Eleven years, then nineteen months.
Hiroshi Tanaka grew up in Kanagawa and went to Tokyo at nineteen. He spent eleven years at Sushi Iwa in Ginza under Yamamoto-sensei, most of them on rice and on the cure, which is where that kitchen puts the people it intends to keep.
He met Despina Marinakou in Athens in 2017. She is an architect whose practice had been small Cycladic chapels and one Cretan winery. They decided on a room with eight seats, and ordered the chairs from the Kyoto craftsman Saito-san in the spring of 2019.
Then two lockdowns and a container reroute through Algeciras. Hiroshi spent the wait teaching himself the Edomae salt-and-vinegar curing he had only practised under supervision. By the time the chairs arrived in February 2021 the nikiri had been reducing on a low pilot for nineteen months. The room opened on a Wednesday in March, four guests at six and four at nine.
