The Ramen King and I Read Online Free PDF

counter?”
    “No. The sushi counter opens at seven o’clock.”
    It wasn’t clear what she and Tetsuo had to do to “open” the sushi counter. I thought about it and wondered if the policy was Tetsuo’s way of showing that he valued himself. It was as if he were telling customers, “If you want to spend time with me, make it prime time. Don’t be scheduling me in.”
    There were rules about the sushi, of course. No “funky” rolls. Nothing spicy. Customers were expected to place orders up front—no follow-on requests. On several occasions, I heard patrons cheerily ask, “What’s fresh tonight?” and then watched as they were ushered out of the restaurant after a scolding from Tetsuo. Junko once revealed to me that she arranged the soy sauce dishes at every place setting so that Tetsuo could see them from his station. When he spotted customers dragging his art through a wasabi mud bath, he cut them off from premium fish.
    The most important thing I learned, though, was that sitting at the Hamako counter entailed certain responsibilities, and that chief among them was massaging Tetsuo’s easily bruised ego. Often he would complain about a sushi bar around the corner that was regularly packed with young, beautiful people. “How can that be?” he would ask. “Their sushi chefs aren’t Japanese, and they serve ridiculous rolls stuffed with multiple kinds of fish.” Deep down he must have known that most Americans love ridiculous rolls stuffed with multiple kinds of fish and don’t care about the nationality of their sushi chefs. But I guess he had a hard time accepting that, because he would always follow up with a self-deprecating comment about how his sushi was not what it used to be.
    “My hands are getting weak,” he would say. “I guess I should retire.”
    I always told him that his sushi was as great as ever, which it was.
     
     
    T here’s one date at Hamako I remember.
    The woman was Japanese, and she was a fit model for an international clothing chain. We were sitting at the Hamako counter when Tetsuo began doing his pity-party routine about the sushi bar around the corner. This time, when he got to the part about how his hands were getting weak and how he should retire, he went one step further.
    “Junko and I have bought a home near Lake Tahoe,” he said. “We’re going to close Hamako in December and retire there.”
    I almost spit out a hand roll. He was speaking in Japanese, so I double-checked that I had heard him correctly.
    “Did he just say that he’s going to close the restaurant in December?” I asked my date. It was just four months away.
    “Yes,” she confirmed. “That’s what he said.”
    That’s why I remember her, because she confirmed it.
    I looked up at Tetsuo.
    “You’re going to close Hamako?”
    “In December,” he repeated.
    Part of me was sad. But another part was happy, because Tetsuo had apparently shared the news with me before telling anyone else. Was it a sign that he was beginning to see me as worthy of first-best fatty tuna? When I got home, I wrote another post on Chowhound. The title was “Hamako Closing?”
    The next night, my cell phone rang. It was Junko, and she sounded upset.
    “Hakata Andy, did you write something about us on the Internet?”
    I wondered how she had gotten my phone number, but then I remembered her asking for it during the registration process. I also wondered how she knew about the post, given that I had written it under a pseudonym. There was no use denying it.
    “Is there a problem?”
    “Our phone has been ringing off the hook. People want reservations.”
    At any other restaurant, it would not have been a problem. Junko assured me that it was a problem at Hamako.
    “The calls are disrupting Tetsuo’s sushi making,” she said. “He’s angry, and he wants you to erase what you wrote from the Internet.”
    “Chowhound doesn’t let you erase a post from their site,” I said.
    It was the truth.
    “I don’t know