19/4/13 – ‘Captured’

While working out on the stepper at the gym this morning I watched the Boston manhunt in real time action. You have got hand it to this country, they certainly know how to do live coverage. But am I a bad person to say that I think there is too much hype attached to anything that resembles terrorism here in the USA? This morning the Governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, put Boston into ‘total lockdown’. This meant that over a million people were told to stay home and stay indoors, go to their basements and not answer the door to anyone. All transit systems (bus, train and plane) were shutdown. Boston was at a standstill and was supposed to remain that way until the fugitive was apprehended. 

 

After lunch we took the subway downtown to Century 21 to buy Peter a suit. He did so well with the suit he decided to get himself a blue blazer as well, just so that he can match Hansie! We then travelled back uptown and ate at the famous ‘Tanoshi Sushi’ (1372 York Avenue). Last month the NY Times listed this microscopically small place as doing the best sushi in NYC and the queues ever since have been huge. Being ‘hot’ in NYC means you can hang out a clipboard on the restaurant door at 1.30pm with just 10 spots available for each of the three sessions (6.00pm/7.30pm/9.00pm) for which they are willing to seat guests that night and expect that there will be a queue of people just standing around outside waiting to sign up and that the list will be completely filled by 2pm … after which and a sign goes up on the door to say: ‘Our restaurant is full tonight – please try again soon!’  Who has time in the middle of a busy day to come all the way up to York Avenue and sign a clipboard? Well we do of course. For one thing we are not at work during the day, so we can afford to take the time out required to stand on line and sign up. Plus of course we actually live up here on the UES, so the restaurant is only a five minute walk away from our apartment. But what about other Sushi lovers, who are not as fortunate as us? Well in typical New York fashion it seems that they actually pay people to come and sign for them!

 

I am pleased to report that the NY Times was right – the ‘omakase’ meal we had was spectacular. Wikipedia tells me that ‘omakase’ (

お任せ?) is a Japanese phrase that means "I'll leave it to you" (from the Japanese word ‘makasu’ (任す?, "to entrust"). The expression is used at sushi restaurants to leave the selection to the chef. The chef will generally present a series of plates, beginning with the lightest fare and proceeding to heaviest, richest dishes. Customers ordering ‘omakase style’ expect the chef to be innovative and surprising in the selection of dishes, and the meal can be likened to an artistic performance. And on this night our Japanese chef may have been huge, and almost completely incapable of communication in English, but he sure put on a show. As he prepared our dishes right in front of us he paid careful attention to even the most minute details and, as in most other aspects of life, it was this attention to detail that proved to be the prime difference between being merely ‘good’ and being ‘absolutely outstanding’. The seaweed wrap was dry, the rice soft, the seafood was at room temperature and very flavoursome and all presented with a grunt (as I said the chef didn’t speak English) on a fresh lotus leaf. He even fired a few of the courses with a mini-blow torch to sear the top – something I had never seen before - and boy was it all good!

The seafood dishes included creamy sea urchin, scallop, salmon, tuna, sea bass, yellowtail, squid, eel, fluke and salmon roe. While we were consuming these delicacies we chatted with a very nice couple seated beside us. Turns out that like us they live nearby. But unlike us they were terribly exotic! He was from Turkey and she was from Cuba – they met whilst they were both studying in Boston (at North Eastern University). Peter, ever the ‘cunning linguist’, was miffed that he did not have the knowledge or skills that would allow him converse with either of them in

their native tongues, but he soon cheered up when he found he could chat in Cantonese with the maître d' who as it turned out was not Japanese at all but a Chinese from HK. We paid our bill ($140), finished our sitting at precisely 8.55pm and proceeded to assure the people waiting outside for the next sitting that they were in for a rare treat indeed.   

We got home to find out that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was now in custody. The Chief of Boston Police had just tweeted "CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody." 3 dead and 284 injured.