Tekka Maki

My experience with sushi dates back to 1976 on my first day of work in the New York City banking world. I don’t think I had ever really even heard of sushi before then. I started work at Bankers Trust Company on Monday, June 28, 1976. I had secured a spot as a Cornell MBA graduate in their bank training program and was being paid the princely sum of $17,000 per year. That had afforded me the ability to move the weekend before into a one bedroom apartment in Bayside, Queens, a not-so-quick express bus ride away from midtown that could take me there in the morning and back to Flushing in the afternoon and evening. I was not smart enough to realize that you didn’t picked apartments for glossy brochure reasons (my building was a high rise on the bay…but my first floor apartment had no views other than of the adjacent row houses), but for their convenience to commutation. So my choices were that express bus or a drive to Shea Stadium to park followed by the #7 train into Grand Central. The train sounds better until you come home on a Mets home game day and realize that it can take you half a day to get out of that parking lot for your five minute ride to Bayside. But commutation knowledge was not the only hayseed issue I faced that summer. Just being in banking and the big city was a constant learning process for me.

That first morning, after my orientation session in HR, I was assigned to the South Europe Group for the summer. The thinking was simple. I spoke Italian and the Italian desk was in the South Europe Group. It took the head of the South Europe Group ten minutes during the midst of his Banco Ambrosiano credit crisis that morning to reassign me to the North Europe Group, where things were very quiet and staid. I was assigned to the Vice President (a 50-year-old Harvard graduate) covering the Germanic counties. With a last name like Pfieffer, he spoke fluent German, which led me to understand that language skill was the guiding force in work assignments in the banking world. Given Mr. Pfieffer’s age and other inclinations, he didn’t want to take me out for an uncomfortable but expected first-day lunch with the new kid, so he asked a young officer who had an MBA from University of Chicago, a guy by the name of Cantalini, who worked on the Iberian desk, to take me out to lunch. I saw some money exchange hands and then Cantalini waved me on to join him at the elevators. Our offices were on Park Avenue between 48th and 49th. That meant that you could either go east to Lexington (or more likely Third Avenue), or you could go immediately west to Madison Avenue and the side streets nearby to find places to eat. As we past Burger Heaven on 49th and Madison, I began to wonder where we were headed. We then went in a small side street door and climbed a set of stairs to get to what Cantalini proudly declared to be the “best sushi place in New York”. If only I had a clue what sushi was.

My 22-year-old palate was not ready for what it encountered. We sat down at a very traditional Japanese restaurant where 80% of the clientele were Asian and the other 20% looked like they were bankers like us (ALL the big banks except J.P. Morgan were near us on Park Avenue). I stared at the menu while Cantalini licked his chops over the offerings, declaring that he liked this eel or that dragon roll. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I could surmise that I had been enticed to a second story restaurant that was all about fish…and I didn’t like fish. The only thing I cared about more than not liking fish was wanting to make a good first impression. This was my first day of work and the beginning of my career. I was supposed to be an adult now and no longer a flaky student. We were all wearing suits and ties after all. So I picked something on the menu that I thought I could stomach. While I never loved tuna fish sandwiches, I knew I could make tuna work…or so I thought. There was a tuna roll on the menu and that sounded OK to me. It turns out that my version of tuna fish from the can was baked and what came to me a few minutes later on a wooden block palate was raw (and visibly red) tuna set in the sushi rice with fermented vinegar, sugar and salt and wrapped in a seaweed wrapper called nori. This tekka maki, as it is called, was beautifully presented and while I was suspicious about why it didn’t look as much like the tuna salad I was used to, I figured, “How bad could it be?”

Once I popped one of the pieces of the hosomaki into my mouth, I quickly got the answer to that question as I gagged. I didn’t know if it was the seaweed, the fermented rice or the raw tuna that so offended my palate, but I simply could not get that disgusting little wad of food down my throat. I not-so-subtly coughed it up into my hand and just looked apologetically at Cantalini. Just then, a group of other Europe Division officers wandered in for lunch, sitting at the next table over. I very quickly asked them if they wanted my remaining tekka maki as an appetizer…since I was so full. They were thrilled and Cantalini, to whom I will be forever grateful, just said we should get back to the office. On our way back, he stopped into Burger Heaven and picked up two cheeseburgers for us, which we ate in a small vest-pocket park under the Park Avenue building. His only comment to me was, “I guess you’re not so much of a sushi guy…”

Fifteen years later I took a temporary assignment to run our Tokyo office for two months. I lived at the Imperial Palace Hotel on Hibiya Park (across from the iconic Imperial Palace). It doesn’t get more Japanese than that. And for two months I learned how to eat Japanese without touching sushi, if you can believe that. Now, when we get asked to join someone for sushi, I know exactly what to do. I had to do just that tonight at Escondido’s finest, called Sushiyama. I had gyoza with a chaser of chicken ramen soup. I can do Yakitori chicken. I can do Yakisoba. I can even do Tempura. I still look at sushi rolls and shake my head. I know people love the stuff, but when I look at it I still get that metallic tang on the back of my tongue that tells me to steer clear.