Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Why Do the Top Sushi Restaurants Leave Us So Bored, and So Broke?
Hiss, hiss, hiss. Up and down the marble counter, the sushi chefs are brandishing their weapons. The first time it’s a thrill, the blue gush of the hand torch, the whoosh like an F-16 fighter jet taking flight. The fifth time it’s a tic. Piece after piece of fish goes under the flame, until the flavor is more smoke than sea, until everything tastes the same.
In a 1963 column about new Japanese restaurants in Manhattan, the New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne wrote that sushi “may seem a trifle too ‘far out’ for many American palates.” Then came the California roll, popularized by Ichiro Mashita in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the flocking of Hollywood stars and studio heads to sushi bars like Osho, conveniently located next to the 20th Century Fox lot.
By 1987, Charlie Sheen, playing a whippersnapper stockbroker in the movie “Wall Street,” was churning out rice balls eight at a time from a home nigiri-making machine in his penthouse.
That nigiri-maker might have been an omen for what was to come: the co-opting of sushi by finance bros, favoring optimization and spectacle over craft, in an eerie Benihana-fication of the American sushi-ya.
I am not arguing for sushi as some serene, transcendent ritual. Sushi as we know it started out as working-class food sold in the streets of 19th-century Edo (today Tokyo). Some of the best sushi I’ve had was in strip malls in Los Angeles, at unadorned counters where the chef set down piece after piece with sometimes little more than a grunt, and we were out in half an hour. (Shout-out to Sushi Ike, for those who know.)
Now the hand torches flare and, at the most expensive restaurants, there’s a banker’s roll of supplements to pad out your meal and push the already astonishing prices even higher — up to $1,200 per person, pre-tax and pre-liquor, for the “chef’s reserve” omakase at Masa on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
At Sushi Nakazawa in the West Village, you might have your choice of A5 Wagyu, truffles (a Japanese food writer I consulted expressed concern that the scent would be “distracting”), a tweezering of gold leaf over caviar and a pairing of Krug Champagne and kinki (thornyhead), a rare and opulently fatty fish sometimes called the Wagyu of the sea.
More insidiously, an odd note of appeasement has crept in. A recent omakase meal at a Lower Manhattan counter was almost all crowd-pleasers. First, three kinds of salmon — a fish not even used for sushi until the 1980s, when Norway, eager to offload an oversupply, lobbied to create a new market in Japan (which may in turn have expanded the audience for sushi in the United States, with the lure of a more familiar and straightforwardly buttery fish). Then delicate sweet snappers, luscious jacks and tuna close to liquefying in its own fat.
With each bite I had the nagging sense I was being spoon-fed, like a finicky child who couldn’t possibly know what’s really good or keep an open mind. There was nothing funky or chewy that might demand a pause to wonder: What am I eating?
In the past decade and a half, omakase, in which the guest cedes power and the chef decides what you eat, has become the dominant form of sushi in major American cities like New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas. This stems in part from the popularity of the 2011 documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” a paean to the monastic virtuosity of the sushi master Jiro Ono, plying his craft in a basement nook off a subway station in Tokyo.
In classic omakase, a chef has leeway to improvise in the moment, modulate, maybe even figure out what kind of person you are. These days in New York, the experience is more often one-size-fits-all: a fixed series of courses — essentially, a tasting menu — ranging from a dozen to 20 or more, with accommodations only for allergies or a particularly querulous diner, and often not even then. At the highest-end spots, everyone sits down at the same time and is fed in the same order, as if at the most elegant of mess halls.
There was a time when omakase was something you asked for, a way of saying, I’m curious and open, willing to try anything. You voluntarily set aside the menu and gave yourself up to fate. It was part of a code you learned, along with picking up pieces by hand and not dipping them into soy sauce unless instructed to do so, and then only the very tip of the fish, never the rice.
In my early years of eating sushi, I didn’t expect to love an omakase meal from beginning to end. Inevitably there were pieces I found slightly less delightful: giant clam, profoundly rubbery, or the oilier fishes that smacked of murky parts of the sea. Nevertheless I ate them, hoping I would learn something — about fish, sushi as a craft, the corners of the chef’s mind. [...]
Every omakase has an arc — as a year has seasons, marking our passage through time — and this is certainly not the only way to eat sushi. I’ve had fine meals ferried by conveyor belt in Tokyo, and nights I would’ve been content with a fistful of negitoro rolls.
But when you ask for omakase, you relinquish choice and your own desires. You put your trust in the stranger across the counter, and say, tell me a story.
Sometimes the story is personal. Naomichi Yasuda, the founding chef of Sushi Yasuda, near Grand Central Terminal (who has since returned to Japan), once told me that he was trained to be an “eel man,” and then served me only eel, sea and freshwater, in every treatment and form, including the flash-fried spine.
At the now-shuttered Jewel Bako in the East Village, I was handed a shot glass full of squirming baby eels, boneless, to be drunk straight; the likewise shuttered Kura, a few blocks over, presented a saucer of shiokara, fermented squid viscera, while the chef laughed and laughed. [...]
No such surprises await at most of today’s sushi-yas. Instead, you are assured that you will get what you pay for: pliant and unchallenging fish, occasional pyrotechnics and status-symbol frills on demand. Which is to say, what you think you want, or the world wants you to want. Nod to the chef; fiddle with your phone. Whatever comes will probably be delicious. It will also be boring.
by Ligaya Mishan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ellen Silverman for The New York Times[ed. Any place blow-torching sushi should be avoided.]
By 1987, Charlie Sheen, playing a whippersnapper stockbroker in the movie “Wall Street,” was churning out rice balls eight at a time from a home nigiri-making machine in his penthouse.
That nigiri-maker might have been an omen for what was to come: the co-opting of sushi by finance bros, favoring optimization and spectacle over craft, in an eerie Benihana-fication of the American sushi-ya.
I am not arguing for sushi as some serene, transcendent ritual. Sushi as we know it started out as working-class food sold in the streets of 19th-century Edo (today Tokyo). Some of the best sushi I’ve had was in strip malls in Los Angeles, at unadorned counters where the chef set down piece after piece with sometimes little more than a grunt, and we were out in half an hour. (Shout-out to Sushi Ike, for those who know.)
Now the hand torches flare and, at the most expensive restaurants, there’s a banker’s roll of supplements to pad out your meal and push the already astonishing prices even higher — up to $1,200 per person, pre-tax and pre-liquor, for the “chef’s reserve” omakase at Masa on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
At Sushi Nakazawa in the West Village, you might have your choice of A5 Wagyu, truffles (a Japanese food writer I consulted expressed concern that the scent would be “distracting”), a tweezering of gold leaf over caviar and a pairing of Krug Champagne and kinki (thornyhead), a rare and opulently fatty fish sometimes called the Wagyu of the sea.
More insidiously, an odd note of appeasement has crept in. A recent omakase meal at a Lower Manhattan counter was almost all crowd-pleasers. First, three kinds of salmon — a fish not even used for sushi until the 1980s, when Norway, eager to offload an oversupply, lobbied to create a new market in Japan (which may in turn have expanded the audience for sushi in the United States, with the lure of a more familiar and straightforwardly buttery fish). Then delicate sweet snappers, luscious jacks and tuna close to liquefying in its own fat.
With each bite I had the nagging sense I was being spoon-fed, like a finicky child who couldn’t possibly know what’s really good or keep an open mind. There was nothing funky or chewy that might demand a pause to wonder: What am I eating?
In the past decade and a half, omakase, in which the guest cedes power and the chef decides what you eat, has become the dominant form of sushi in major American cities like New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas. This stems in part from the popularity of the 2011 documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” a paean to the monastic virtuosity of the sushi master Jiro Ono, plying his craft in a basement nook off a subway station in Tokyo.
In classic omakase, a chef has leeway to improvise in the moment, modulate, maybe even figure out what kind of person you are. These days in New York, the experience is more often one-size-fits-all: a fixed series of courses — essentially, a tasting menu — ranging from a dozen to 20 or more, with accommodations only for allergies or a particularly querulous diner, and often not even then. At the highest-end spots, everyone sits down at the same time and is fed in the same order, as if at the most elegant of mess halls.
There was a time when omakase was something you asked for, a way of saying, I’m curious and open, willing to try anything. You voluntarily set aside the menu and gave yourself up to fate. It was part of a code you learned, along with picking up pieces by hand and not dipping them into soy sauce unless instructed to do so, and then only the very tip of the fish, never the rice.
In my early years of eating sushi, I didn’t expect to love an omakase meal from beginning to end. Inevitably there were pieces I found slightly less delightful: giant clam, profoundly rubbery, or the oilier fishes that smacked of murky parts of the sea. Nevertheless I ate them, hoping I would learn something — about fish, sushi as a craft, the corners of the chef’s mind. [...]
Every omakase has an arc — as a year has seasons, marking our passage through time — and this is certainly not the only way to eat sushi. I’ve had fine meals ferried by conveyor belt in Tokyo, and nights I would’ve been content with a fistful of negitoro rolls.
But when you ask for omakase, you relinquish choice and your own desires. You put your trust in the stranger across the counter, and say, tell me a story.
Sometimes the story is personal. Naomichi Yasuda, the founding chef of Sushi Yasuda, near Grand Central Terminal (who has since returned to Japan), once told me that he was trained to be an “eel man,” and then served me only eel, sea and freshwater, in every treatment and form, including the flash-fried spine.
At the now-shuttered Jewel Bako in the East Village, I was handed a shot glass full of squirming baby eels, boneless, to be drunk straight; the likewise shuttered Kura, a few blocks over, presented a saucer of shiokara, fermented squid viscera, while the chef laughed and laughed. [...]
No such surprises await at most of today’s sushi-yas. Instead, you are assured that you will get what you pay for: pliant and unchallenging fish, occasional pyrotechnics and status-symbol frills on demand. Which is to say, what you think you want, or the world wants you to want. Nod to the chef; fiddle with your phone. Whatever comes will probably be delicious. It will also be boring.
by Ligaya Mishan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ellen Silverman for The New York Times
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Monday, April 27, 2026
Sunday, April 26, 2026
Friday, April 24, 2026
What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center
Image: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty
[ed. An order of magnitude worse than I imagined.]
Thursday, April 23, 2026
Suddenly Everyone Wants a Tailor. They’re in Short Supply.
As AI sweeps into white-collar workplaces, old-timey hands-on jobs are getting a new look—and some of those professions even have shortages.
Consider tailors. Sewing is a vanishing skill, much like lacemaking and watchmaking, putting tailors in short supply when big retailers like Nordstrom and Men’s Wearhouse, as well as fashion designers and local dry cleaners, say they need more of them.
The job, which can take years to master, can be a tough sell to younger generations more accustomed to instant gratification. But apprenticeships that offer pay to learn on the job and new training programs are helping entice more people. 
“It’s not glamorous and not something you want to post about on social media,” says Khaleel Bennett, a 30-year-old who lives in Queens, N.Y. “But it’s a skill that will carry me for life.”
Bennett had been working as a technical designer for a fashion company, responsible for verifying that production met quality and construction standards. When he was laid off, he had trouble finding a new job. Then he came across a new Nordstrom-backed program at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology that teaches custom alterations and tailoring.
Bennett completed the training late last year and is now a tailor’s apprentice at the department-store chain, where he is getting real-life experience on the intricacies of pant hems. (Denim requires a different technique than slacks. For denim, the original hem is cut, the pant leg is shortened, and the hem is reattached to give the jeans a worn-in look.)
For the first semester of its program, which concluded in December, FIT received more than 190 applications for 15 spots. The nine-week course requires prior sewing experience. Nordstrom hired seven students from the inaugural class.
“It’s increasingly becoming more challenging to find people to fill these alterations jobs,” said Marco Esquivel, the director of alterations and aftercare services at Nordstrom, which employs about 1,500 tailors. Similar to other high-end retailers, Nordstrom offers free basic tailoring for garments purchased at the department-store chain and charges a fee for those bought elsewhere.
Tailored Brands, which employs about 1,300 tailors at its Men’s Wearhouse, Jos. A. Bank and other chains, is updating its apprenticeship program to include more self-guided videos with the goal of moving people through the training faster.
“The pipeline has dwindled,” the company’s chief operating officer, Karla Gray, said.
While counterintuitive, there is an acute need for tailoring even in the current age of casual dressing. Pants and cuffs still need to be hemmed to say nothing of bridal, prom and other special-occasion clothes.
Decades of offshoring affected the American apparel industry, decimating the profession. Now most tailors who are working are starting to approach retirement age, so demand for them outstrips the supply of labor, industry executives say.
Other colliding factors have had an impact, too. As more women took traditional corporate jobs outside the home, schools eliminated home-economics programs, which were a steppingstone to becoming a professional tailor or seamstress. More recently, the explosion in popularity for resale clothing and the growing use of GLP-1 drugs for weight loss have created more need for nipping and tucking what is in peoples’ closets.
“These are all trends that require more tailored clothing,” Nordstrom’s Esquivel said.
U.S. tailors numbered about 18,500 in 2024, a nearly 30% drop from a decade ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1997, there were almost twice as many. Federal data show the typical annual wage for a dressmaker is about $43,000 a year, but some tailors and seamstresses can make more.
Jenny Robbins, 61 years old, recently joined Nordstrom after completing the Fashion Institute’s program. It is her latest reinvention after starting her career as a math teacher, working as a tutor for Princeton Review and then becoming a pattern maker for designer Anna Sui after taking a few sewing classes.
Robbins says she learned to operate industrial sewing machines, which stitch much faster than home machines, create blind hems where the stitching is essentially invisible, and can cuff a blazer.
“There is no shortage of work,” she said.
The lack of tailors and sewers has also been a blow to reviving apparel manufacturing in the U.S.
Cindie Husbands opened an apparel manufacturer in Las Vegas in 2013 but closed it in 2021 partly due to a lack of trained sewers, she said. [...]
“Tailoring is one of the oldest skilled trades in the world,” she said. “Yet the pathway has almost vanished in a single generation.”
by Suzanne Kapner, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Consider tailors. Sewing is a vanishing skill, much like lacemaking and watchmaking, putting tailors in short supply when big retailers like Nordstrom and Men’s Wearhouse, as well as fashion designers and local dry cleaners, say they need more of them.
The job, which can take years to master, can be a tough sell to younger generations more accustomed to instant gratification. But apprenticeships that offer pay to learn on the job and new training programs are helping entice more people.
Bennett had been working as a technical designer for a fashion company, responsible for verifying that production met quality and construction standards. When he was laid off, he had trouble finding a new job. Then he came across a new Nordstrom-backed program at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology that teaches custom alterations and tailoring.
Bennett completed the training late last year and is now a tailor’s apprentice at the department-store chain, where he is getting real-life experience on the intricacies of pant hems. (Denim requires a different technique than slacks. For denim, the original hem is cut, the pant leg is shortened, and the hem is reattached to give the jeans a worn-in look.)
For the first semester of its program, which concluded in December, FIT received more than 190 applications for 15 spots. The nine-week course requires prior sewing experience. Nordstrom hired seven students from the inaugural class.
“It’s increasingly becoming more challenging to find people to fill these alterations jobs,” said Marco Esquivel, the director of alterations and aftercare services at Nordstrom, which employs about 1,500 tailors. Similar to other high-end retailers, Nordstrom offers free basic tailoring for garments purchased at the department-store chain and charges a fee for those bought elsewhere.
Tailored Brands, which employs about 1,300 tailors at its Men’s Wearhouse, Jos. A. Bank and other chains, is updating its apprenticeship program to include more self-guided videos with the goal of moving people through the training faster.
“The pipeline has dwindled,” the company’s chief operating officer, Karla Gray, said.
While counterintuitive, there is an acute need for tailoring even in the current age of casual dressing. Pants and cuffs still need to be hemmed to say nothing of bridal, prom and other special-occasion clothes.
Decades of offshoring affected the American apparel industry, decimating the profession. Now most tailors who are working are starting to approach retirement age, so demand for them outstrips the supply of labor, industry executives say.
Other colliding factors have had an impact, too. As more women took traditional corporate jobs outside the home, schools eliminated home-economics programs, which were a steppingstone to becoming a professional tailor or seamstress. More recently, the explosion in popularity for resale clothing and the growing use of GLP-1 drugs for weight loss have created more need for nipping and tucking what is in peoples’ closets.
“These are all trends that require more tailored clothing,” Nordstrom’s Esquivel said.
U.S. tailors numbered about 18,500 in 2024, a nearly 30% drop from a decade ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1997, there were almost twice as many. Federal data show the typical annual wage for a dressmaker is about $43,000 a year, but some tailors and seamstresses can make more.
Jenny Robbins, 61 years old, recently joined Nordstrom after completing the Fashion Institute’s program. It is her latest reinvention after starting her career as a math teacher, working as a tutor for Princeton Review and then becoming a pattern maker for designer Anna Sui after taking a few sewing classes.
Robbins says she learned to operate industrial sewing machines, which stitch much faster than home machines, create blind hems where the stitching is essentially invisible, and can cuff a blazer.
“There is no shortage of work,” she said.
The lack of tailors and sewers has also been a blow to reviving apparel manufacturing in the U.S.
Cindie Husbands opened an apparel manufacturer in Las Vegas in 2013 but closed it in 2021 partly due to a lack of trained sewers, she said. [...]
In November, Husbands founded the American Tailors and Sewing Association, which aims to create a standardized, scalable training and certification model for the industry.
“Tailoring is one of the oldest skilled trades in the world,” she said. “Yet the pathway has almost vanished in a single generation.”
by Suzanne Kapner, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. No kidding, try finding a good tailor or seamstress these days. It's nearly impossible (or they're booked for weeks). What a lost art. My grandmother, aunties, mom... everyone used to sew (and awesomely well! I think they were all competing against each other), all kinds of clothes, and beautiful quilts and pillows, placemats, whatever... it was Art. Now those lessons seem to be fading, maybe not everywhere, but surely here in the US.]
Sunday, April 19, 2026
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