What goes into a single piece of sushi at one of New York's most celebrated sushi counters?
For this PureWow food feature, we visited Michelin-starred Sushi Ginza Onodera before service to meet its head sushi chef and get an up-close look at the precision, ingredients and technique behind the restaurant's sushi.
After the interview, we followed the chef into the kitchen as he prepared one of the restaurant's dishes for lunch—turning a conversation about the craft into a firsthand demonstration of it.
This was a relatively simple location shoot, but the access was what made it special.
We arrived at Sushi Ginza Onodera before the restaurant opened, giving us a quiet window to interview the head sushi chef and capture the restaurant before the lunch service began.
Rather than relying entirely on the interview, we then followed him through the preparation of a dish, shooting the details of the process and letting the precision of his work become part of the storytelling.
With food content—particularly somewhere operating at this level—the details matter. Close-ups of the ingredients, knife work, preparation and final presentation could communicate aspects of the experience that an interview alone couldn't.
The production was deliberately unobtrusive. We had limited access before service, so the goal was to get what we needed efficiently without disrupting the restaurant's actual work.
And there was one memorable production perk: the chef prepared enough of the featured sushi for each of us to try a piece—an extraordinarily expensive bite of sushi that made the assignment particularly easy to enjoy.