Morimoto
Posted on Apr 03 in Behind the Scenes, cookbook, Food Pornby NikaPrint
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In the middle of March, I had the opportunity to go see Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto give the keynote speech at the International Boston Seafood Show.
The room was packed to the gills with people who were eagerly awaiting the start of his talk.
One minute we were waiting for him to come and chatting with each other and the next, Morimoto is walking down the center isle, greeting everyone.
The relatively dry and humorless guy who was interviewing Morimoto (a great shame) had to stop his odd monologue at the beginning as Morimoto had to reconfigure his traditional Japanese outfit.
The interviewer proceeded to try to ask questions that were less than scintillating and asked with too much complexity.
At times, thankfully, Morimoto’s interpreter would get up and help him understand the question and help formulate an answer.
Despite the fact that Morimoto has lived in the US for some 20 odd years, his english is not yet perfectly polished. Even though, you can see his charisma and spark. He seems like a genuine authentic person.
After the keynote session, Morimoto had a book signing out in front of the lecture hall but there were WAY too many people in line for the number of available books so I went down to the show floor where he would continue the signing with more books.
He is promoting his new and fantastically beautiful book –
I waited in that line, chatting with new friends from Chicago and Michigan, for more than an hour! When he came down to the booth, there was this enormous rush of people that surrounded us, standing there in line.
He walked up and got ready for this next hour of signing.
I was second in line and a bit freaked out by the crush of the paparazzi behind me. Morimoto was as cool as a clam as he got settled in.
He was extremely kind when I came up. I had asked him during the questions after the keynote to consider doing a project with kids – teaching them about bento boxes. He and his interpreter recognized me from that question and smiled and laughed. I smiled and mostly remember still tweaking about the crush of people behind me and the security guys on their radios asking for more back up.
He wrote a lovely note to me in my copy of the book, in Japanese too.
As I walked away, grown men (two asian fellows) asked to see my signed copy. I did and asked them to translate it. I vaguely remember that it says something like “Follow your big dreams” or something like that.
This book is simply stunning in it’s beauty. I shot a few pages for you to sample.
Here is a page that shows what he did at the beginning of the talk!
It was totally worth the wait, I enjoyed my time there that day immensely!
Here are all the shots relating to Morimoto that I took that day.
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he’s way cool. i love the guy. he studied the art of selecting and cutting fish for TWELVE YEARS. a true master
He’s my favorite Iron Chef–very talented! Cool for the pictures.
bee: he really is a master – he represents so many qualities that I admire – hard to know where to start!
mom: thnx! Yeah, he is amazing!
hi nika, this is one of the books that I want to buy but still waiting for the big sale
i really love his presentation of the japanese food in modern way.
Lucky you to hear him in person. I love this book!