![]() ![]() ‘Please Entrust Your Precious Time to Us’ The ingredients inside are like uncut diamonds, waiting to be cut by Sugiyama into sparkling culinary gems. This is the ‘Hōseki box’, the box of gems. When the carefully selected ingredients are gathered from all over Japan, they are loaded onto containers headed for Hōseki. All the producers are personal contacts from his years working in Japan, people who work with him because they know and trust him. The nori seaweed is sourced from a specific nori gatherer, the wasabi from a wasabi farm. Inquiring further, we find that Chef Sugiyama has all the details down cold. Dubai’s location is perfect’, the chef says with a smile. That’s just when the market is taking a breather, so it’s an easy time for us to talk. When the restaurant closes at midnight, it’s five o’clock, early morning, in Japan. ‘I get in touch with my food broker every day, so it’s just like visiting Tokyo’s Toyosu Market’, Sugiyama explains. Fresh foodstuffs are flown in from Japan several times a week. Sugiyama goes to great lengths to ensure that everything at Hōseki is made in Japan, from the fish, vegetables and salt to the tableware. When Sugiyama talks about Hōseki, a phrase that comes up over and over is ‘made in Japan’. Hōseki opened as a sushi restaurant run strictly on an omakase basis-everything left up to the chef. Sugiyama set off for Dubai.ĭrawing on the association of the Bulgari name with dazzling jewellery, and on the beauty, elegance and good taste for which sushi is admired, the restaurant was named ‘Hōseki’, the Japanese word for ‘jewel’. Then in 2017, when a Bulgari Resort opened in Dubai, Sugiyama received an enthusiastic offer: he could have his own restaurant in the hotel, with full authority over its concept, operation, foodstuffs, everything. Later, after working at a series of sushi shops in Tokyo, Sugiyama began his apprenticeship at a branch of Sushi Kanesaka. It wasn’t long before Sugiyama reconnected with sushi. Seeing the moment when a customer smiles on eating his food is the true thrill of counter service, he realised. When he saw the customer smile upon tasting his cooking, Sugiyama knew that this was what he wanted to do. One day, Sugiyama had the opportunity to serve a customer a dish he’d prepared himself. Sugiyama liked to eat and was interested in cooking, however, and as a student he worked part-time at a restaurant. I was so happy when my friends let me trade lunches with them’. ‘But kids want different things, like fried chicken or hamburger steak. ‘My packed lunch on sports days was always the same: roll sushi’, Sugiyama recalls. Seeing at first hand the grinding hardship of running one’s own business, Masahiro simply didn’t see becoming a sushi chef as an option. Not for a single day could work and home life be separated. Both parents worked from morning to evening, and even on days off they always answered the phone if it rang. Yet as a young boy, Sugiyama recalls, he did not see himself continuing that family tradition. His paternal and maternal grandparents all owned sushi restaurants as well. Masahiro Sugiyama is the son of a sushi chef, owner of a long-established restaurant founded in 1865. ![]()
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