Taste regained
Sometimes I struggle with what people want because every person’s interests seem so different. Nevertheless, I am on a quest to regain my taste.
In an interview with David Senra, 37signals co-owner David Heinemeier Hansson, affectionately known as DHH and one of our inspirations, described the Japanese word omakase, which is part of his portmanteau of a new-company name Omarchy. That sentence is a quite a mouthful.
Anyway, omakase translates roughly to “chef’s choice.” He likes the word because it encapsulates an important principle in his design philosophy as he’s been building companies these last decades. Recall Steve Jobs’s famous dictum that people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. Or Henry Ford’s apocryphal quote saying that if he asked customers what they wanted they would’ve said a faster horse.
Imagine you’re entering a three-Michelin-star sushi restaurant. Astute readers may recall Jiro Dreams of Sushi. The chef has been making sushi for over forty years, refining even his ability to make rice. It’s the perfect rice every time. He is the definition of craft, a true master of his art.
When you enter an establishment like this and sit at the bar of a singular figure in his profession, you do not tell him what you want. He tells you what you want. That’s because his taste is so superlative that it’s hard to even imagine the taste that he is about to create for you. You simply enjoy the experience.
Now, on the surface this may sound patronizing. But instead think of it as an act of love, of service, of a perichoretic dance of satisfaction, where both participants enjoy the experience as they mutually submit to each other’s expertise.
My first of these experiences didn’t come from a Michelin restaurant but rather a mixologist in a nice hotel in Lyon, France. I say “mixologist” rather than “bartender” because his craftsmanship, in retrospect, was in a different class from your everyday bartender.
The room was color-drenched maroon—the walls, the chairs, the bar. We were feeling adventurous. When the man walked over and asked what we wanted, I typically respond with something like, “Well, good lad,” because I instantly become an old British man at cocktail lounges like this, “I’d like an old fashioned. Rye whiskey, please.” Instead, I described a mood I was in and asked him to make me something like that.
Boy, did he deliver. It was the best cocktail. Yuge. I asked what it was and he said he just made it up. That’s taste.
I tell you this story because over the years I think I’ve forgotten my taste. I mean, I know what I like, of course, but I’ve forgotten how to guide others in their own sense of a high-quality, pristine sense of craftsmanship. So many disparate opinions have crashed upon me over the years that my own craft has come a bit unmoored.
But no longer.
Both David Senra interviews I listened to lately—DHH and Tobi Lütke—argued for the importance of trusting your instincts when it comes to defining a sense of direction.
Watch out, world. We’re gonna make some mean nigiri.
