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"FacebookPinterest\n\nI do not often go to the mountaintop, seeking the way. I'm not that spiritual (or that fond of ercise). But after several harrowing days in Los Angeles, the land of dancing sushi chefs, \"oy vey salmon sashimi\" and giant sushi buffets with warning signs cautioning pregnant women not to gorge, I found myself soliciting the soothing company of sushi masters, men who can find meaning in a single grain of rice. Phillip Yi, vice president of the California Sushi Academy in Venice (where some rogue meat eater had spray-painted FUCK SUSHI on the front door), spoke to me of a venerated sushi chef in Japan who molds sushi rice so exquisitely that if the grains of rice in twenty pieces were counted, the number in each would never vary by more than three or four.\n\nNobi Kusuhara, the chef-owner of Sushi Sasabune in West L.A., where the word sushi is spelled out in red neon but the name of his establishment is not displayed at all, talked to me about his Edo style of serving cool fish on warm, unstructured balls of loose rice. I'd eaten at his restaurant and found his sushi profound, and now I returned to learn more about his almost forgotten style. He said Japanese customers in their eighties remember it from when they were children in Tokyo.\n\nI am by no means a sushi incompetent, even though I come from the Eurocentric metropolis of New York, not the Pan-Asian sprawl of Los Angeles. I know not to turn my little dish of soy (almost always lite soy in L.A.) into an off-brown sludge by stirring in gobs of wasabi (a Japanese condiment that tastes like an amalgam of mustard, horseradish and sulfuric acid). I know to dip a little corner of the fish, not the rice, into the soy if I want to accent the flavor. I know it is permissible to use your fingers to eat sushi, but never sashimi, which is unadorned raw fish. I know it is acceptable to order tuna and cucumber rolls, which are eaten in Japan, but no others. While I was in California, the words California roll never passed my lips.\n\nStill, I was experiencing difficulties, even at Kusuhara's sensible Sushi Sasabune. Captivating as I found his sushi, the undisciplined little balls of rice were falling apart in my hand before I could get around to a second bite. I explained my problem to Kusuhara, and he listened carefully, even though he is not by reputation a patient man. Contrary to custom and tradition, I do not eat sushi in one bite. Not only do I require two; I will occasionally, in a demonstration of Occidental defiance, take three. The Japanese are somehow able to eat an entire piece of sushi in one giant gulp, but this is beyond my ability. I believe they possess a certain unapparent physiological advantage over Americans. How else to explain the five-six, 144-pound Japanese man who shattered the record at the Nathan's hot dog-eating championship previously held by a six-seven, 320-pound Queens resident of Polish extraction?\n\nKusuhara slowly shook his head and pronounced my sushi eating unacceptable.\n\n\"When you put the sushi in your mouth,\" he said, \"you must close your eyes and feel the warm rice fall away, and then you bite into the fish.\" He said my style of eating was creating tension in my mind.\n\n\"When you have two bites, your mind is not concentrating on tasting the fish. You worry about messing up the table.\" I nodded, bowed imperceptibly and backed away.\n\n\n\nTo most of us, sushi is raw fish painted with wasabi and served on vinegared rice. In L.A. it can be anything. The proliferation of sushi restaurants in Southern California began in the early 1980s, about the time the television miniseries Shogun glamorized feudal Japanese society. That was also the beginning of an era of Japanese hegemony over Hollywood, when the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company took over MCA and Sony grabbed Columbia. Mike Ovitz, who was involved in both those deals, recently put his power and credibility behind a new sushi restaurant, Hamasaku, switching from the shark-filled waters of commerce to the tuna-infested waters of sushi. Calista Flockhart, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening were all seen in his establishment soon after it opened, which raised questions as to whether his position as the head of Artists Management Group gave him unfair access to toro-addicted celebrities. Today sushi is as intrinsic to the Los Angeles cultural scene as mud slides and SUVs. Sushi chefs and sushi sections are so much a part of supermarket shopping that a friend told me, \"I was in the checkout line of a supermarket the other day, and a little boy sitting in the seat of a shopping cart in front of me\u2014he was maybe 3 or 4\u2014was crying because his mother wouldn't open the sushi container for him.\"\n\nThe buffet lines at wedding receptions feature sushi. Children in the better private schools are offered sushi as a lunch selection; the designation on their menu cards is SU. Sushi is eaten at business dinners because it is perceived as a food of the elite, or at least of people with expense accounts, which in L.A. is pretty much the same thing. The California Sushi Academy is even training women to be sushi chefs, the equivalent of allowing women into the Catholic priesthood. \"The reason Japanese women never made sushi,\" explained Yi, \"is that females wore perfumes and lotions that transferred onto the raw fish. Also, it was always said that women had slightly higher body temperatures and they would start cooking the fish with their hands. But mostly it was a male-dominated industry, and they didn't want to let women in.\"\n\nIn L.A. (and to a certain extent in New York), sushi made with toro, cut from the fatty belly of the bluefin tuna, has become the new beluga caviar. It is sold for as much as $10 a bite in L.A., sometimes three times that in Japan. At the tide-pool end of the edible-seafood aquarium, L.A. is awash in implausible sushi rolls designed to lure customers who realize they must eat sushi to remain stylish but who don't really like raw fish. A friend of mine who writes for television, Roger Director, admitted he still orders spicy tuna rolls, even though he's the only one in the business who does. He said, \"I started getting them three years ago, thinking it was the cosmic answer to the sushi conundrum, but they've worn out their welcome, and now I don't know what to do.\"\n\n\n\nIn The Fly, Jeff Goldblum lures Geena Davis down an eerie alley to his laboratory, and to calm her apprehensions he says, \"It's cleaner on the inside.\" I was feeling what Geena was feeling, a touch of desperation, after I parked my car on a forlorn street in the old warehouse district of downtown Los Angeles and walked along some abandoned railroad tracks in search of R-23, reputedly the most awesome sushi restaurant in all of L.A., at least for the week I was there. Across from the practically unmarked entrance\u2014I suppose everybody the restaurant wants for a customer already knows its location\u2014 was a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire. Nothing like flying 3,000 miles to California just to find yourself in the South Bronx.\n\nIn addition to the bracing locale, R-23 is beloved for its cardboard chairs. Indeed, I soon found myself seated on an object that had much in common with a grocery-store carton, although it had a chair-like appearance and was not uncomfortable. I thought the only real disadvantage of such a piece of furniture was that it would be too flimsy to wield effectively in the fight I was bound to have with whoever decided to steal my car.\n\nMy table, constructed of particleboard, was enhanced with a conventional white tablecloth. The room had brick walls, wood floors, exposed ducts, high ceilings and an incredible noise level. I thought nothing could be more depressing than the neighborhood until I noticed the artwork: Most of it was of women in pain. I was seated under a painting of an elderly woman wearing a wedding ring, wrapped in a scarf and weeping in mourning. Kind of made me want to order fugu with the poisonous parts intact.\n\nOur waitress had a thick Asian accent and insisted on speaking in a whisper, so I understood almost nothing she said. She raised her voice only to insist I order a special of pine-tree mushrooms. When I refused twice, she grew surly, and service declined from unintelligible to intolerable. The menus were parchment paper protected from the unclean fingers of guests by vinyl protectors and black binder clips, very much the Dead Sea Scrolls meets Staples. I ordered appetizers, soup and sushi and was served in this order: sushi, soup, appetizers.\n\nMost of the cooked food was as grim as the ambience, although the grilled scallops on the shell, which came with some sort of cream sauce, reminded me of French food. The sushi was beautifully presented on a long, heavy faux-marble slab brought to the table by an extremely fit employee who must have been hired for his Olympian slab-lifting abilities. The fish was very fresh, the rice so good that I decided to order a bowl of it. What arrived, after a long wait, was a $2 bowl of white rice overcooked to the consistency of gruel.\n\nAfter the perils of R-23, the more mundane strip-mall ambience of Ovitz's Hamasaku was welcome indeed. Almost all sushi restaurants are located in strip malls, but that is not a remarkable observation, inasmuch as almost all of L.A. is located in strip malls. The more minor the mall, the more grandiose the name, and Hamasaku is in the Santa Monica Plaza, a tiny oasis with byzantine parking rules. It has ten-, thirty- and forty-five-minute spaces, none of which are conducive to leisurely dining. I grabbed one of the forty-five-minute spots\u2014lucky me!\u2014and asked the restaurant host if I would be towed. He kindly offered me a cup of green tea to calm my apprehensions and told me it was unlikely but he couldn't be sure.\n\nHamasaku is clean and bright, with a lot of blond wood and black lacquered chairs, pretty standard upscale-sushi-restaurant decor. I ordered marinated albacore tuna with \"Hisao's special dressing,\" which turned out to be oversize chunks of tuna, some of them three inches long, awash in a sauce much like the creamy stuff served with pickled herring at Jewish delicatessens. The black cod marinated in miso and sake wasn't quite sweet enough for my taste, but the ragged slices of tasteless halibut with a lip-puckeringly sour ponzu (a light sauce traditionally made with soy, vinegar and citrus) were far worse. I liked the tempura onions, but little else, and the sushi was made with fish that Arthur Treacher would be ashamed to fry.\n\nAlthough sushi is too rarely thrilling, the vast majority of it that isn't prepackaged is perfectly good. (In plastic-encased sushi, it's often the rice that is intolerable.) Distressed at the lifelessness of the Hamasaku sushi, I asked my indifferent waitress to bring two orders of anything the chef thought was wonderful, regardless of price.\n\nFirst came \"premium albacore,\" which I think was wahoo, a fish native to Hawaii and Florida. It appeared decked out for the prom, topped with a dab of something white and a blob of something orange and a bunch of curly greens. By the time I got through all the accessories, I'd forgotten I was supposed to be eating fish. Then she brought \"special yellowtail,\" which I believe was yellowtail from Japan. It had been minced, cooked and topped with spicy mayonnaise, and it tasted strongly of garlic. It wasn't sushi as I know it, but it was the finest mini-tuna burger on rice I'd ever been served.\n\nI left, pleased that my car hadn't been towed but distressed that L.A. sushi restaurants were turning out to be fatuous rather than fabulous. I had a lengthy list of places I wanted to try, and I decided to continue making my way through the most fashionable ones before moving on. That meant the Hump, owned by Brian Vidor, son of director Charles Vidor; and Sushi Roku, which prides itself on environmental rectitude. After dispensing with status, I had two other categories to consider: ritual sushi and haute sushi. Regimentation is de rigueur at Sushi Nozawa in Studio City and the almost unknown Sushi Sasabune of Nobi Kusuhara, the all-knowing master of the single bite. Far more indulgent, as well as imaginative, are Matsuhisa, the original American restaurant of Nobu Matsuhisa, the genius who invented Japanese-Peruvian- Californian crossbred cuisine, and the startlingly expensive Ginza Sushi-Ko, where the base price is $300 per person and a nonrefundable deposit of $100 per person is required to guarantee a reservation. I couldn't imagine what they did to make raw fish that pricey, except sprinkle it with gold. I also hoped to find time to see sushi chefs dance, a culinary trend I have yet to encounter in New York.\n\nThe Hump, located at the tiny, retro-feeling Santa Monica Airport and worth a visit for the thrill of dining a few floors above parked Gulfstreams, is perhaps the most attractive sushi restaurant in L.A. It has a gas fireplace, wildly exotic in Southern California. The ceiling seems to be sisal carpeted, and a few orchids and bamboo plants add just enough vegetation to the decor. Nobody appears to care that the Hump\u2014a World War II term for the Himalayas\u2014relates to the struggle against the Japanese. A few slices of red-snapper sashimi were vibrant, and the toro was properly rich and fatty (if somewhat mushy), but the rest of the fish was uninteresting.\n\nThe bill, including tip, tax and a bottle of flabby Hawley viognier with possibly the most bitter finish ever found in a California white wine, came to $289 for three people.\n\nI wasn't the least bit full, even though I'd just spent nearly $100 per person on dinner, so I thought this was a perfect moment to make a few unscheduled sushi stops. I peeked into the Marina del Rey branch of Tokyo Delve's, acclaimed for a staff that breaks into spontaneous dance at predetermined times. As I walked in, \"YMCA\" by the Village People was playing, but the sushi chefs were doing nothing more interesting than making sushi. I left feeling cheated, like a tourist who visits Buckingham Palace and misses the changing of the guard. Then I went to Crazy Fish, located on the outskirts of Beverly Hills and reputed to have lines out the door most of the day. Among the more than thirty kinds of sushi rolls offered there is the Crazy Fish roll, which I could not resist. It was essentially several varieties of second-rate fish sticking out of some rice. Crazy Fish is the establishment with the oy vey salmon sashimi, and it also features the Jewish roll (salmon and cream cheese). These appear to be transparent marketing ploys designed to lure unwary customers from the Harkham Hillel Hebrew Academy across the street.\n\nThe next day, I drove to Studio City to observe the wonders of Sushi on Tap, but I arrived to find it renamed Sushi Yasuke and the staff no longer tap-dancing. It was practically empty, and when I suggested to the blond Japanese hostess that business must have been better before the music died, she replied, giggling, \"Oh yes, but we are really tired of tap-dancing.\" Sushi Roku, in Hollywood, has a statement of guiding principles printed on the first page of its menu: \"In our attempt to save the earth and its environment, Sushi Roku has been built with environment-friendly products and recycles in every way possible.\" The restaurant was done up in earth tones\u2014no ozone-depleting pastels here. The menu was written in a style that recalls '50s restaurants specializing in Continental cuisine: Hot Appetizers From the Sea, Appetizers From the Garden (including one of my favorite farm-fresh garden appetizers, tofu), Cold Appetizers From the Sea and so on.\n\nI ordered the $23 Ecutive Bento Box, even though no Hollywood ecutive would ever order a box lunch. (Perhaps a better name, reflecting its bargain price, would be the Mailroom Bento Box.) I received a black enameled box with a burnt sienna interior filled with compartments containing more than a dozen nibbles\u2014four kinds of tempura (loved the mushroom), two kinds of sashimi (nice whitefish), two kinds of skewered grilled meats (hated the sticky-sweet beef ), two kinds of marinated vegetables, a little chunk of the omnipresent marinated black cod (cloying) and lots of decorative touches such as black sesame seeds and pink-rimmed fish cake. Although the chef here is considered a disciple of Matsuhisa, the food reminded me more of Wolfgang Puck. Everything was bright, colorful, tasty and decidedly on the sweet side.\n\nVirtually all the customers were Caucasian, the males wearing white T-shirts under unbuttoned dress shirts with the tails hanging out. If people are going to dress like that in restaurants, is the earth really worth saving? Next to me, a young couple appeared to be on a first date; he seemed calm from the waist up, but his feet twitched uncontrollably throughout the meal, vibrating with nervousness. At the end of lunch, he said to her, \"You have an expense account or anything?\"\n\n\n\nAt Matsuhisa in Beverly Hills, my friends and I were seated at a plain wooden table adjoining a similar table occupied by gentlemen with tattoos, nose rings and T-shirts. How fortunate I was to be dining alongside Korn.\n\nI seldom deviate from the signature Matsuhisa items, even though they haven't changed much in a decade or so, because I'm always going with friends who haven't been there before, and I want them to taste everything I love. We had lobster seviche, yellowtail dotted with a sliver of jalape\u00F1o, \"new-style\" sashimi (slightly seared, in a light sauce of lime and soy and not so new after all these years), halibut sashimi with a dab of red-chili paste and Matsuhisa's ubiquitous and unforgettable black cod marinated in miso.\n\nThere were two dishes on the menu I didn't recognize\u2014the first, Chilean sea bass with white truffles; the second, a crab spring roll. As everybody who has been to Italy knows, white truffles are never served on fish, apparently a terrible oversight. The sea-bass dish was fragrant, creamy and alluring, as good as a white-truffle dish can be. The crab spring roll, to my surprise, was ill-conceived\u2014too large and too bland and served in an undistinguished \"creamy spicy sauce.\"\n\nI tried a surf-and-turf creation of my own making, accompanied by a bottle of red Burgundy. The surf portion consisted of a slice of \"barbecued\" toro, fatty tuna that had been marinated in soy and sake before cooking. The turf was Kobe beef. It was so good I led the applause for myself.\n\nI returned to Matsuhisa at 1:30 P.M. on a midweek afternoon, wanting to try the sushi bar, naively figuring I'd have no difficulty getting a spot at this hour. After spending thirty-five minutes crushed into a tiny waiting area next to the kind of bodacious woman a man doesn't mind being pressed against, I was assigned a tiny subway- quality space at the bar.\n\nOn one side of me were three young Korean pharmacists. They had finished their meals but stuck around to watch me eat after I was spotted by the restaurant manager and lavished with food they didn't know existed: raw sweet shrimp drizzled with lemon and topped with caviar; Japanese sea snails cooked in garlic and butter and served in their shells; perfect foie gras accompanied by a shiitake mushroom of outrageous succulence, a mushroom so perfect I'd have been satisfied if it had come without the foie gras; and toro seared on one side and served with a torrid Korean red-chili paste. The sushi chef at my section of the counter, a gentleman nicknamed Tsuru, served me an assortment of extremely good fish, but Matsuhisa is the one sushi restaurant where the sushi seems an afterthought.\n\nAs I was leaving, the woman with whom I'd spent so much quality time in the foyer was also on her way out, and she paused to personally express her farewells to the sushi chefs, all of whom seemed to know her well. I asked a member of the alert Matsuhisa staff if he could identify her, and I was told she was a porn star of considerable repute. If there is a Mrs. Tsuru, she should be gratified to know her husband wasn't all that much of an admirer.\n\n\n\nI have grown weary of Nazi as a culinary descriptor. It all started with the Seinfeld Soup Nazi, and these days any restaurant proprietor who doesn't fawn over his customers becomes the Nazi designee of his cuisine. There are probably still a few genuine old Nazis out there, maybe in Paraguay, and though I do not wish them well, I sympathize if they are offended by this. The so-called Sushi Nazi of L.A. is Kazunori Nozawa, who owns the famous Sushi Nozawa in the otherwise undiscovered Eureka Plaza in Studio City. He is the Sushi Nazi as surely as John Wayne is the Duke. The Korean pharmacists who had sat beside me at Matsuhisa said that when they ate at Nozawa, everybody seated at the sushi counter was very quiet, afraid they'd get thrown out. I couldn't wait to experience this unique melding of sushi and sadomasochism.\n\nSushi Nozawa resembles a modern European sandwich shop; the only decorative touches are brightly painted red poles and a neon-rimmed fish picture behind the sushi counter, where Nozawa stands. I walked in just after 8 P.M. He glared at me and said, \"Table or sushi counter?\" I replied, \"Sushi counter.\" He nodded in the direction of a sign that said TRUST ME. In sushi-counter vernacular, that meant I could eat only what he wanted me to eat, not what I might prefer.\n\nSmiling ingratiatingly, I cleverly replied, \"You look trustworthy to me.\"\n\nHe stiffened slightly at the unwelcome familiarity. I hummed a few bars of the Horst Wessel song and took my assigned seat.\n\nAccording to conventional wisdom, the sushi here is the best in L.A. Based on one visit, I'd say it was in the ordinary-to- pretty good range. The sushi rice was bland and served at varying temperatures, from cold to slightly warm. The albacore sushi came with a too vinegary sauce; the crab in the hand roll was much too salty. I liked the briny oysters and some wonderfully smooth, rich sea urchin roe, more delicate and unctuous than caviar. Throughout the meal, which was served very quickly, Nozawa stood, unsmiling. To me he seemed a semi-tragic figure, a samurai sushi chef reduced to serving the peasantry; because he does not take reservations, he has no way of keeping out the people who annoy him. Most of his customers were badly dressed Caucasians, although two Asian women were the dates of badly dressed Caucasians.\n\nThe fellow sitting next to me at the sushi bar was wearing a black fuzzy sweatshirt, a black knit watch cap and a bandage on his face. He ate the fish off the sushi, leaving the rice. He gulped water from a bottle. He soaked everything he ate with soy, leaving the counter a mess of rice, soy and wasabi. Nozawa didn't toss the guy out, although I was wishing throughout my meal that he would.\n\nKusuhara, the chef-owner of Sushi Sasabune, worked with Nozawa at various times over the decades, and his style is similar. When I went to his restaurant for a dinner, I first took notice of the rules and regulations: TRUST ME imprinted on the shirts of his waiters. No children at the sushi bar. A minimum of four orders of sushi per person. No California rolls. No spicy tuna rolls. If anything, his restaurant is even less grand than Nozawa's. Outside, it has the appearance of two buildings cobbled together, the first a stucco Mexican restaurant, the second an early California bungalow with peeling paint. Inside, the floor is hard, the chairs are uncomfortable, and the tables are the kind rolled out in function halls for special events. It seems fitting that Nicolas Cage is a regular.\n\nI trusted, and the food was nearly perfect. The sushi rice seemed almost a delicacy, even though no attention had gone into molding the rice into the perfect oblong shape found in the most punctilious sushi palaces. Most of the fish came in a variety of light, beautifully balanced sauces that tasted like ponzu, sweet vinegar or honey. The salmon bore a sprinkling of sesame seeds.\n\nWhen I returned the next day to meet Kusuhara, he told me that when he started out as a fish salesman in L.A., one of his early clients was Nozawa. \"I was curious; maybe if I learned to make sushi, I would be able to sell fish to sushi restaurants better than anybody else,\" he said. Nozawa taught him, and in 1980 he opened his first sushi restaurant. Seven years ago, he and his wife, Ryoko, his high school sweetheart in Japan, opened Sushi Sasabune after finding the inelegant building they now occupy, located a few blocks from the San Diego Freeway in West L.A. \"When I saw it,\" he said, \"I thought it looked terrible, but I knew that not many people would come in and I could start slowly, only my wife and I.\" He's 48 now, and for the past thirty years he's been going to the fish market every day it's been open, waking up at 4 A.M., sometimes getting to the fish market before the fish and helping to unload the trucks.\n\nNo restaurant could differ more from Sushi Sasabune\u2014in style, in locale and especially in price\u2014than Ginza Sushi-Ko, located on a pedestrian walkway at the foot of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. A friend and I took an elevator to the second floor of a tiny building, ducked under some annoying cloth flaps shrouding the doorway and were politely shown to a semiprivate room containing two tables, each of them large but not particularly ornate. Sharing a room with one other party is disconcerting. No matter how scrupulously the people at each table attempt to maintain privacy, conversation between the two inevitably breaks out. In the room with us were a young Chinese man and his two attractive companions, one of whom refused to eat sushi or sashimi. I could have warned him. Whenever I take three or more friends out for sushi, one of them invariably announces, shortly after we've been seated, \"I don't like raw fish.\"\n\nI'll say this about my $850 meal for two, which included tax, tip and a couple of tiny pots of cold sake: It was really good. In fact, considering that most $850 meals for two served in America today consist of two martinis, two jumbo-shrimp cocktails, two sirloin strips, creamed spinach, hash browns and a $500 bottle of California Cabernet, I'm certain it was better than most. The service was surprisingly casual but polite and almost perfect. The glasses, plates and utensils were ceramic, porcelain and lacquered wood, all lovely but probably not valuable. Our waitress told us the reason we didn't have one of the bright red lacquered toothpick bos on our table was that ours had been swiped by a previous customer.\n\nThere were nine courses, all chosen by the chef, and eight of them quite nice. (I count the sequence of sushi that concluded the dinner as one course.) Most fun was the foie gras-and-lobster shabu-shabu; least fun was being instructed to drink the seaweed-flavored shabu-shabu broth in which we'd cooked our lobster and foie gras. We ate Japanese \"risotto\" with white truffles; the rice, which had been cooked in broth flavored with white codfish roe, reminded me a little of risotto and a little of marshmallow fluff. The sushi was magnificent, even though I had no real interest in eating some of it, such as a dangerous-looking red clam. (Although terribly chewy, it was otherwise harmless.) We had squid, Japanese mackerel, abalone, needlefish and herring. The tuna and toro at Ginza Sushi-Ko were the best I'd ever eaten. Chef Masa Takayama's raw toro was even better than Matsuhisa's, and his rich, fatty, melting, knee-weakening barbecued toro was better, too\u2014something I never thought I'd say. The toro roll was great, too, but I couldn't compare it with anybody else's, because I'd never eaten a toro roll before.\n\nYes, we ate fugu, the fish of death, and indeed it was sprinkled with gold. The first fugu course was a kind of mid sashimi in ponzu; the second, a bite or two of fried fugu that reminded me of delicate crab. That first course included baby chives wrapped in tiny fugu intestines\u2014very nice\u2014and the liver of the fish, which I'd always thought was the deadly part. The chef came out to explain why we should eat it, and though I'm not sure I got this right, I believe it had something to do with the fish being young and healthy and having eaten a balanced diet and the liver not having turned dark and evil and bloated and virulent.\n\nAnyway, I ate the liver and survived. You think, for $425 a person, I wasn't going to clean my plate?"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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