Get Jiro: Anthony Bourdain’s ultraviolent sushi chef makes for wild, pulpy television

A love of food and a taste for bloodthirsty action collide as a very angry chef gets caught up in a brutal turf war between warring restaurants in LA Has foodie culture gone too far? It’s a truism that to get to a lasagne recipe now, you have to wade through an essay about someone’s childhood in Tuscany. We talk about food sentimentally, consume TV about it fetishistically, slavering over slow-motion shots of chopped pepper falling on to stainless steel. We enjoy judging the food of others. We talk about the provenance of our ingredients with a kind of purity fixation. It strikes me that there’s a totalitarianism to it. So it was bracing to watch Get Jiro (from Sunday 4 October, HBO Max), an adult animation that pairs a love of food with a taste for ultraviolence. It’s the story of a sushi chef, caught up in a bloodthirsty turf war between warring restaurants. It is set in a dystopian near-future Los Angeles, in which all human desires “including companionship, travel and sex, can be experienced … virtually”. (The episodes I’ve seen don’t go into this, explaining for example how chiropody could be experienced virtually, but that’s beside the point.) Continue reading...