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

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.)

Food is the holdout: a sensual pleasure the digital world cannot colonise. As a result, master chefs have gained great power – operating like crime lords, while people kill for reservations at their restaurants. Having spent four years failing to get a table at the Sportsman for the slip sole with seaweed butter, I get it.

Jiro himself is a taciturn, exacting sushi chef and biker, who knows how to use a knife and is no innocent bystander. In the first scene, he decapitates a customer for the crime of dipping his fish in soy sauce. Elsewhere, the violence is cartoonish yet gory. There is cheese-grater violence, custard violence, creme brulee blowtorch violence. Bones are snapped off, faces deep-fried. There are bloodthirsty, militant vegans. “It’s one thing to take out a few low-level busboys. But Monty was a made chef,” growls one proprietor.

It’s not for the squeamish, clearly. But the hardness with which Get Jiro leans into its satire is part of the fun. One of the characters trying to get Jiro is Cynda, a detective with the City of Angels Health Department. CAHD pack heat, drive armoured squad cars, and work out of a Fritz Lang skyscraper emblazoned with their initials. They have beef with the Alcohol, Firearms and Food agency, or AFF. Both desks have real power in a town where control of food supply lines is crucial, and hospitality staff headhunting takes on new meaning. The streets here run redder than a rib-eye.

It’s an inherently funny idea, that the refined language of restaurant criticism could hit the streets like this. “You gotta try these anchovy toasts! They make them with Calabrian chilli butter,” drools one law-enforcement meathead, pronouncing it “calla-bryan” and “budda”. “Unless you want some chilli butter up your ass, get to work,” shoots back Cynda. That’s a spicy workplace threat. I guess when the robots came, HR were the first to leave the CAHD building.

In classic comic-book style, men are barrel-chested, jaws squared off like anvils. Women are coke bottles. Subtlety is not the dish of the day; except presumably for the texture of Jiro’s nigiri, over which every diner has a Proustian meltdown. Tenderness is reserved for the food scenes, disquisitions on pot-au-feu, spaghetti con la bottarga, katsu sando. I ate Haribo through most of it, and hated myself.

Get Jiro is camp and in on the joke, tongue firmly in its pig cheek. It is produced by and based on a graphic novel co-written by Joel Rose and, ah! – Anthony Bourdain. A man who stirred machismo with empathy, and was as interested in people as the primal energy of kitchens. His influence shows: beneath the pulpy twists and action hits, politics simmers. The story is an indictment of how food becomes class currency, and can be wielded as a weapon.

One can’t help but think of a meditative 2011 documentary, and wonder if there’s a connection. Jiro Dreams of Sushi? Jiro Dreams of Slicing Clean Through Your C-5 Vertebra, more like. But this is its own, provocative concoction – a dash of Sweeney Todd, a tablespoon of Batman: Caped Crusader, and a quarter cup of Grand Theft Auto. You thought Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi had high standards? You ain’t seen nothing.