Chef Yoshimasa Saito, 85, is the founder of Kitchen Country, a Hungarian restaurant in Tokyo's Jiyugaoka area. His goulash was once so famous that even celebrities were happy to stand in line for a place at one of his tables. Saito is a true optimist: Neither five years of hard labor in Siberia's notorious war camps nor the past five years of battling throat and lung cancer have broken his strong spirit.
One becomes a cook by washing the dishes. This is the best spot to study. I worked from age 15, at first in Japanese and then in French restaurants. I licked the leftover in each pot and learnt how the food should taste.
People are the same everywhere: good and kind. Governments are bad, not the people. The Soviets were poor, but they tried to give us scraps of food. Our guards were all kind. If one of us got sick, they touched our foreheads to see if we had a fever and motioned for us to lie down and rest a day or two. They never beat us.
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