According to ChatGPT, it takes a sushi chef just a few minutes to make sushi. Hmmm. Not to accuse you of generating misinformation, Ms AI, but that’s not quite the whole truth. Assuming we’re talking real, artisan sushi – the sort you pay eye-watering prices for at an omakase temple – and not flavourless, mass-produced sushi, those few minutes are really just the icing on the cake, if you’ll forgive the mangled metaphor.

Ask Yasunari Okazaki, sushi master at the two-Michelin-starred L’Abysse in Paris. “To make a sushi it takes 25 years and 10 seconds,” he wrote in a book about the restaurant, co-authored with renowned French chef Yannick Alléno (L’Abysse, 2022, published by Glénat Editions of France).