Cooking Co-operatively at Shun

Robert C Marshall

The fourteen women worker-owners of the Japanese lunch restaurant ‘Shun’ cook co-operatively and part-time. As a member cooks she may casually offer the cook at her elbow a chance to taste and suggest changes to her dish. I came to call this practice “giving a taste”, but its practitioners do not remark on it or focus it as an object of awareness. Leaving this practice tacit in their work allows it to sustain both the consistently high quality of their popular cooking without reference to of the cook of each dish, and their egalitarian ethos by forestalling ‘aggressive egoism’.