So Nama Sushi Bar, booooy what a story here as I have mentioned in their sister restaurant post, Alta Strada. Quick setup is as follows: 5 item shoot, in and out, and scheduled 2 hours before their opening hours. Sounds excellent and I had a busy day of sitting in traffic, so faster way out of here was absolutely ideal. Plates start coming out –
After seeing 3 boring and standard tuna maki make their way to my work table, I go and ask the GM if he’s sure he wants 3/5 items to basically be the same thing…? And what happens next is so hilarious I still laugh about it to this day,
-What do you mean only 5 items?! It’s a whole menu shoot! I (assumed) menu shoot mentioned to me was a WHOLE menu shoot, not some 5 items. I’m NOT doing this if it’s only 5 items!
To all of that I simply reply that I’m only paid for 5 items and if he wants me to do more, he’s more than welcome to call his sales rep and see if they’ll accommodate his pompous ass because I’m more than open to entertain his whims so long as corpo pays me for way more than the standard gig.
Next becomes a game of telephone as he blows up the corpo, they’re calling me on my cell while I’m sitting within a wasabi spit of this looney guy and I tell the sales rep the same thing I just told him. Hilarity begins to ensue as they have no idea how they would pay me given their shoot structures of X money for a small shoot and big and juicy Y amount for what’s considered a big shoot since this GM is demanding an amount of plates well over the limits of both. I’m doing my best to hold my laughter in because of corpo reps having zero clue how their own corpo runs and the fact that they have the mental GM yelling at their incompetence on the other phone.
The way this was handled in the end was gorgeous and I essentially made about 5x of what I would have originally, so I walked away a happy pho-tog that day with a hilarious story to tell you now. To be fair the staff and chefs there are amazing, but the busybody management is just absolutely something else.
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