What the cookbook leaves out

I work the middle station at a restaurant in Namba and I've been cooking professionally since I was nineteen. I'm twenty-six now and my feet hurt in a specific way that I've been told eventually becomes permanent, which I'm trying not to think about. What I want to write about is the moment when food becomes the thing a person is actually feeling. Not the ingredients or the technique. I was making dashimaki tamago one afternoon, a dish I've made probably three thousand times, and the diner had the same expression my father had when my mother made it, and I understood it was not about the eggs at all. I've been trying to write that understanding down ever since. I started with food essays and found that the essay form wanted me to argue a point, which isn't what I have. What I have is accumulation: small moments in which the physical reality of food carries something else. So now it's fiction, loose and short. I write on my phone on the train to work and in my notebook during the break between lunch and dinner service. The restaurant is on Dotonbori and the lunch service ends at two and the kitchen goes quiet in a way that the street outside never does. That's when I write.