Roll without it Sushi chef sticks it to customers who dare ask for extra soy sauce

Good chefs are notoriously exacting about how a customer ought to experience a dish that may have taken months, years or even the arc of an entire career - to perfect.

- Leyland Cecco

Sign outside Sushi J in Canada, laying out Philip Kim's house rules

Gordon Ramsay will not serve ketchup. Marco Pierre White, as the apocryphal tale goes, ejected dozens of diners who asked for more salt or pepper. Alice Waters never accepted requests for items that were out of season.

Now add to the list Philip Kim, a purveyor of sushi in northern British Columbia, has his own steadfast rule. “We never serve extra soy sauce,” says a sign outside his Kitimat shop.

In a social media post earlier this month meant to be the “last time we debate this”, Kim said his edict was firm: “We never serve extra soy sauce - even if [a customer] offered to pay $1,000 for it.”

For Kim, whose Sushi J restaurant has operated for seven years, the decision is not one of cost. Instead, he said it reflected a theory about customer palates, suggesting that “not a single person” who asked for extra soy sauce in the early years of his business ever became a regular.