Restaurants

The Raw Truth

Gassed tuna. Frozen salmon. The sushi business is booming -- but diners
don't always know what they're getting. Where the fish really comes
from, and how to spot the good stuff.

BY G. BRUCE KNECHT
March 25, 2006; Page P1


At Tama Sushi on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, Calif., chef Katsu
Michite serves raw fish that some consider among the best in town. It's
$12 for two small pieces of bluefin tuna. Just down the road is Todai,
a big sushi chain where $14 buys a full lunchtime buffet, including all
the fish you can eat.

Despite the big price gap, the two restaurants have something in
common: They get much of their fish from the same supplier.

Sushi -- one of the fastest-growing segments of the restaurant business
-- is now firmly in the mainstream, served everywhere from military
canteens to 7-Elevens, and in all 50 states. Even Tony Soprano and his
wife, Carmela, ditched the scaloppine for yellowtail in the season
opener of "The Sopranos."

But at a time when other kinds of restaurants are inundating diners
with details about where their pork chops spent their youth and what
farmer harvested their veggies, sushi is curiously out of step. Even at
top-of-the-line establishments, menus rarely say anything about where
the fish comes from.
FISH TRAILS


· Look behind the menu at 50 major sushi places around the U.S.



It turns out just a few suppliers stock most of the sushi restaurants
in any given city. One of the more popular cuts, yellowtail, almost
always traces its origins to the same fish farms in Japan regardless of
price. "Yellowtail is yellowtail," says Choi Pak, a wholesaler who
supplies Tama Sushi and Todai.

Even in the same restaurant, quality can vary. Spicy tuna rolls,
another staple, are often a way to disguise less-than-top-quality tuna.
Other servings of tuna, whether on a bed of rice or as sashimi, may not
be as fresh as they look; its rich red color may indicate it was caught
days ago -- or that it was "gassed" to give it a rosy glow. And even
fish described as fresh may well have been in the freezer for a while,
which the Food and Drug Administration recommends to kill parasites.

Restaurateurs and distributors say the quality of fish varies -- and
prices reflect that. When a bluefin loin arrives at a wholesaler, for
instance, it is examined and priced based largely on its color and fat
content. This process is inherently more subjective than, say, pricing
beef, which has already been given a grade by inspectors from the
Department of Agriculture.

To some extent, sushi restaurants put their faith in their suppliers,
trusting that higher prices correspond to higher quality. A small
number of high-end places with agents who buy for them at markets in
Japan rely on the judgment of their buyers. Some chefs, like Mr.
Michite of Tama Sushi, go to their fishmongers every morning and pick
out the fish they want. "Experience decides everything," says Mr.
Michite. "I've been doing this for 45 years." At Todai, a spokesman
says the company orders by fax and sends back fish deemed inadequate.
He adds that Todai benefits pricewise by ordering in volume.

The number of Japanese restaurants, nearly all of which serve sushi,
more than doubled in the past decade, to 9,182 last year, up from
4,086, according to Japanese Food Trade News, while sushi sales hit
$2.8 billion, up from $1.1 billion in 2000. Technomic, a food industry
research and consulting firm, expects growth to continue at 10% to 20%
annually for the next five years -- by contrast, the overall restaurant
industry is growing at 5% a year. Mr. Pak, the Los Angeles fish
wholesaler, says he's selling 30% more sushi than he did a decade ago;
it's the fastest-growing segment of his business.
TIP SHEET: A DINER'S GUIDE


Sushi experts say consumers can do several things to ensure that they
eat the good stuff:
NEVER ON SUNDAY: Most restaurants do not receive fresh fish on the
weekend, so it is certain to be less fresh than on other days. In some
places, Monday is even worse.
NEATNESS COUNTS: Look in the sushi case at the bar. If pieces aren't
wrapped and are touching one another or the sides of the case, says
Sushi Sasabune chef Nobi Kusuhara, "they aren't really taking care of
the fish very well."
EXPECT VARIETY: Offerings that change according to the season usually
mean the chef takes pride in his selections.
GOOD LOOKS: Fresh fish will look shiny. Tuna should not be dark or too
red. "When the color is red, almost as if it's been painted, ask if it
has been smoked," says Mr. Kasuhara. If so, "it won't taste good and
could be spoiled inside."
FOLLOW THE CROWDS: Unpopular restaurants may not have enough turnover
to have fresh fish.
SAY NO TO SPICY SUSHI ROLLS: The spices are often intended to disguise
inferior fish.

Sushi owes some of that popularity to the perception that it's healthy.
But tuna, perhaps the most popular sushi fish, may contain high levels
of mercury. "A lot of people think sushi is a health food, but it isn't
if you eat tuna sushi twice a week," says Eli Saddler, a public health
analyst with GotMercury.org, an environmental advocacy group that
tested sushi from five restaurants in California earlier this year.
Mercury, which occurs both naturally and from industrial sources, is
absorbed by marine food chains. It's most concentrated in top
predators, such as swordfish, shark and tuna. In GotMercury's test, 25%
of the tuna samples were close to the FDA's limit of 1 part per
million; 75% had more than 0.5 part per million of mercury, the maximum
many countries consider safe. Every sample exceeded Japan's 0.4
parts-per-million standard.

Coverage of the test has generated controversy in California, where
fish restaurants and retailers that employ more than 10 people are
required to post warnings about mercury. Activists say the warnings
should be nationwide and the FDA should do much more testing.

Understanding the sushi hierarchy can make for smarter ordering. For
example, chefs often reserve the best-quality seafood for sashimi,
which is served without a bed of rice. Spicy tuna rolls are often at
the bottom of the hierarchy.

And that healthy red color that makes the tuna look as if were swimming
an hour ago? This may be the color of tuna that has been gassed, or as
it is sometimes called, "smoked." After the fish is cut into loins or
filets and before it's frozen, it's exposed to carbon monoxide, which
binds with hemoglobin to prevent the flesh from turning from red to
brown to gray.

Joe Gumpel of Gotham Seafood, a major New York distributor, says he
sells gassed fish, mostly to cruise-line customers, but says, "It
misrepresents the product. You can't tell when it was caught, and you
don't know that it went into a factory for enhancements."

Sushi (clockwise from top left): Sea eel, snow crab, Penshell scallop,
golden-spotted sardine



In our survey of 50 top sushi restaurants (see chart), single pieces of
yellowtail ranged from $2 at Suehiro in Salt Lake City to $5 at
Morimoto. But unlike tuna, which comes from all over the world and
varies in color and fat content, yellowtail generally used in sushi is
quite uniform. Chefs and vendors say that nearly all yellowtail used in
sushi is farm-raised in Japan. Star sushi chef Masaharu Morimoto, who
recently expanded from Philadelphia to New York, agrees, but says that
his is fresher than other restaurants may be able to buy because he
gets shipments from Japan four times a week. (He says he also uses
buri, a kind of wild yellowtail, on the rare occasions when he can get
it.)

Then there's that omnipresent modifier "fresh." Most sushi fish has
been frozen at some point. The state of the art is flash freezing, in
which the fish are frozen so quickly in super-cold chillers that the
moisture in its flesh does not crystallize and the fish isn't mushy
when thawed. Kee Chan, the owner of Heat, a sleek, high-end sushi place
in Chicago, says all of the fish he serves is fresh, although he also
acknowledges that much of it has been flash frozen. "Once it gets to
us," he says, "it's fresh."

To confuse things even more, experts say that some seafood that's been
frozen is superior. "I've seen an assembly line where eels are alive at
the start of the process, then stunned, filleted, vacuum-packed and
frozen," says Robert Wholey, who owns Pittsburgh's biggest seafood
distributor. "That's as fresh as you can get."

One way to ensure quality, according to some chefs, is to order direct
from Japan. New York's Masa, with its $350 prix-fixe dinner, is
generally regarded as the country's most expensive restaurant. Its
chef-owner, Masayoshi Takayama, has what amounts to a personal fish
shopper in Japan. An agent buys for him at Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo
and directly from fishermen at the port of Chiba, then rushes the fish
to the airport to catch a nonstop flight to New York, JAL's flight 006.
As soon as the fish clears Customs, the driver of the van who will
bring it to Masa calls with an estimate for his arrival time.

Mr. Takayama claims fish caught near Japan feed on superior plankton.
"Good plankton is as important to fish as soil is to crops," he says.
That's "pure nonsense," says Daniel Pauly, the director of the
University of British Columbia's Fisheries Centre. Still, the quality
of the fish sold at the Tsukiji market is widely admired by industry
insiders. They point to the enormous volume of fish sold there (about
2,000 pounds of marine products every day), the high standards of the
domestic market, the exacting way fish are butchered and handled, the
temperature controls and the hygienic standards.

That's why sushi chefs like Chris Kinjo of Atlanta's MF Sushibar buy
much of their fish in Japan and air-freight it to the U.S. at a cost of
$3 to $4 a pound. A broker working for Mr. Kinjo shops at Tsukiji and
ships fish on a nonstop Delta flight to Atlanta three times a week. New
York's Jewel Bako also gets most of its fish directly from Japan. So do
both branches of Morimoto.

But the fish at most sushi restaurants arrives by routes so complicated
that even many chefs admit that they do not know exactly where it came
from. Most acquire their fish from several local suppliers. Some are
affiliates of large importers like New Jersey-based True World Foods,
which has branches across the country, and Yama Seafood, which supplies
300 restaurants, mostly in the Northeast. Other wholesalers are local
businesses. All typically buy fish that comes from many places around
the globe.

Some of the tuna sold at the Atlanta affiliate of True World Foods, for
example, is caught in the Pacific, landed in Southeast Asia, then
shipped to Latin America enroute to Atlanta; salmon is flown in from
fish farms in Chile or Scotland. Long Island-based importer Bob Sedano,
who supplies tuna to Gotham Seafood and several other New York
wholesalers, says he buys fish "opportunistically" from all around the
world.

So apart from that Japanese-farmed yellowtail and California sea
urchins, you can rarely be sure where the fish on your vinegared rice
has been swimming. But you can count on the rice: Nearly all of it is
grown in California.