Upscale Sushi Chefs Fight Overfishing Sustainably

Image Gallery image by Bart Nagel / www.bartnagel.com

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One day in 2007, Kin Lui was taking a break from his shift at an upscale Japanese restaurant in San Francisco. A piece in the Chronicle caught his eye: Stocks of bluefin tuna—the sine qua non of any sushi bar worthy of its lucky cat figurine—were flat-lining due to overfishing.

Later, at Hana Zen, where Lui moonlighted, he described what he’d read to co-chef and buddy Raymond Ho. They agreed the news was tragic—then went to work behind a bar stocked with cherry-pink blocks of bluefin. “At the time, it seemed like we couldn’t do much,” Lui recalls.

But eventually Lui and Ho did do something. In February 2008, they set up behind the sushi bar at Tataki, their first venture as owners. The 26-seat restaurant started with a simple mission rooted in that Chronicle article: serve only seafood that was sustainably farmed or wild caught. Soon, Tataki was being hailed as the only fully sustainable sushi bar in the nation.

Still, with growing awareness of the role sushi has played in decimating the world’s fisheries, one wonders whether places like Tataki can stop our appetites from emptying the oceans.

In 2007 Americans picked up chopsticks and dipped 2.5 million sushi meals into slurries of wasabi and soy sauce. It’s a figure capped with a question mark: Is sushi as we know it—from prepacked supermarket rolls to exquisite omakase meals—doomed, inevitably, to extinction?

Consider the face of most American sushi: It is the realm of monster maki: hefty, gooey with spicy mayo, often deep-fried, and lavished with layer upon layer of fish. Like meat lover’s pizza and the Croissan’wich, monster maki were born in the USA, for people with a seemingly bottomless craving for proteins and no fear of calories. Not to mention an apparent lack of curiosity about where the rolls’ hefty layers of seafood originate.

“We’ve somehow moved ourselves into this strange relationship with food,” says Sheila Bowman, manager of outreach for Seafood Watch at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “Look at how Americans eat shrimp. Forty years ago, you most likely ate five shrimp a year, probably in a shrimp cocktail on Christmas Eve. Now we just gorge on them whenever we want. Some things simply should not be all you can eat, and fish is one of them.”

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