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When it comes to saving sushi for future generations to eat, Bay Area restaurants employ different strategies…or none at all.

By John Birdsall • Photos by Bart Nagel

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

Later, at Hana Zen, where Lui moonlighted, he described what he’d read to co-chef and buddy Raymond Ho. Tragic, they agreed, then went to work behind a bar stocked with cherry-pink blocks of that same endangered 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 modest, 26-seat restaurant on the scuffed-up margin of Pacific Heights started with a simple mission rooted in that Chronicle article: serve only seafood that was sustainably farmed or wild caught. Soon, the Monterey Bay Aquarium was hailing Tataki as the only fully sustainable sushi bar in the nation, and Lui, Ho, and their “sustainability guru,” Casson Trenor, were racking up the kind of press usually lavished on mega-openings by golden boys like Michael Mina. Even Gourmet did a shout-out.

Tataki represents hope for sushi lovers everywhere. But despite its early success—stoked by the release of Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Sustainable Seafood Guide for Sushi last fall—Tataki has raised more questions than Lui and Ho probably ever dreamt they’d be called on to answer. Sure, they’ve banished open-sea-farmed salmon and hamachi, shrimp from sprawling Southeast Asian farms, and bluefin altogether. But huge obstacles stand in the way of meaningful change by a restaurant of such modest size.

In the face of growing awareness of the role sushi has played in decimating the world’s fisheries, can places like Tataki stop sushi from destroying the oceans?

Rolling in a deep-sea minefield

In 2007, Americans picked up chopsticks to dip some 2.5 million sushi meals into slurries of wasabi and soy sauce. It’s a staggering figure, capped with a question mark for nigiri lovers everywhere: Is sushi as we know it—the global genre that ranges from California rolls in supermarket prepack to the exquisite omakase at places like Hama-Ko in Cole Valley—is all of it doomed, inevitably, to extinction?

If Tataki is positioned as the savior of sushi, then Trenor is the prophet crying in the depleted oceanic wilderness. He has advised Lui and Ho about acceptable seafood buys almost from they moment they toyed with the idea of ocean-friendly sushi. He’s also director of business development for FishWise, a project of Santa Cruz–based Sustainability Fishery Advocates to establish source-of-origin labeling at seafood counters. And in January Trenor published Sustainable Sushi, a guide to navigating the sushi bar without destroying the oceans or your soul. The book’s a culmination of his work in marine conservation, including a stint at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and even his culinary degree—in classical French cuisine, no less.

Tataki has become an essential bullet point on his résumé. Trenor, you see, is a man with something to prove. “I had my theories, but I didn’t have a restaurant,” he says. “Tataki was really where I felt we could prove that this whole thing is possible, so critics couldn’t attack me and say, ‘Well, this sounds good, but it’s impossible to put into practice.’”

He’d searched in vain for chefs willing to take the plunge into total eco-immersion. Then he met with Lui and Ho over lattes. They handed Trenor a list of fish they were considering. Trenor pulled out a red Sharpie and crossed out maybe half of them. Lui studied what was left. “OK,” Trenor recalls him saying. “I think we can work with that.” Bingo—he’d found his test case.

The problem, as Trenor sees it, is this: The five most popular sushi items are threatening either to flatline global fisheries and/or destroy the environments in which they’re farmed. And soon.
Take salmon, No. 1 in U.S. popularity. Wild fish are pricier than farmed, and thus unlikely to appear on the menus of all but the fanciest sushi bars. Aquacultured salmon is a voracious feeder, crowded like factory hogs in filthy ocean farms. Ditto hamachi, also known as amberjack. Most wild shrimp are bottom-­trawled, a practice as devastating as rainforest slash-and-burn, while farming shrimp often entails the destruction of vast swaths of ecologically critical mangrove swamps, primarily in Thailand and southern China. Unagi, freshwater eel, are snatched and penned young before they can breed, then fattened on massive inputs of wild fish. And the numbers of bluefin tuna, which is always caught in the wild (except for extremely rare and expensive Kindai; see next page), are crashing about as precipitously as AIG’s closing stock price.

Readers of an Eater SF blog post titled “Sushi No-No’s,” about the Seafood Watch sushi guide, let out a collective wail at the new pariah status of their old favorites. “But those are all the good ones,” said one commenter, while a shrimp lover threw down a grim challenge: “They can pry my ama ebi from my cold, dead chopsticks.”

It’s a line that must give the sustainability guru chills.

A bigger problem with the Toxic Five is that they also tend to be a sushi bar’s biggest profit makers. Meaning that, even if a concerned chef wanted to do the right thing and banish them, the economics of the sushi bar are skewed in favor of keeping them in the fish case—especially now that recession is making any extra smidgen of profit irresistible.

Trenor devised a menu of swap-outs for Tataki. For salmon, it now uses sustainably farmed arctic char. Its amberjack comes from lower-density U.S. and Australian farms. It sources wild shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico, Pacific Coast, and mid-Atlantic, where shrimpers employ better management practices. For tuna, it relies on troll- and pole-caught bigeye and yellowfin, and albacore from Hawaii and the northern Pacific. Those are relatively straightforward substitutions, doable for many sushi bars willing to accept reduced or negative profit margins, so-called loss leaders.

But unagi? That was tough. Trenor, Lui, and Ho together got creative, perfecting something they call “faux-nagi”: thin slices of Canadian black cod, seared to order with a blowtorch so the muscle fibers swell to an approximation of eel flesh. Blackened and glazed with viscous sweet soy, it’s an interesting solution. But at least in the nigiri I tasted, a slightly unpleasant one, with an acrid taste from the blowtorch blasting. Is this, I asked myself, the key to saving fisheries? Forging simulacra of sushi-bar favorites?

Like mock foods of all kinds—from Tofurky and Not Dogs to “apple” pie that swaps out Ritz crackers for the fruit—faux-nagi asks for a certain willing suspension of disbelief, heavy emphasis on the willing. With national press, Tataki is no doubt attracting a self-selecting fan base: the eco-conscious, certainly the curious. ­According to Kin Lui, they show up from as far away as San Diego, Texas, and New York. “They like the idea of what we’re doing,” he says.

But which customers aren’t queuing up for one of Tataki’s 26 seats? And after the novelty of faux-nagi fades, won’t even Tataki patrons who love the Toxic Five go back to the things they fell in love with in the first place?

Rock and a hard place

Early afternoon, and, over a rattling sound system, Lady Gaga is spitting rhymes above an especially turgid dance mix. The Polk Street branch of Sushi Rock is deserted except for me and, four stools down the bar, Eric.

Eric is thirtysomething, with tousled blond hair and a rolled-sleeve dress shirt. He works in the neighborhood, eyes me suspiciously between glances up at ESPN, and won’t give his last name. He comes to this very seat at this very sushi bar for lunch three to five days a week. Always orders exactly the same thing: green tea, and the E lunch special—a six-piece Rock ‘N Roll, two-piece maguro nigiri, and two-piece hamachi nigiri, for $10.95. As his Rock ‘N Roll is packed with unagi and avocado, on the Toxic Five scale, Eric is scoring a solid three.

Sushi Rock’s slogan is “What we can’t rock, we roll.” Behold the face of American sushi, the type of place where the vast majority of those 2.5 million U.S. sushi meals were consumed in 2007. It’s fun here, a whiff of over-the-top theatrics—the walls are the acid green of Slushees, there’s a kitschy oil painting of dolphins cavorting in the deep, and a poster of lovable cinematic potheads Harold and Kumar.
And it’s the realm of monster maki: hefty, gooey with spicy mayo, often deep-fried, and lavished with layer upon layer of fish. Like the Meat Lover’s Pizza and the Croissan’Wich, monster maki were born in the U.S.A., for people with a sweet tooth, a seemingly bottomless craving for proteins, and no fear of calories—lots and lots of calories. Not to mention an apparent lack of curiosity about where the rolls’ hefty layers of seafood originated.

In Sustainable Sushi, Trenor suggests asking your chef where, say, his hamachi was farmed, transparency being the first step in the sustainability solution. “Typically, the executive chef does all the buying, so he knows what he’s serving,” he tells me. “The chef has a direct, vested interest in keeping you happy.”

While that may be true in more rarefied places, the strategy proves unsatisfying here. I have to raise my voice above Justin Timberlake to ask the baby-faced sushi maker where his maguro is from. He’s a nice kid, friendly, wheeling around after popping hunks of unagi in the microwave to consider my question, scrunching his eyes and nose in an expression of extreme concentration.

“Um, hard to say. Sometimes Thailand, sometimes Vietnam. Could be a lot of places.”

The kid’s cluelessness is a reminder of just how opaque the sushi experience remains, even in a place as accessible as Sushi Rock. Combine that with our supersized appetites for flesh in general, and it is no surprise that fisheries are teetering on the brink of collapse.

Out on the sidewalk, I ask Eric if he’s ever considered the source of the seafood in his near-daily lunch combo.

“Whoa,” he says, physically pulling back. “I don’t get into any of that. I’m just an end user.”

He’s not alone. “We’ve somehow moved ourselves into this strange relationship with food,” says Sheila Bowman, manager of outreach and education 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 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.”

The problem is that most of the Toxic Five, for example, are creatures at or near the top of their food chains. “When we eat one of them, it’s more like eating a lion than like eating a chicken,” Bowman says. “These are wild animals we’re talking about, not some easily raised land protein source.”
“That is the sleeping dragon of the sushi industry,” Casson Trenor says of the challenges posed by monster maki. “These places can transform. They just have to make different ­decisions.”
Once a guy like Eric has developed an almost daily taste for the Rock ‘N Roll, however, it may be hard to entice him back to the turkey club. In the absence of pressure from customers, there’s little incentive for restaurants to make decisions that chip away at their profits. So Sushi Rock could just go on rolling the Toxic Five until fisheries crash and sushi as we know it drifts off into extinction, like a polar bear on an ice floe.

Which is why some think we should reexamine our very notion of sustainability, and extend it beyond swapping out “good” ingredients for “bad.” Perhaps sushi needs to somehow become as rare as that once-a-year shrimp cocktail.

The Japanese paradox

Michael Black dips thin fingers into a wooden rice tub, and with a few deft movements forms an ivory nugget into a rounded base for nigiri. With Daniel Dunham, Black is owner and chef of Sebo in Hayes Valley, named by Bon Appétit one of the best sushi bars in the country.

Talk about special-occasion sushi: Paula Miranda, a TV actress and blogger with a gorgeous tan, has flown up from L.A. just to eat here tonight. Sitting upright at the six-seat bar, she’s giddy with anticipation, asking Black what he recommends, snapping photos, sheepishly apologizing for the flash.

The sparkling pieces of nigiri lined up on Miranda’s blue-glass plate are links in a Japanese tradition going back to the early 1800s, when Edomae-zushi (essentially, ­Tokyo-style sushi) was born. Most of us think of sushi as pieces of raw seafood, configured in some way or other with seasoned rice. But authentic Edomae is a complex choreography of timing and curing, yielding subtle and not-so-subtle transformations of fish. Thus, a brief cure with brine and vinegar turns silvery skinned wild mackerel (saba) pointedly acidic, firms it, and creates a kind of sea-breeze freshness that balances the saba’s natural oiliness.

Almost all Sebo’s seafood comes from Japan: the menu lists the region of origin for each. Black says sustainability is crucial, if only to ensure that sushi is even possible in the future.

“I want to have a job in five years,” he jokes.

It’s expensive, of course—a solo meal at Sebo will set you back at least $50, and even then you’ll be tempted to grab a hot slice from the pizza parlor next door. But eating at Sebo is about something besides stuffing your gullet. The restaurant may leave you wanting more, but it satisfies a yearning to connect with the oceans and the creatures it contains­­—an acknowledgment of mystery.

“When you’re talking about sustainability, the most important thing is to honor what you’re doing,” says Tom Worthington, co-owner of Monterey Fish Market, a seafood wholesaler on Pier 33 with a retail shop in Berkeley. In 2007, Worthington joined a culinary delegation of 35 restaurant and food industry types who traveled to Osaka, Japan, to mark the 50th anniversary of San Francisco’s oldest sister-city proclamation. It got him thinking about what a truly sustainable cuisine could look like.

“It’s a culture that respects stretching out a little bit of something,” he says of Japan. “A small piece of eel on a bowl of perfect rice—I ate that for breakfast. It was sublime,” Worthington says: a lesson in how to consume less while somehow appreciating it more.

The food critic Patricia Unterman, co-owner of the sustainable seafood restaurant Hayes Street Grill and one of the founders of the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market, led the delegation to Osaka. The experience struck her with what she calls the Japanese paradox.

“It’s so ambivalent—they have this beautiful reverence for nature; the seasons are so important to them,” she says. “But when it comes to sustainability, or consciousness about the health of the Earth, it seems to be a matter of, ‘Oh, we’ll pay and get the best.’ They don’t want to compromise quality or change their sushi rituals.”

On the other hand, outside of kaiten, or conveyor-belt places, sushi is really, really expensive. “The basic Japanese diet is mostly vegetables,” she reports.

Unterman sees the possibility of creating a sustainable future for sushi by fusing Japan’s moderated-protein approach onto American creations like the Rock ‘N Roll. Take something like the spicy tuna tataki roll. Unterman, who confesses she’s never eaten at a monster maki place, says such a roll could use up all the little bits that would be otherwise thrown away—the bits that classically trained sushi chefs won’t touch—and turn it into something tasty and filling, in which the seafood functions mainly as a kind of garnish.

Will sushi find salvation in the discarded bits? Could Eric learn to love the California roll?
Back at Sebo, Michael Black is telling Paula Miranda what he finds most disappointing about American-style sushi. “You shouldn’t have the same fish on the menu 365 days a year,” he says. “One of the fundamentals of Japanese cooking is seasonality.” If shrimp isn’t on Sebo’s menu, that’s not because someone forget to order it, just that it’s not time—in part, a kind of naturally imposed check against depleting fragile stocks.

Meanwhile, I’m taking my first bite of umekyu, a slightly dented maki filled with sweet-tasting Japanese cucumber and sour-salty pickled plum. It’s refreshing, delicious, suffused with a kind of handmade, wabi-sabi esthetic.

And it doesn’t contain even a single fiber of fish.

Kindai: The “good” bluefin
Bluefin tuna is prized primarily for toro, the eraser-pink belly flesh rich in delicious fat. So delicious, in fact, that wild stocks throughout the world’s oceans are crashing due to overfishing: three species in the Southern Hemisphere are nearly gone, while western Pacific numbers have declined more than 90 percent. But there’s one bright exception: Kindai.

Past attempts at bluefin farming failed, until researchers at Kinki University in southern Japan perfected a system of raising the fish from eggs—sustainably. The first Kindai reached the market in 2004. These days, broker Nick Sakagami imports three or four of the fabulously pricey Kindai to the U.S. each week. Hayward-based wholesaler IMP Foods buys one or two for its four-star customers in Northern California, including Sebo, Cyrus, the Ritz-Carlton, and St. Regis, as well as others in Chicago and Las Vegas.

But IMP branch manager Glenn Sakata says a new imposter is roiling the waters. Bluefin caught in the wild and farmed in Japan—a practice deemed unsustainable—has hit the market at half the price of the real thing, confusingly under the name Kindai. “Because Kindai has such prestige, they’re calling it that,” Sakata says. Sakagami is trying to establish a certification system for true Kindai.

Editor’s note: Recent news on the state of tuna fishery: Overfishing to wipe out bluefin tuna in 3 years: WWF.

John Birdsall is an independent jour­nalist, food writer, and former chef. His work has appeared in San Francisco magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, East Bay Express, Contra Costa Times, and The Mercury News, among other publications. He lives in Oakland.