i didn’t grow up eating sushi. i was a meat and potatoes or fish n’ chips kinda gal. so i never ate the fresh fish until i moved to the city in my late teens. even then it was a slow start with california rolls and deep fried spicy tuna.
it wasn’t until i worked at a sushi restaurant that i truly gained an understanding of the cuisine and the culture surrounding it. they had me take a quiz before i started and i had no idea that “sake” also meant salmon, although with a slightly different pronunciation. regardless of my sad understanding, they hired me for my supposed charm and so i helped them open their first sushi restaurant. she had worked front of house and he had trained as a sushi chef. eventually i would be there till we had a solid crew of regulars, an impatient crowd waiting outside, and a Michelin star. i would learn the names of the all the daily fish in japanese. i would watch the chefs slice, dice, and prepare all the delicate ingredients to make their masterpiece of a nigiri sampler. i would develop a taste for different fish and cultivate a discerning palate.
but i’ve meandered from what i really think about when i eat sushi to what i think about when i write about sushi...
what i think about when i eat sushi... is all these different fish with a bite taken out of them. one perfectly-measured-bite-size piece of a fish on a precisely packed cylinder of rice. i think of the inversion of that piece of nigiri. i think of that fish on my plate. of all those fish in front of me. so that when i take my piece of nigiri and place it in my mouth i feel like i’m picking up one of those fish and taking a chomp out of it. just one bite, and then on to the next.
it’s distorted my enjoyment of eating sushi. i feel painfully aware of my place on the food chain, perched on a bar stool at a hip sushi bar with soft music, mood lighting, and me taking just one bite of all these fishes.
i know that there are many people taking their respective bites of each fish eventually eating the whole, but still… i get wrapped up in it.
*sushi drawing by Mark Dingo Francisco