How not to eat sushi
Anyone can tell you how to eat sushi. There are sushi bores from here to Japan who just can't wait to explain how not to dip the rice side of your nigiri into the soy sauce and to always eat it in one bite. Only use chopsticks for sashimi. Use your fingers for sushi rolls, and on a mixed platter, always eat the rolls with the seaweed on the outside first. Never mix the wasabi into your soy sauce, you sushi-snacking peasant. In fact, you must only ever eat wasabi with sashimi, while smugly acknowledging that the bright-green fusion of chemicals on your plate, a mixture of horseradish and mustard powders laced with food dye, bears little resemblance to the subtle complexity of true wasabi, the best of which is grown in gravel stream beds under black curtains in an area to the south west of Tokyo.
Impart this information at every godforsaken opportunity. Remind all that you started eating sushi years ago, long before it became the rage. Make your date feel small by pointing out that the pickled ginger should be used as an inter-course palate cleanser, not as an accompaniment. Always eat the sashimi garnish, which will usually be a bit of green stuff and some radishy nubbins. Knock three times on the ceiling if you want more. Twice on the pipes, bing, bing, means you are choking on a lump of bigeye and require a glass of water.
On and on and on it goes, a riot of sushi rules and regulations, of customs and etiquette demanded by tradition and, yes, a certain amount of snivelling food snobbery, all to consume a simple snack of rice balls and fish. Samurai warriors never had this problem. They just tossed it down like krill and got on with perfecting their pony tails and making lush tartare of their enemies. In comparison, today's sushi diners are faced with a barrage of dilemmas before they even sit down at the counter to crack open their disposable wooden chopsticks. Yet increasingly, the most important question they must ask themselves is not how to eat sushi, but how not to eat sushi.
It started off as a way of preserving the fish that were left high and dry in paddy fields following floods; now it is taking over the world. The problem with sushi today is not how to manoeuvre kappamaki from plate to mouth without everyone screaming with laughter at your lack of technique, but how to escape the stuff. The planet is awash with California rolls and strips of inferior salmon trapped in little coffins of rice. Sushi is in the supermarket, in shopping malls, in sandwich shops, at the airport. It is available from Mumbai to Morecambe, in Des Moines and in des res everywhere. Most notoriously, it is available at high-end restaurants where gourmands pay huge sums to be titillated by scraps of the finest seafood. At Masa in New York, which holds the distinction of being the most expensive restaurant in America, customers pay around $300 for the basic omakase menu at Masayoshi Takayama's sushi bar.
At Umu in London, chefs in geta sandals hand-squeeze sushi and serve real wasabi to high rollers who don't mind indulging themselves with three-figure-plus bills. Just like the eel they serve, no one gets out of Umu, or restaurants like it, without being skinned. Alive, if possible. Unagi tastes better if the chefs cut them open while the creatures are still squirming, because the taste component breaks down rapidly once death sets in. Perhaps that's why sushi presentation is so abstract and so pretty; it disguises the bloodlust and brutal murder that goes on behind the scenes.
If you are the kind of diner who is willing to dice with mercury poisoning and scomboid side effects, then eating raw fish does clearly have health benefits. I mean, have you ever seen a dolphin with acne or depression? They all look as sleek as seals who, incidentally, are no slouches themselves if there's any sashimi in the offing. However, anyone gorging on crunchy tuna rolls and avocado/crab combos in the great sushi middle market that is taking over the world should not be deluding themselves that what they are eating is a healthy product. It is an empty banquet of fishy Liquorice Allsorts, bullets of starchy carbs, lozenges of sugared, factory rice with a central vein of greasy, farmed fish. Did Carrie and co realise they were dicing with empty carbs when they chatted over uramaki at Manhattan's Sushi Samba in Sex and the City? Did Lindsay Lohan realise what she was ingesting in last year's sushi-fuelled romcom, Just My Luck? Salmon and tuna are farmed in great, sea cages to feed the global sushi market. Trapped in the deep, they grow fat through a lack of exercise and room to move. It is this very fatness - toro, the fatty tuna belly is highly prized - that gives sushi lovers the 'melt in the mouth' sensation that they crave. 'Sushi makes me hum, and I only hum after sex,' says Julian Clary, which is possibly a sushi fact too far. Meanwhile a Japanese news agency claims that Princess Diana was recently spotted alive and well in a sushi restaurant in Chigasaki where she was eating whale - a 'delicacy denied her during her years as a princess'. Really, sushi is spooky stuff. Take my advice. Just say no. At least to sushi bores, if not to sushi itself.
Three places for raw fish
Umu
14-16 Bruton Place, London W1 (020 7499 8881)
Is this London's most upmarket Japanese restaurant? Well, Rupert Everett dines here, which says it all. Rupert recently complained that people who use private jets are just not as stylish as they once were. He comforts himself at Umu, with a choice of a dozen different mineral waters and a courtly kaisake menu. Let's hope he doesn't bump into Nicky Haslam, who thinks sushi is 'dreadfully common'.
The Captain's Galley
The Harbour, Scrabster, Caithness (01847 894999)
Chef Jim Cowie once dreamt of teaching himself how to make sashimi from a book. 'How hard can it be?' he said, perhaps not realising that Japanese sushi chefs must undergo a 10-year apprenticeship. Jim's other specialities include Asian steamed pollock with sweet-and-sour cabbage. The Galley is situated in a former Victorian ice house.
Il Clandestino
Baia di Portonovo, Ancona, Italy (0039 071 801 422)
This is just a simple shack on the beach serving Italian-style sushi and weird hybrids of tuna tataki. Instead of soy, wasabi and ginger, parsley, lemon, olive oil and lime are used as flavourings and seasonings. It shouldn't work but it does, and brilliantly so.
Read Jan Moir's restaurant reviews at areyoureadytoorder.co.uk
A new review is added every Thursday.