Meanwhile, minds on the other side of the Pacific were wrestling with the personnel problem. In the late ’70s, it occurred to the sushi restaurateur Minoru Ikishima that machines could replace much of the high-priced labor of the sushi master. By l980, he had come up with the “sushi robot,” which would become the Tomoe Company’s line of different machines for cooking and mixing the vinegared rice, forming it into individual-sized portions for several types of sushi, and wrapping sushi rolls in sheets of nori (toasted dried laver). Other entrepreneurs in the Far East were soon devising systems of their own.
When you factor in the simultaneous arrival of large distributors selling sashimi-grade fish to restaurants in precut blocks (often frozen) to save the effort of cutting and trimming it on the premises, it is clear that shortcut sushi had arrived. People who ate sushi still thought of it as an elite food for elite palates. But many of America’s new sushi joints were designed to provide a sort of prefab simulation of sushi staffed at minimal cost by people with a few months’ coaching in a dumbed-down version of the art.
By this time, the business also reflected several decades of American taste preferences, which leaned toward strong effects (for example, megadoses of wasabi) and lots of them. The selection of fillings and toppings increased exponentially. Vegetable-based sushi in Japan generally featured cucumber, carrot, or pickled gourd; here, a larger range of colorful mosaics was developed for those who disliked fish but wanted to experience the vogue. Since seafood in cooked rather than raw form not only appealed to a larger audience but was cheaper and easier for restaurants to handle, offerings in that department (often featuring mass-produced surimi) also mushroomed as pop sushi bars spread throughout the land. By the late ’80s, many Americans’ first exposure to sushi was coming from such native coinages as multi-vegetable fantasias, “California roll,” “spicy tuna roll,” and smoked salmon toppings, all preferably served up in king-size portions.
Sushi also happened to be ideally situated for a breakthrough in the new American supermarket, which put itself in direct competition with a spectrum of specialty retailers. Ten years ago, it had been around long enough for everyone to have heard of it but had not wholly lost its image as something novel and worldly. It was portable, non-messy, pretty enough to catch the eye of impulse-buyers, and versatile enough to serve as either lunch or dinner. By now it was also cheap enough to be affordable to most people.
What can we expect next? I can imagine no obstacle to buttercrunch or tangerine sushi in the fullness of time. Put imitation bacon bits on it, and we may all be eating it for breakfast one of these days. But in irrepressible all-American style, what began as a consciously exotic fashion has splintered into several class-defined strata. The cut-rate incarnations that now show up in Chinese pork-barbecue shops, Italian delis, movie theaters, and children’s lunchboxes don’t stop American devotees of the wonderful old-style sushi bars from making their way to hundreds of excellent if aging midprice Japanese restaurants from coast to coast. And for the sticker-shock-is-no-object contingent, baroque developments have come thick and fast since the 1980s, when a rapidly increasing supply of “new” fish—gizzard shad, halfbeak, conger eel, western Pacific bream and snapper—started reaching high-end restaurants from the ends of the earth (and even Japan). American-based chefs, many emboldened by the California debut of the Japanese-Peruvian transplant Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, began educating themselves in raw or raw-cured sashimi-grade fish. Among today’s cutting-edge restaurants, a remarkable proportion are best known for their innovative riffs on the theme of sashimi—fish “carpaccio,” “tartare,” or “crudo”; lees-cured black cod; Latin American ceviche. All of which may seem to be a long distance from Yankee business types in l950s or ’60s Japan getting up the courage to actually taste the pièce de résistance—but it was they who first awakened their countrymen to a hunger that no one has ever described better than Philip N. Ober in the pages of this magazine back in 1958: “the atavistic need for raw fish, sashimi, fresh from the unplumbed depths of the sea, chilled, pristine.”
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