The second person I knew to eat sushi and live was me. The first was a college faculty colleague married to a coal-company CEO, who had taken her on a business trip to Japan. As she reported to a queasily fascinated departmental circle: “It tasted like raw fish.”
I did not foresee that my own reaction, when I took the plunge in a New York restaurant a few months later (this was probably around 1971), would be, “Where has this been all my life?” And certainly none of us had any blinding time-warp visions of a later America where the hottest and hautest restaurant chefs are sushi and sashimi specialists while neighborhood talent fresh from five minutes’ training turns out no-brainer versions of sushi rolls in supermarkets across the land. (To get issues of terminology out of the way, strictly speaking, sushi refers to anything based on vinegared rice made according to a particular Japanese tradition; sashimi refers to raw fish presentations minus the rice. To most Americans, it’s all just sushi.)
How did something seemingly so alien to this nation’s palate as raw fish become one of the great all-American delicacies? Our familiar immigrant cuisines furnish no real parallel, although it is true that in the early part of the century a California food writer or two bore sporadic witness to the protohistory of sushi in America. Clarence E. Edwords, for instance, a chronicler of Bay Area gastronomy, was treated to sashimi (though he didn’t know it by name) at an elaborate meal in an unadvertised Japanese dining club. As he later recalled in the 1914 Bohemian San Francisco, “the pièce de résistance” was an all-but-quivering carplike raw fish, which, to their astonishment, his party found “most delicious, delicate, and with a flavor of raw oysters.”
The midcentury emergence of Japanese restaurants in America, however, had nothing to do with immigration. Some postwar help came from American-occupied Japan, where military families saw fresher-than-fresh fish on proud display in every market, and from Hawaii, where a swelling stream of tourists from the mainland saw raw fish being enthusiastically eaten in several forms.
But the major breakthrough came from the growth of, and interaction between, two wealthy expatriate communities—American businessmen in Japan and Japanese businessmen in the U.S. In fact, even though food pundits like to preen themselves on having enlightened the bumpkins by fearless example, much of the fearlessness in question must be ascribed to the American businessmen—like my colleague’s husband—who were more or less forcibly subjected to expense-account meals, Nipponese-style.
The three-Martini lunch pales (in terms of both duration and alcoholic overload) beside Japanese corporate courtship rituals. As Americans discovered, any dealmaking involved protracted socializing in high-end restaurants designed for the purpose and dependent on company expense accounts. (Entertaining at home was rare.) A full-scale business dinner was a highly structured pageant of visual effects and deftly theatrical service, impressive even to people who were not predisposed to like the food.
For those who stayed in Japan long enough to sample other kinds of restaurants on their own, the sushi-ya (sushi bars) offered the chance to eat sashimi and sushi—which was not served at formal business dinners—in a more relaxed setting. (Sushi as we know it is not really an ancient part of the cuisine. Though rice and fish preparations that may have given rise to it apparently go back nearly two millennia in parts of East Asia, Japanese sushi in recognizable form is largely a 19th-century creation.) Perched at a sushi-ya counter, Japanese habitués would watch one exquisite mouthful after another take shape under the disciplined fingers of the artist and perhaps ask him to improvise something especially for them, as I would later see pinstripe-suited Americans doing at sushi counters in New York City.
By the late l950s and early ’60s, Japanese investors in search of overseas opportunities recognized the nucleus of a potential U.S. market. A scattering of restaurants sprang up in a few large cities, then began to form a swarm. Ten years later, a sushi cult was taking shape.
We can appreciate now that the live-theater aura of sushi—with its bond between connoisseur-customers and a chef-athlete concentrating a lifetime’s skill on the moment of creation—was to have a tremendous influence on the next generation of American restaurants. At the time, though, it seemed destined to remain a rarefied world of its own. And that was part of the appeal. After all, sashimi-grade fish was unknown to regular American fish suppliers, and the skills needed to handle it were exclusive to sushi masters with seven or eight years of rigorous apprenticeship. That such a specialty would ever move out of Japanese restaurants was inconceivable.
This was where matters stood in the mid-l970s, when a gaggle of lobbyists and bureaucrats with anything on their minds but sushi began a campaign to retool the U.S. fishing fleet while staging a grab for a 200-mile offshore exclusive fishing-rights zone. (Every other nation with a coastline and a fishing fleet was doing the same.) The cluster of regional fisheries councils established by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 started prodding the nation’s fishermen, with the aid of lavish tax breaks, to emulate Japan’s investment in a new generation of high-tech, high-speed fishing boats—huge vessels with sophisticated navigation and detection instruments, vast storage capacity, and factory-scale onboard cleaning and refrigeration equipment.
These monster boats enabled stupendous hauls to be processed and brought ashore in remarkably fresh condition, either iced or, on advanced models, flash-frozen; with careful thawing, the quality was almost indistinguishable from that of fish that had not been frozen, and indeed sashimi-grade fish that hasn’t been frozen is now a rarity. (Freezing fish to 0°F, incidentally, kills parasites, a major consideration for health authorities.) At the same time, the shipping of perishable foods was being revolutionized by specialty air-freight services that could get fish to Kansas City or Tokyo hours after it left Boston or Seattle.
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.”