You should not have to add any wasabi. A decent chef in a good sushi bar will already have put it in the sushi. But yes, they will get miffed if you ruin their creation with too much soy sauce. This is when I discovered, in my novice years, that many chefs are more than willing to gently brush the sushi with soy sauce before they hand it to you.
Octopus is generally seared with a chef’s blowtorch or broiled. Maybe it can be boiled but I’ve never heard of that. But the main point is, I’ve never in my life had something disgusting like a tentacle with suckers served to me at a sushi bar. Everything is very beautifully assembled, and IIRC octopus was generally served with a very thick and flavourful sauce over it, not brushed or dipped in soy.
As always, YMMV. I can’t afford the very best sushi bars very often, so my option is to go less often, but go to the very best.
I went to a nice sushi bar in Japan recently. I didn’t have the guts to order omikase, and also, they had a set bowl that looked fabulous. So i ordered the bowl (with rice on the bottom and all kinds of fish and roe and garnishes on top) which was totally spectacular to eat. And yes, the highlight was fatty tuna belly, even better than my usual favorite, yellowtail. But all of it was delicious. I don’t usually eat salmon roe, but it was so beautiful, and it was really good. But i digress…
There were two young women next to me who ordered omikase. The chef brought them each one piece at a time, and opened a big book to show them what he was giving them. They delicately picked up the (rather large!) piece of sushi and plopped the whole thing in their mouths. Then they thoughtfully chewed it and swallowed.
I would have taken two bites from each of those pieces. But I’m pretty sure they were doing the “correct” thing.
I assume i didn’t eat exactly the way a polite Japanese customer would have. But the staff were extremely pleasant to me, and i had a delightful meal.
Just one? Interesting. In my experience in North America, when serving omakase the chef brings you two identical pieces at a time. The book is a nice touch, usually here the chef tells the customer verbally what the fish is. Sometimes when the omakase is done we like to order a couple of our favourites again and I often struggle to remember what they were called. Or I’ll just give up and suggest a mini-omakase: bring us a couple more of whatever you think is good!
One sushi bar I liked signaled the conclusion of the omakase by serving a hand roll – a cone of seaweed containing a seasoned mixture of rice and chopped tuna. It was delicious!
One thing to consider is that at the more upscale sushi bars, omakase often has a fixed price for the entire meal. You aren’t paying by the order. And it can run hundreds of dollars. In Los Angeles, for example, omakase typically runs anywhere from $100-400 a person.
Personally, I would rather order what I want, then ask the chef to make me a couple of special items of his choice. Best of both worlds.
Something else occurred to me. If the sushi bar offers you ‘white tuna’, I would decline it unless you know your fish. A lot of what is passed off in the US as white tuna - or even albacore - is actually escolar, a variety of fish that is likely to cause significant gastrointestinal distress in as little as half an hour.
What I love about omakase is the luxury of just sitting back and trusting a good chef to do all the work.
Yep, good sushi ain’t cheap. The last time we were at our favourite sushi bar, sashimi omakase was around $600 for two (as I previously noted, what they meant by “sashimi” was a variety of courses, both raw and cooked, hot and cold, that were served prior to the sushi courses). Since then, their prices have roughly doubled. When I offered (as a birthday gift) to pay for my son and his wife to have dinner there, he said I should check out their prices first before making such a rash offer! They wisely decided to go to a different sushi bar, one which has been renowned for years but which hasn’t raised their prices quite so much.
Yeah, we used to have a nice Sushi restaurant downstairs. I help out the owner/chef a few times, and so when we came in to order we got special deals. Sometimes, I would walk in during a slow period and tell him “surprise me” which he loved, because he could try out new dishes on us/me.
One of them was an appetizer with lightly fried miso, with super thin bits of onion atop, which then waved due to the heat.
My daughter and I love sushi, so we go out regularly, from cheap holes in the wall to “all you can eat” to upscale restaurants. Even been to a place where you order on a touchscreen at your table and a robot cart brings it to you.
The place we went to last month was upscale. We both got the chef’s choice. He served us one piece at a time, explaining what it was and how to eat it. He adjusted the wasabi down for my daughter when she couldn’t handle the full amount.
Other places are less formal. Add soy sauce and wasabi to your own taste. All you can eat lets you try a variety. Often the smallest joints are the most fun, because it’s just the chef and several guests.
Oh, we’ve also gone to Korean style places where you point to the live fish in a tank and eat its raw flesh minutes later with an array of possible sauces.
I have been to Japan once, where the otori was caught that day and where the sushi meal ordered on the train is better than most Canadian sushi restaurants.
I love eating sushi. Canadian sushi restaurants, often run by Koreans, are often “all you can eat” places serving a variety of rolls, sushi, sashimi, tempura, dim sum, Korean favourites like kalbi and bulgogi, and mediocre Chinese and Thai dishes. These places are great, a bargain at $25-50 (lunch/dinner) and unpretentious. They don’t care if you use your hands or too much soy.
The fancier places are fussier. I doubt even they expect everyone to use chopsticks well. Remember the chopsticks have thick and thin ends. You can serve other people using the thick ends, but not the thin ends used to eat. And stabbing the sushi is frowned on.
I think high end sushi places are less likely to offer other options, so this might be worth checking out in advance. Japan has about 30 types of restaurants, and while some serve general bar food most are pretty specific. I loved the ones serving only organ meats. If you don’t want sake or beer I’m sure there are usually other options.
There may be lots of interesting tips and authenticity in that video, but that guy showing how to “correctly” apply soy sauce is putting on far too much and generally making a mess of it. It reminds me somewhat of how I did it in my inexperienced early days of visiting proper upscale sushi bars, causing the horrified chef to come running over exclaiming “too much soy! Too much soy!”. The cardinal sin is allowing the rice to soak up soy sauce. That’s also when I learned that, on request or if you’re judged to be an incompetent novice, a sushi chef will delicately brush soy sauce over the sushi for you. Frankly I don’t know why this isn’t done all the time. Especially because some moron might take a piece of sushi with a beautifully matched special sauce on top that doesn’t need soy sauce at all and ruin it by dipping the rice side in soy!
Sushi chefs in my experience are faultlessly polite but they’ve devoted their lives to their art and want you to enjoy it as it was meant to be enjoyed, and if you’re doing it wrong they will gently tell you. OTOH if you express appreciation for their creations and are eager to learn, they may do interesting things just for you.
Confession: i sometimes dip the rice side in the soy sauce because i like that much soy, and my American sushi comes without wasabi, so that’s also in my soy sauce. But I’d never mangle the piece of sushi like that.
I think that video was more about how to say words a sushi customer might say in Japanese than it was about how to eat sushi.
And if you are with your friends, you can pour the beer however you want. The other customers will not be appalled if a man pours his own beer, or if a pair of Americans doesn’t make Japanese beer-pouring sounds as they do so. When i visited, i went out to bars (not sushi bars, but other food-serving bars) with groups of square dancers, and everyone poured their own beer.
I think maybe not everything in that film is to be taken completely seriously. “Toro is a junk food for low income people. The fish is recycled and instead of rice, barley or minced pasta is used.”
I guess maybe the whole video was intended to be a joke. I only watched part of it. The guy making a mess of his sushi dipping in soy sauce is what prompted my comment, because that’s believable – lots of people don’t know how to do it, or to ask the chef to do it for them.
Were they Japanese, Westerner, or something else? Said another way, were you expecting them to be models of “correct” or “incorrect” sushi etiquette? How do you think they did?
Oh, sorry, they were Japanese, and old enough to know their manners, maybe 25-30. I think they were “correct”. I was the only white person in the shop, and i don’t think the people i interacted with spoke English, although the book with descriptions of the sushi was multi-lingual.
It was just odd to me to see these small, demurr people put a giant bite in their mouth.
(I was in Japan long enough that white people started to look weird to me. I very much expected everyone to look Japanese. Even the Chinese and Koreans stood out as “others”.)
If the place is nice enough they might have real wasabi to offer you. They will usually charge for that but I think it is well worth it. It’s rare to find it so get it if you can. Especially at a very nice sushi place. Generally they will grate it at the table so you can see it is the real thing.
And you really should not mix the wasabi into the soy sauce.
