My wife (now ex…a long time ago) flatly refused to eat sushi when we were dating no matter how much I tried. Then, some old college friends of hers were coming through Chicago. She really wanted to see them the one evening they were in town. They told her they were going to a sushi restaurant (Sai Cafe for those in Chicago…it’s still there). If she wanted to see them then she simply had to go to a sushi restaurant. So, we did, she tried sushi and LOVED it! After that we were having sushi almost every week.
My sense of it is most people are weirded out by the idea of sushi (raw fish). I have yet to find anyone who does not like it after trying it.
Tell the waiter/chef that the person you are with is new to sushi. The chef will almost certainly prepare some easy-mode sushi everyone likes to ease them in to it. I’d bet it is something sushi chefs are used to dealing with.
That’s getting to be a thing hereabouts- covering sushi with goop, white good and red goop. While I admit to using a bit too much (low sodium) Kikkomans, I want to taste the fish, thankyouverymuch. If you cover it with goop, I assume the fish isnt fresh.
Of course. What immediately came to mind when I thought about sushi that requires no soy sauce was the memory of some delicious piece – may have been octopus – with a deeply flavoured sauce of its own, but there’s also sushi that comes with its own seasonings that doesn’t require soy. One of the advantages of sitting at a sushi bar as opposed to a table is that the chef will tell you what each piece is.
My mistake in my early days was a tendency to use too much soy sauce. I was immediately disabused of this habit, on my first visit to an upscale sushi bar, by a shocked sushi chef waving a very sharp sushi knife!
Side story. My son, who is normally as timid as I am. was so enamoured of sushi that he got into extensive conversations with this chef and got to know him well. He (the chef) went on from his nice restaurant in a rather rundown area of the city to a much nicer suburban location, and then sold that and established the new restaurant and sushi bar where he is now, in a very upscale neighbourhood of Toronto. It’s arguably the best sushi restaurant in the whole Toronto and GTA area.
That’s the place I mentioned before with a sushi bar counter made of 200-year-old hinoki cypress to evoke the spirit of the most upscale sushi bars in Tokyo. That’s the place where the drinks server, separate from the chef, upon learning that I wasn’t sure what kind of sake I would like, brought us about a dozen samples (about 6 for each of us, not sure they were the same). Unfortunately to eat there as often as I’d like I’d have to rob a bank.
De gustibus. I have good sushi to taste the fish, not fermented bean juice. With good sushi, the seasoning of the rice should already be enough to avoid blandness even with extremely mild fish. Unless the soy is on there already, I don’t see the point of adding any myself.
For me, raw sea urchin with a raw quail’s egg on top (Makimono) .
This was at a top end restaurant where the chef personally came over to grate real wasabi root onto our plates (instead of the usual fake green horseradish paste).
I also dislike eel in general, so eel nigiri is not for me.
That restaurant is one of the very few sushi places in my city that are run by Japanese chefs, the majority are Korean (and I understand there will be some cultural stylistic differences)
Squid is fine with me, I have eaten worse things. I mean, I ate the sea urchin/quail egg combo!
Ah, I think it was probably eel, not octopus, that was served with that very savory thick sauce I remember. And yes, it was cooked, or at least blowtorch-seared. Eel is one of those things that I’d ordinarily never in a million year volunteer to eat, and yet, when beautifully prepared by a great sushi chef, I’m fine with it. That’s why in a very good sushi bar, I’m fine with omakase. Go nuts, I say! My only problem is the bill at the end!
This is my preference as well. I don’t put soy sauce on sushi by default. (It’s like adding salt to a chef’s steak.) When our chef saw that, he recommended soy sauce on some pieces, knowing we wouldn’t otherwise, and then let us know when soy sauce wasn’t beneficial. It’s all a part of the experience at an excellent sushi bar.
I judge the quality of a sushi restaurant by its rice. In the Los Angeles area, fresh fish is widely available. Skilled rice preparation is more rare.
Well, I’ve been to some of the best sushi bars in the world, and if you ask the chef to brush on soy sauce for you, the vast majority of the pieces are so anointed. The mistake many people make is putting on too much – it only needs a thin film over the fish. Of course there are sushi that don’t require any soy sauce at all, but they’re in the minority.
That’s generally true, but what you actually get at particular place and time is highly variable, depending on the available fish, the choices of the chef, and the preferences of the customer.
In this instance, I think that once the chef saw we didn’t show much interest in soy sauce on the early pieces he made for us, his later choices for us were mostly pieces that didn’t need it.
I first had sushi when I was 19. A friend was very eager for me to try it and took me to a well-respected place. But the first thing he ordered for us was Spanish mackerel, which he adored. It was not at all what I was expecting and it came with a little ponzu and grated ginger, which both have strong flavors. I absolutely hated it and my adventurous spirit ended right there. I decided I didn’t like sushi, and he was super disappointed.
I might not have eaten it again, but another friend invited me out to sushi a few months later. I declined and explained why. His response was, “man, you ate the wrong shit” and convinced me to try it again. He wasn’t very adventurous - we ordered california rolls and shrimp (cooked) and probably more sake than we should have. I loved it. Towards the end of the meal, I decided to try a tekka maki (tuna roll) and also loved it. Over the next few weeks, I went back a few times and eventually tried yellowtail and salmon, which I also loved.
Today, there are very few things I won’t eat at a sushi bar. I don’t really enjoy sea urchin or regular mackerel, but I adore Spanish mackerel, the fish that killed my first meal, and just about everything else. I think it is important to ease beginners into it, and I’ve turned more than a few people into sushi lovers by simply starting them with a california roll. No, it isn’t traditional, nor is there anything raw about it, but it seems to work every time. My partner was one of those people who said “I’ll never eat raw fish” at first. Now, it is all he wants when we get sushi.
Absolutely. Well prepared shari is less common than it ought to be, considering it’s not very hard to make. I suspect it’s because most of the sushi joints in the US are run by either Koreans, SE Asians, or Taiwanese, who all have their own rice traditions.
I think you may be misremembering. “Makimono” means, literally, ‘rolled food’.
Probably the most concise advice in the thread. Don’t fake anything, give feedback, and trust the hand that feeds you.
That’s good advise for other activities where a person is doing something for you, too. You’ll get a much better massage if you interject with “that feels good”, “ouch”, and “there’s something going on there” than if you just lie there quietly.
No, I worked for a couple of years as a waiter in a sushi place, so while not an expert I know the basics. This was makimono with the sliced sea urchin in the roll and the quail egg on top.
I am not sure how authenticly traditional it was, I am not Japanese… and this was in a South African restaurant, so…
(note, makimono, not maki, the wider variant approx 5 to 6cm in diameter. It would be hard to balance a raw egg on a piece of maki…)
