“Crowded together, weary with waiting/Customers squeeze their hands/As Yohei squeezes sushi,” goes a 19th-century Japanese haiku about a well-known Tokyo sushi stall owner.
Sushi is rather like a haiku itself: a small, spare but complex thing, its chief joy its self-contained beauty. Each piece is meant to be a juxtaposition of different elements in perfect balance. And it is, as Yohei’s customers knew, worth the wait.
The first time I ate sushi was nine years ago, in a student apartment in Brighton, when my Japanese flatmate Ken had volunteered to make dinner. I was torn between politeness and anxiety: I liked Japanese food, but had only ever eaten the cooked bits, which I loved: tempura, yakitori, bowls of ramen or udon or soba noodles.
Still, watching Ken work was fascinating: he sliced triangles of salmon sashimi with lemon slices, patted rice into tiny rugby balls for nigiri, and rolled nori (seaweed), round omelette, cucumber and fish. When we tried, we made a mess of everything, squishing the rice too flat and tearing the little nori belts around the square omelette slices. Despite our mangling, the meal was lovely, and I was charmed by both the making and the eating. I didn’t know then that sushi would become my favourite food.
While ‘sushi’ implies ‘raw fish’ for most non-Japanese people, the word means ‘sour’ or ‘preserved’, and refers to vinegar-ed rice topped with other ingredients. (sashimi, which is slices of raw fish, doesn’t qualify). Sushi was originally a method of preserving freshwater fish by storing it with cooked rice. In 1600, people began adding rice vinegar to the rice to achieve the same effect, and sushi as we know it, fresh instead of fermented, was born. The quick street snack, eaten standing up, took off, and soon Yohei and his contemporaries in Tokyo couldn’t get them out fast enough.
Today, at a good sushi place, if you say “Omakase” — “I leave it to you” — to the chef, you will receive a parade of seasonal, inventive things: cured squid, eel with apples, sashimi, hand-shaped nigiri, the battleship-shaped gunkan , blue crab hand rolls. Tuna, so prized today, was considered an inferior fish before the 1920s. Japanese chefs and diners would scoff at its bland, fatty taste, preferring the complex, subtle flavours of the traditional stars of the sushi counter — clams, eel, mackerel, flounder, snapper, sea bream, and squid.
Innovations like California rolls, spicy mayonnaise, avocado, cream cheese are all American, and many were born in the Little Tokyo district of Los Angeles after the ’60s. (Apparently a thrifty chef realised he could replace fatty tuna with the similarly-buttery texture of avocado, and save on fish.)
In Delhi, sushi had always been the sole preserve of hotels, including early pioneers like Threesixty° and Sakura, and the odd outlier like Tamura. But 10 years ago, affordable sushi suddenly burst onto the scene: Sushiya and Sushi King, Kylin, Shiro, Yum Yum Tree and ai. And if they didn’t quite inspire poetry, they were very, very successful.
At Wasabi, the Taj’s swish Japanese restaurant, I ate toro, the fatty underbelly of the tuna that, without fibre or sinew, melts away in your mouth (and which was earlier so disdained). It was also at Wasabi, naturally, that I encountered real wasabi: the chef would grate a knobbly root on a small sharkskin grater to produce a little pile of fresh, herby wasabi, subtle and faintly sweet. (Real wasabi, native to Japan and Sakhalin Island, is difficult to grow; what you get in tubes is a mix of horseradish and mustard powder.) ai’s sushi brunch, with its pink pickled gari martinis and cone-shaped temaki rolls, brought hungover friends out of hiding on weekends. For quiet meals, we went to Tamura, where the straw-coloured walls, the wheat tea, the udon and the cooked salmon rolls soothed midweek frazzle.
Sushi was everywhere, in guises that would amaze even the enterprising avocado roll inventor. In Vasant Vihar, I ate a chicken tikka sushi roll with wasabi-mint chutney, which was surprisingly addictive. Friends said that in Kolkata, one could order a hilsa sushi roll with panch phoron on top.
But it was Yum Yum Tree that found a place in my heart and on my weekly calendar. On Tuesday nights they had a famously popular all-you-can-eat dinner deal, and the Tree’s conveyor belt saw me on more evenings than I should admit. Those Tuesdays — endless drinks, endless sushi, then piles of noodles or beef or little salads — were what I imagine sushi bars are like in Japan, loud and convivial, slightly tipsy, everyone at all the tables becoming giggly friends. It was sushi shorn of its minimal haiku elegance, in its more everyday, expansive aspect.
Paris’s favourite food seems to be Japanese too. The number of Japanese restaurants is astounding, and sushi is the number-one takeout option in the city (something about beautiful, small portions appeals to the Parisian palate).
The sushi takeaway on my street is one such indulgence. Because of the size of my orders, they’re convinced that four people live in my apartment, and always send enough chopsticks and accoutrements for four. I haven’t disabused them of this idea, because I quite enjoy eating four people’s servings of ginger. Meanwhile, a new restaurant has opened serving only sushi burritos: a giant-sized sushi roll stuffed with any mix of ingredients from salmon, quinoa, cream cheese, edamame and coriander, to guacamole, bean sprouts, pickles, chicken or tuna.
I’m ridiculously excited to try it, since a sushi-burrito, Frankenfood though it might be, combines two of my favourite cuisines. A dainty haiku it’s not, but sushi, in all its new shapes and sizes, is still a crowd-pleaser.