Photos by Anne FishbeinI remember the momentI stopped eating sushi as if it were yesterday, a chilly, sunny March afternoon back in 1992, in a mini-mall near Wilshire and Wilton. I had just visited Ginza Sushiko for the first time, a glowing 10-seat restaurant where my wife and I had been the only two people in the room, and Masa Takayama, the chef and proprietor, had just prepared a meal that included membrane-thin slices of fugu, the famous poison-bearing Japanese blowfish, arranged like the petals of a treacherous, iridescent flower, and a delicate salad of halibut dressed with a white miso sauce that had been emulsified to order in the kind of ridged bowl usually used to grind taro. Takayama’s hands flashed and his fingers flew, and piece by piece, as if he were building a philosophical argument out of fish and vinegar and rice, he served us tiny lozenges of sushi that were so much better than what we’d had before that they were almost in a different language, fish that he’d somehow spirited from the great fish market in Osaka, fish with nuances of flavor that echoed like revealed truth. We had eaten in three-star restaurants in France, and in the best dining rooms in the United States. We had been eating sushi for years. We had never tasted anything like Takayama’s sushi. But this was a $600 lunch. And suddenly, knowing that we could never afford to eat at Sushiko on a regular basis (Takayama’s new restaurant in New York is even more expensive), and knowing that the experience could never be duplicated anywhere else, we basically put an end to regular meals at Shibucho and Katsu. In this sushi-saturated era, it may be hard to recall what the state of Los Angeles sushi was even just a few years ago. I once went to Little Tokyo with La Toque’s Ken Frank, the first Western chef in Los Angeles to introduce Japanese flavors into his cooking (now at his Napa Valley restaurant of the same name), and his favorite sushi chef surprised us with 13 different courses, 12 of which involved mayonnaise. (I much preferred Frank’s own take on the cuisine, especially his tuna sashimi garnished with enoki mushrooms and his raw-seafood salad with daikon sprouts and slivered mountain yams.) In a menu I saved from 1983, Horikawa, possibly the most serious sushi restaurant in the United States at the time, lists sushi only glancingly in the middle of its roster of sukiyaki and shabu shabu. The first sushi bar I ever frequented was a peculiar, signless establishment, closed during the daytime, marked only by the three tiny cones of salt outside its front door. But now even Spago, whose chefs’ expertise across the range of French, Austrian and Italian cuisines have never been questioned, offers a full selection of sushi on its catering menu and several sashimi dishes in the main dining room: a version of the toasted salmon-skin salad that Katsu Michiki, now of Tama Sushi, made famous in his restaurant Katsu in the mid-’80s; tuna and yellowtail sashimi tricked out with a little of the violently green pumpkinseed oil from Puck’s native Austria; sashimi served in little pastry cones; and a dish of raw tuna, lightly seared on the edges, like Japanese tataki, to tighten the flesh, given a Tuscan spin with crushed beans and olive oil. At the brand-new Providence, a brilliant fish restaurant, Michael Cimarusti, who is a veteran of some of the best restaurants in France, may owe more to Nobu Matsuhisa than to Escoffier. Post-Matsuhisa cuisine is the lingua franca of new Los Angeles cooking. Sushi is a cuisine almost perfectly suited to our times. The best sushi chef, unlike his French equivalent, may be incapable of rendering thymus glands, butterfat and flour into something delicious, but he is a masterful curator, or a DJ if you prefer, assembling sensations from all over the world and presenting them in a coherent fashion on a series of elegantly designed plates; it’s a cuisine that is as much about shopping as it is about technique — and there is an awful lot of technique. Like DJs faced with the same stores, mailing lists and record stacks, all sushi chefs wake up in the morning to essentially the same pool of fish. If you went to a club this June, you were going to hear 50 Cent and Jay-Z. If you went to a high-end sushi bar, you were going to come up against wild baby yellowtail from Japan, beefy bluefin tuna from Italy, giant octopus tentacles and Japanese scallops — normally rare but totally of the season. At most — almost all — sushi bars, the experience is a little like slapping a quarter into a slot and hoping the jukebox plays your favorite songs. Sometimes you get lucky, and the machine spits out the sushi equivalent of Hank Williams and Al Green. Some days it’s all Juice Newton. Such are choices made. In 2005, sushi is not only in the mainstream of Los Angeles cooking, it is the mainstream. There may be chefs here, even good ones, who don’t jostle with the sushi chefs in the downtown fish markets, but in 2005 a dinner without raw fish is like a major-league infield without a Dominican, a morning without a soy latte or a ride unpimped. And the sushi chefs themselves, led by Matsuhisa, are cooking as if they live in Los Angeles instead of Meiji-era Japan. I’m eating sushi again — how could I not? But only the good stuff, I swear.
