MIKE RICCETTI
  • The best of Houston dining
    • Best Values
    • Breakfast
    • Chinese
    • Cocktails
    • Fajitas
    • Hamburgers
    • The Heights
    • Italian
    • Indian / Pakistani
    • Mexican
    • Middle Eastern
    • Pizzerias
    • Sandwiches
    • Splurge-Worthy
    • Steakhouses
    • Sushi
    • Tacos
    • Tex-Mex
    • To Take Visitors
  • Musings on Houston Dining
    • The best new restaurants to open in 2023
    • Houston's Italian restaurant history
    • Restaurants open for lunch (or brunch) on Saturday
    • Restaurants open for Sunday dinner
    • Restaurants open for lunch on Monday
    • Restaurants open for dinner on Monday
    • The top 10 new restaurants of 2022
    • The top 10 new restaurants of 2021
  • The margherita pizza project
  • The martini project
  • Italian restaurant history
  • Italian & Italian-American
  • Entertaining tips
    • Booze basics
    • Styles of Cheeses
    • Handling Those Disruptive Guests
  • Wine
  • Beer
  • Cocktails and Spirits
  • Miscellaneous
  • Blog
  • The best of Houston dining
    • Best Values
    • Breakfast
    • Chinese
    • Cocktails
    • Fajitas
    • Hamburgers
    • The Heights
    • Italian
    • Indian / Pakistani
    • Mexican
    • Middle Eastern
    • Pizzerias
    • Sandwiches
    • Splurge-Worthy
    • Steakhouses
    • Sushi
    • Tacos
    • Tex-Mex
    • To Take Visitors
  • Musings on Houston Dining
    • The best new restaurants to open in 2023
    • Houston's Italian restaurant history
    • Restaurants open for lunch (or brunch) on Saturday
    • Restaurants open for Sunday dinner
    • Restaurants open for lunch on Monday
    • Restaurants open for dinner on Monday
    • The top 10 new restaurants of 2022
    • The top 10 new restaurants of 2021
  • The margherita pizza project
  • The martini project
  • Italian restaurant history
  • Italian & Italian-American
  • Entertaining tips
    • Booze basics
    • Styles of Cheeses
    • Handling Those Disruptive Guests
  • Wine
  • Beer
  • Cocktails and Spirits
  • Miscellaneous
  • Blog
MIKE RICCETTI

Mostly food and drink...

...and mostly set in Houston

From Castaway to Craved around the Globe - A brief history of the popularity of bluefin Tuna

4/6/2017

0 Comments

 
“Americans won’t touch raw fish…if I served it, I’d go broke.”
– Rocky Aoki, founder of the Benihana in The Wall Street Journal, September 7, 1973
 
What a difference time makes.  Today, Americans by the millions have to satisfy a sushi craving on a regular basis.  That might even be more pronounced near the coast.  As one who remembers the days when it was a hard-to-find curiosity – only served in the very few Japanese restaurants, and rarely ordered by American customers – the amazing popularity of sushi is the most unexpected development in this country’s dining habits, and proof that they are always changing.
 
For years, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Hawaii were probably the only places with restaurants serving sushi.  These were very few in number, and catered primarily to Japanese-Americans and traveling Japanese businessmen.  Sushi was found beyond those cities by the late 1980s following the torrid love affair American consumers were having with Japanese electronics and autos.  In fact, Americans’ desire for sushi is directly related to that high tech commerce.
 
In the early 1970s, a Japan Airlines employee named Akira Okazaki was looking for a profitable way to fill the empty cargo holds, which had contained mostly electronics on the inbound flights.  He managed to convince fishermen on Prince Edward Island to fish more assiduously for bluefin tuna.  Though prized in Sicily and the Mediterranean since antiquity, it was seen only as a sport fish or nuisance elsewhere.  There was not even a commercial market for it until the late 1950s.  It was not nearly the favorite fish for the Japanese, either.  For tuna, they had preferred the yellowfin variety, and other fish with white or light-colored meat.  This was due in part to widespread influence of Buddhism, whose adherents did not animal meat.  But, the generation who grew up with a greater exposure to beef after the Second World War more so enjoyed the red-fleshed bluefin, and the stocks around Japan had been depleted.
 
Okazaki’s gambit was a success.  In a couple of years bluefin accounted for 90% of the cargo on these flights back to Tokyo.  The Gulf of Mexico, including south of Galveston, is one of its principal spawning grounds for this Atlantic bluefin, the largest in the world.  It had the added benefit that it could be ready to be eaten in Tokyo restaurants in four days, when its texture and taste were at its peak.  In the time before refrigeration fishermen would bury the odd bluefin for four days before being consumed for that same reason.  The availability of the bluefin from the north Atlantic – and from elsewhere in the world – help stoke a Japanese craze for this fish that they would pass on to Americans, and the rest of the world.  In January, 2011 a record was set as a 754-pound bluefin sold for $396,000 in Tokyo, well over $500 per pound.
 
Michael Lo, whose family has owned Yamato on 61st Street in Galveston since 1987 and served sushi that long, said that their most popular nigiri sushi – the familiar style with fish sitting atop rice – is the fatty stomach from the bluefin (toro), which is considered the tastiest part of the fish.  It comes in only once a week, and it is fairly pricey, $10.95 an order.  But, it is delicious.  A guide to eating in Japan from the early 1970s, wrote that the bluefin is “one of the favorites of foreigners who try sushi for the first time.”  It is because of its clean, meaty flavor – once off-putting to the Japanese – that Americans readily enjoy, and a big reason why sushi took off here.  Eric Hyatt, once the executive chef at the Landry's Red Sushi and Hibachi Grill on the Kemah Boardwalk, called it, “beginners’ raw fish.”  “Everyone understands it,” and it is very easy to like.
 
Because of evolving tastes in Japan and later here, bluefin has become overfished internationally.  But, it can be gateway to other, equally satisfying fish and not endangered fish.  Tastes are always changing, and even broadening.


An earlier version of this article appeared in the Galveston Daily News.
Picture
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Author

    Mike Riccetti is a longtime Houston-based food writer and former editor for Zagat, and not incidentally the author of three editions of Houston Dining on the Cheap.

    Picture

    Archives

    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016

    Categories

    All
    Beer
    Cocktails
    Italian
    Margherita Pizzas
    Recipes
    Restaurants
    Wine

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.