Food Conscious: Bringing sea change to menus

Glance at the menu of Tataki Sushi & Sake Bar in San Francisco, and you'll notice some glaring omissions.

Notably missing from this tiny, 7-month-old establishment are such traditional staples as bluefin toro, hamachi, unagi, octopus and ever-popular spider rolls made with blue crabs from Asia.

Because these species are considered overfished, the restaurant is not serving them. Tataki is believed to be the only sustainable sushi bar in North America, the first to tout "sushi without guilt."

It may not be the last, especially after the publication this month of three new, groundbreaking sustainable sushi guides by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Blue Ocean Institute and Environmental Defense Fund.

The free guides will be available in handy pocket and mobile versions starting Oct. 22. Although the three differ slightly in information, they agree on which seafood species commonly found on sushi menus are top choices, worst picks and cautionary options because of health and environmental concerns.

Environmentalists hope the guides will spur a sea change in our unchecked appetite for sushi, which long ago stopped being a culinary oddity for Westerners and has evolved into an essential item at nearly every American supermarket.

Consider that of 61 billion restaurant meals served nationwide last year, 225 million of them included sushi, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm based in Port Washington, N.Y. That's an 11 percent increase from the previous year.

Yet with species such as wild bluefin tuna - coveted for its luxurious belly meat - diminishing in numbers by nearly 90 percent in the past 30 years, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, our demand for sushi has not come without consequences.

"We're not asking people to stop eating fish, just to make the best choices," said Sheila Bowman, outreach senior manager for the aquarium's "Seafood Watch" program. "We need to stop the damage and start the recovery."

That's what Kin Lui, chef and co-owner of Tataki, thinks, too. Three years ago, he was working at a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, when he read a newspaper article about how bluefin tuna were so overfished that they might soon be virtually nonexistent.

"It caught my attention," said Lui, 28. "It felt especially awkward because in 10 minutes when I went to work, I'd have to serve bluefin."

Lui grew up in Hawaii with a love for the ocean. His business partner and co-chef, Raymond Ho, 37, is an avid diver. So when the two decided to open the 24-seat Tataki, they asked Casson Trenor of FishWise, a Santa Cruz nonprofit that educates about sustainability fishery issues, to be their "sustainability guru."

At their first meeting, Lui and Ho came armed with a list of seafood they hoped to serve at their restaurant. Trenor looked it over, then took a red marker and crossed out almost everything.

"They didn't even blink. That's how I knew they were serious," Trenor, 29, recalls. "I've had other restaurateurs call me about trying to do this. But they've been more curious, rather than earnest."

From philosophy to practice

Tataki's philosophy is simple: Serve only what can be verified as sustainable. But putting that into practice can be challenging. The menu changes all the time, Trenor says, because the health of the ocean does, too. And while other Japanese restaurants can make a tidy profit from bluefin toro because of the premium price diners will pay for it, Tataki can't because it doesn't serve it.

The restaurant also doesn't serve aquaculture salmon because so many farmed varieties have high levels of PCBs, parasites and mercury, Trenor says. Instead, Tataki serves well-managed, U.S. farmed arctic char, which has the same rosy-orange hue and rich flavor, but none of the same concerns.

Hamachi (yellowtail) is not on the menu because it is ranched, a process in which juvenile fish are caught in the wild, then fattened up in captivity until they are killed for food. Because the fish never get a chance to breed in the wild, their numbers never increase substantially. It can also take 8 pounds of feed to grow 1 pound of hamachi, Trenor. To put that in perspective, when you eat a 2-ounce portion of hamachi at a sushi bar, you're actually consuming 1 pound of fish.

Tataki doesn't buy octopus, either. Octopus are fished all over the world, then sent to Japan for processing, before being re-exported. As a result, it's difficult to trace whether a particular octopus came from a sustainable fishery or not.

Ho and Lui are working on finding a sustainable substitute for unagi, freshwater eel that's ranched and being rapidly depleted. One faux nigiri version they've devised utilizes wild sablefish that's been blow-torched to create the ridged texture and smoky flavor of unagi. The traditional thick, sweet soy-rice wine sauce is brushed on top. Take a bite, and you'd be hard-pressed to distinguish the luscious mouthfeel from the real deal.

Consumer guides

Prompted by consumer requests, the aquarium has been working for the past year with Trenor and the two other environmental organizations, to create the sustainable sushi guides.

Bowman hopes the new guides will prove as successful as the original "Seafood Watch" guide. Since its debut in 1999, more than 24 million copies have been distributed.

While many diners are used to referencing the "Seafood Watch" guide whenever they see "grilled Alaskan halibut" or "roasted Chilean sea bass" on a Western menu, those same diners have often left those eco-sensibilities at the doorstep when entering a Japanese restaurant.

"Sushi menus feel more authentic if they feature only the Japanese word for a type of fish - a word that in most cases reveals nothing about what that fish actually is and where it comes from," Trevor Corson, author of "The Story of Sushi" (Harper Perennial), wrote in an e-mail. "Morsels of sushi also are tiny, artistic abstractions, far removed from their natural forms, which makes the origins of the seafood seem even more distant, so we think about it less."

Cultural and language differences also play a role. Paul Johnson, owner of Monterey Fish Market in San Francisco, sells seafood to a number of Asian-American distributors who then re-sell it to sushi bars. No one ever questions whether it's sustainable, he says.

At Hayward's IMP Foods, one of the main to Bay Area sushi restaurants, the story is the same. Few sushi restaurateurs ask if their seafood purchases are environmentally sound, says Glenn Sakata, IMP branch manager.

Pleasing diners

At the highly regarded Kaygetsu restaurant in Menlo Park, toro and unagi are still served because they are so popular with diners.

"Right now, we go more by what the customers want, rather than by any guidebook," says restaurant co-owner Keiko Sakuma.

At the celebrated Ame restaurant in San Francisco, monkfish liver was taken off the menu years ago, and Alaskan sablefish replaced overfished Chilean sea bass in the signature dish with shrimp dumplings and shiso broth. Every time a new menu is conceived, chef-owner Hiro Sone and his staff refer to the "Seafood Watch" guide.

"Most Asian chefs don't know about the guide," Sone says. "The new sushi ones will be a wake-up call. It's their choice to serve a particular seafood or not. But this will give them more to think about. And that's a good start."

Perhaps one real sign of success will be if Tataki loses its distinction as the only sustainable sushi bar in North America.

For Tataki, that would be just fine.

"Our goal is not to be a niche restaurant," Trenor says. "We want to make Tataki so successful that other restaurants want to get on board, too."

Tataki Sushi & Saki Bar, 2815 California St. (at Divisadero Street), San Francisco; (415) 931-1182 or

New seafood guides

The guides to sustainable sushi will be released on Oct. 22. For more information, go to: