The first sushi I ever had was from a grocery store. Wegman's grocery store, to be exact, in Rochester, New York. One black plastic clamshell to-go box, a little piece of fake grass, a mound of green-dyed horseradish masquerading as wasabi, sliced ginger that tasted like sucking on disinfecting wipes. There were four pieces of tekka maki, the tuna an impossible purple like it was being strangled, and two ebi handrolls. The rice tasted like eating a mouthful of nursery-school paste, the shrimp like biting the blade of a plastic spatula. It was singularly awful sushi.
Joshua Huston
Unlike other sushi chefs, Ed doesn't showboat.
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Nijo 83 Spring St., 340-8880, nijosushi.com. 11 a.m.–11 p.m. Mon.–Wed.; 11 a.m.–midnight Thurs.–Fri.; 4 p.m.–midnight Sat.; 4–10 p.m. Sun.
View a slideshow of Nijo "food porn" here.
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And I loved it like I loved my first blowjob.
View a "Food Porn" slideshow of Nijo. Caution: there is a shot of little baby octopi which may be upsetting to some viewers.
Fish in my neighborhood came in two versions back then: caught over the weekend, dumped in a stinking cooler, then burned to carbonized blackness on a backyard grill; or fried up on Friday nights and served at every restaurant like a safety net, so all us Mick Catholics wouldn't get our asses sent to hell for accidentally eating a cheeseburger. To consume fish in any other form was to arouse the suspicion of friends and neighbors—as though if you were willing to do that, maybe other things about you bore watching. And to eat raw fish? That hinted at proclivities best not discussed in public.
Still, I kept going to Wegman's. If I wanted sushi from somewhere else, I had to go into downtown Rochester. And even there it was scarce. But Wegman's was close. I could walk there from my high school, and sometimes did—skipping study hall or, on good days, sneaking out for a smoke during lunch and blowing off my dumb-kid math class that came after, then coming back for AP English with my tongue gummy and my breath smelling of horseradish and fish.
It took me years to get hip to the good stuff, to find the new champions and old masters who really knew their way around a piece of hirame or maguro. I ate fish flown in daily from the markets of Osaka, from the hands of chefs who'd spent decades practicing the swift movements that can turn a slip of fish and a hundred grains of rice into something delicious. I ate sushi in Buddhist temples and in cool, clinical dining rooms where the only decoration was a lacquered wood table set with a single ikebana flower. I ate dollar sushi. I ate strip-mall sushi. I ate sushi when I traveled, and sometimes traveled just to eat sushi. I slouched around some of the best bars in the country, and ate fish like I could never, ever get enough.
But still, that Wegman's sushi hung with me. I've never forgotten it—the thrill of the new, the joy of walking, even briefly, on food's wild side (wild for that time, anyway, and that place). In later years, sitting on a plane and knowing that in just a matter of hours I would be circling down into some new city where, more than likely, I would eat sushi, I would wonder whether it was worth it: traveling hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles just for a few little pieces of fish. Standing outside some hot new joint, hemmed in by crowds and waiting for a chance to spend a hundred, two hundred, a thousand dollars on fish, I would think about how easy it'd once been: a short walk, a couple bucks, a plastic takeout box, and then that sweet moment when I could pop the first tekka maki into my mouth and feel like I was truly experiencing something different.
So the question becomes, What's more important: that sushi be great or that sushi be there?
Let's be honest: For 95 percent of people, what matters is that their sushi be fresh. That it won't poison them or send them, a minute or an hour later, scrambling for the bathroom to lie like some wounded animal on the tiles. Beyond that bedrock concern, everything else is negotiable.
People may say different. They may quest after the presumed luxury of the rare, expensive, or uncommon, but that's just a sushi thing—as much about status as about the pure appreciation of flavors or technique. Not one person in 10 can really taste the difference (or have eaten enough to even consider the difference) between a bonito shipped frozen to some local seafood purveyor, thawed, cut to order, and delivered in the back of a panel van to the back door of a restaurant two days ago, and one blast-frozen just 10 minutes out of the water, then shipped straight from Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market to Seattle. Sometimes I can't, and God knows I've eaten enough to know better.
I have had arguments that lasted hours over how to pour soy sauce, how to hold chopsticks, when (or if ever) to use wasabi—fighting as if these things really mattered. They don't. That's another sushi thing: the idea that half the experience is appreciating an ancient and rigorous food culture which prizes decorum and civility and only the finest of things.
