Author: Allison

After my interview with Hajime, I got to sit down for a few minutes with Casson Trenor, sustainability expert and author of Sustainable Sushi: A Guide to Saving the Oceans One Bite at a Time.

Allison: So how did you get into the business of sustainability with seafood… how did you get started with that?

Casson: I get asked that question a lot and I just don’t know the answer. It’s just something that happened… it’s just something I knew I needed to do. Sometimes I say it’s because I grew up on the beach, and I think that’s partially true. And sometimes I say it’s because I used to be in a lot of restaurants and I saw a lot of waste and it really bothered me, and I think that’s true too. And sometimes I say it’s just because I really like sushi, and I want it to be around, and I think that’s definitely true… I don’t know, I just… I just knew it was something that I was gonna do, that I had to do and it just evolved into what it is, and that’s a terrible answer, I know.

Allison: That’s fine. What do you think is very important for people to know, regarding sustainability?

Casson: That it is incredibly important. That our lives in these next years are going to change drastically, due to how many people are on this planet, and the way that we’ve been managing it – and that’s not something that we can do anything about. Those changes are real, and they are coming, and they’re already here, in a lot of ways. And it’s not about trying to resist the changes, it’s about trying to adapt and to move fluidly through them. Sustainability is a way of life. It’s a mantra, for business and just… if we are to continue to exist and be happy in this changing planet, we have to learn how to live with our eyes open, and balance our resources.

Allison: How did you help Hajime revamp the menu and everything, to make it more sustainable?

Casson: That might be a better question for him. I can give you my answer… I think that maybe… I think the thing that I’m proud to say that I was really able to do for this restaurant and for him is to give him the impetus to do what he already knew what he wanted to do. I didn’t really have to convince Hajime that sustainability made sense. I didn’t have to convince him that he didn’t really have to use hamachi, or that these fish were really good also, I mean, I just had to show him that he wasn’t alone in thinking the way that he already was. ‘Cause his heart was in this stuff long ago, you know? But he was, I think maybe a bit shackled by the fact that there was no one else in the sushi industry that was expressing these ideas, and um, you know it’s not surprising. As you know, the sushi industry is extremely ritualized, and very regimented and hierarchical. And it’s tough to break the mold, you need a rabble-rouser, and most sushi chefs are not rabble-rousers. Most sushi chefs- ’cause you know, during the development of a sushi chef, that kind of innovation… sure, I mean, innovation is encouraged, but in certain ways, you know what I mean? In other ways it’s discouraged. I think… I guess I think I’m… I’m just proud to have helped him be himself.

Allison: What kind of advice can you give to people who really can’t imagine giving up all their favorite types of sushi which might not be sustainable?

Casson: First of all, I understand. There are things that I really thought I would miss when I realized I probably shouldn’t be eating them as much or at all. My advice I guess would be to, and I talk about this in my book, I’ve got a few points that I give people when they’re trying to make these changes, and the one that I really feel strongly about, well I feel strongly about all of them, but one in particular is… if you do it… if you just go out there and you try to live your values, sometimes you’ll find yourself struggling but at the end of the meal, you’ll really feel good about it. And if you do it in a group, it makes it much easier to just kind of have that camaraderie, so when you go in there and are like, “alright, we’re going to try to have a sustainable meal,” then you can help each other do it. ‘Cause it’s not always easy. Also try not to… I would say don’t necessarily try to do it all at once. If you love your bluefin, and your farmed salmon and your eel and your hamachi… go in and replace two out of five the first time. And see, you know, try some new things. Then the next time, replace a different two. And then eventually, after three or four visits try to work your way off of all of them. But explore the menu – don’t go in and be like, “I can’t eat anything, I hate this”… that’s not gonna work.

Allison: Anything else you’d like to say?

Casson: So many things. [laughs] I do this for a lot of reasons. You know, I do this because I believe in it. I do this because it’s becoming financially viable. I do this because I see it’s a change that needs to be made. I do this because I am very passionate about the ocean. I do this because I’m an environmental activist. But I don’t want people to ever get the idea that one of the very most essential primary reasons I do this is not simply that I love sushi. That is so important. And the fact of the matter is that a healthy ocean is what gave birth to this art form. And without a healthy ocean, this art form will die. If we do not steward our resources properly, and this is a critical, critical stage… I cannot over-stress the kind of peril our oceans are in right now. The reasons that these fish… these fish aren’t sustainable for very good reasons. You know? Crashing populations, horrible pollution problems, by-catch that you would not believe – millions and millions of tons every year thrown over the side. Horrible. I want my children to be able to eat like this, because it meant so much to me and has formed so much of what I am, and I would really be heartbroken if I knew that it was my generation that stole that from my children, and that cost us this beautiful art form that so many people have put so many years into developing. So sustainable sushi, for the love of sushi.

Wednesday I’ll wrap this all up with a few extra thoughts that both men had about sustainability and the sushi business. Do you have a question about sustainability? Ask in the comments or email me, and I’ll do my best to answer your questions.

The day after the dinner at Mashiko, I was scheduled to be back at Mashiko in the afternoon, to interview Hajime and Casson.

First, Son and I sat down with Hajime and Casson – Son took pictures, I asked questions, and Hajime and Casson discussed my questions to the music of the kitchen prepping for the first evening of service with a completely sustainable menu. Though this was supposed to be Hajime’s interview (Casson’s will be posted in a few days), Casson was happy to interject his thoughts as well.

Allison: How did you get into the sushi business?
Hajime: How did I get into the sushi business? Well, twenty years ago I was here, and my parents wanted me to go to college and study business, same as any other Asian parents. [Son]’s laughing, he knows. [laughs] “Camera guy? God! Get a real job!”

Son: Exactly.

Hajime: Exactly! And I did get a stupid two year thing, small business management, but I was working at a restaurant and I really liked it. Most of the people were doing it just to make money, but I actually really liked it. So after that, I kind of kept going, and was looking for different restaurants who could teach me, and just, I guess, kept going for twenty years now.

Allison: Now that you have Mashiko, what prompted the decision to make it sustainable?

Hajime: Sustainability… I did kind of think about it for a while, but what made it certain is when I went to Diane’s Kitchen… she has this kind of kitchen for catering, kind of fancy dinners, stuff like that. She called me because she knew somebody I knew and told me that Casson’s coming, and I was kind of skeptical about it… not about him, but… somebody called me and said “Can you come down here, we’re doing something.” And I was like, “Hmmm, whatever.” Actually I Googled it, like, who is this guy? It sounded legit and I went there, and he actually started talking about it, and he convinced me that this is good, this is possible, and it can be done. Of course, I didn’t know that much about it at the moment, but I promised everybody at that moment that I’m going to be sustainable in three months. If I say something, I’ll do it, no matter what.

Allison: Once you made the decision, what sorts of challenges did you face in making it sustainable?

Hajime: I guess the challenges… like, okay you cannot use this and this and this, right? But… distributors don’t know. And most of the distributors for sushi bars, they don’t care about sustainability. And the people who care about sustainable fish, they’ve never served sushi bars before, so they don’t know what kind of quality or what kind of cut that I want. So I have to kind of gather information and say for the sushi bar people, “I cannot use this, this, this,” and they’re like, “Why?” Then I’m dealing with the American distributers and say, “I need those fish that you have,” but they’re like… one girl actually told me like, “Well, I have this fish that’s a week old, can you use that? You’re gonna cook it anyways, right?” I’m like, “No!” [laughs] “Would you eat it raw? Come on.” So that kind of a challenge, I guess, of explaining to people what sustainability is. Like even yesterday [at the dinner], most of the people kind of think that it’s a good thing, but don’t know exactly what it is. I guess the challenge is that. The menu making was actually kind of fun for me, a good kind of challenge and that kind of stuff, so that was not that hard compared to distribution.

Allison: So with your new menu, do you feel in any way like you’re depriving your customers of anything?

Hajime: Meaning… what do you mean?

Allison: Meaning… probably most people who go to sushi bars are going to go expecting tuna, and unagi, and all the stuff that we’re saying “No way, no how.” Do you feel like with the new menu, that you’re keeping them from getting anything they should be getting, or do you think that it’s… sufficient, with the new menu?

Hajime: I mean, well… that’s a kind of multi-layered question. Regular customers, they’re going to be fine. I’m going to just tell them to eat, and they’re going to eat it, so I don’t have a problem with it. But non-regular customers come in, expecting to have those things, and this is the first day that I don’t have any of those things. They might freak out, like, “What kind of sushi bar is this?” And see how that’s going to affect… I don’t know if you can answer it Casson, but…

Casson: Um… “depriving” is a funny word. I… I don’t think that we’re depriving our customers of anything. I think that we’re showing them that there’re so many other ways to use and to think about sushi conceptually, and we’re actually offering them new opportunities to experience things that they’ve probably never tried before. Not only that, if we’re depriving them of anything, we’re depriving them of choices that they don’t want to make, choices that they would make unwittingly, that would harm the planet or that would harm their health and helping them get out of this very small, very very small box that is the kind of standard, run of the mill US sushi industry. So I mean, I think yeah, at first glance people could say, “Yeah I’m depriving my customers of being able to have unagi.” Why not? I mean, if they want unagi they can go down the street, no problem. What I’m doing is I’m offering them an alternative to it. They can still eat unagi if they want, just not at my restaurant. Because I won’t be a part of it.

Hajime: Yeah, I mean… some people are going to be pissed off no matter what. I mean, you can look at… like I was actually on Yelp this morning, and some people were complaining about my attitude, and my signs, and like… okay? [laughs]

Casson: Yeah, you just gotta do your thing.

Hajime: Exactly. To the point, even my reviews… either they hate me or they love me. I’m going to have to accept that. And from that point of view, even this menu’s going to be the same thing too. And… I’m going to kind of say this in a weird way, meaning… Even what people are used to, in the US at sushi bars, those items are not necessarily traditional in any way, or what you get in Japan. So… you know, it’s all about marketing or what people are used to. So changing from that to that, it can just be a switch… you know, it can be just I don’t know, new marketing of this fish, or… you know what I mean? Changing is all in your mind. That’s what you’re used to. It doesn’t mean that that’s… it’s supposed to be. Does that make sense? Yeah, it’s kind of vague, but I guess that’s kind of how I would put it.

Allison: So obviously you’ve determined that this is going to be a very different dining experience here, from what it used to be or from other sushi bars. Are there any new delicacies or new types of seafood that you think your diners may not have heard about, but that they should look out for?

Casson: It’s a slam dunk question, come on!

Hajime: What…

Casson: He’s got all sorts of things.

Hajime: Well, [Casson] has the black cod, so we have the black cod, we had that yesterday. We have the Hawaiian albacore that you should definitely start using, it is so not that expensive, dude… it’s awesome, and I don’t know why people don’t use it. We have ono, we have hebi – hebi, that’s a kind of cool thing too. Hebi is the spearfish, and I was in the Honolulu fish market about three months ago, and spearfish is not considered good fish at all. They even kind of say it’s a trash fish, they’re gonna make a fish cake out of it. Sometimes they’re even bycatch because they don’t look for it. I said, “Have you ever eaten it raw?” And they’re like, “No, it’s gross!” “Have you eaten it raw before?” “No…” So I ate it. So freakin’ good. So that… that is really good. I don’t know, even the catfish I was doing that’s really good… it’s not about just one or two fish, but just searching for different things. We have this small shiny fish called kibinago that we get from Japan that’s a really small fish, it’s like this big. And nobody uses it. It’s available, and I get it, but I don’t know. Anything that’s new.

Monday I’ll post the interview with Casson, then next Wednesday I’ll wrap it up with a few extra thoughts that both men had about sustainability and the sushi business. Do you have a question about sustainability? Ask in the comments or email me, and I’ll do my best to answer your questions.

About a month ago, I was hanging out on twitter, and got a tweet from Casson Trenor (you may remember I’ve written about him when I had a contest to give away several copies of his book and wrote about some bluefin tuna protests happening in Los Angeles): “any chance you can be in seattle mid-aug? Opening a new sustainable sushi restaurant, would lovelovelove to have you there.”

Ordinarily, I’m not one to make spur of the moment plans, especially when they involve significant travel (as in, more than an hour away from me). But a new sustainable sushi restaurant… how could I resist? I just had to see how a restaurant would ditch all the non-sustainable fish (No bluefin tuna! No unagi! No tako (octopus)! No ankimo (monkfish liver)!). Luckily it didn’t take too much to convince Son that we had to go to Seattle for this (we were due for a vacation anyways), so within a few days we had our plane tickets and our hotel room booked.

The weeks seemed to fly by, until finally we were in Seattle! (And subsequently getting lost in Seattle. Let me say, never have I been more thankful for Son’s iPhone…) It wasn’t long before we were walking through the front door of Mashiko – the established Seattle sushi restaurant making a complete change to only serve sustainable sushi. Soon after arriving we were greeted by Casson and Hajime Sato, the sushi chef, both of whom are a pleasure to know. Traca Savadogo came and introduced herself to me (she’s a very sweet woman who seems to know everybody!), then took me around the restaurant, introducing me to everyone else – including, but not limited to, Jon Rowley and Viv. Soon I went back to my seat between Son and a very nice couple (whose names I unfortunately do not remember). From our seats at the sushi bar, we had an excellent view of the two sushi chefs, Mariah and John, creating the dishes we were to eat that evening, and of the rest of the small restaurant (almost everyone else sat at tables.)

Then, time to eat. We each got a menu that listed each of the nine courses, as well as a sheet of paper describing the sake pairings (neither Son nor I drink alcohol, so we did not partake). For each course, Hajime would explain what we were eating, Casson would discuss the sustainability of the seafood, and Eric Verne, the sake specialist, would talk about the sake he paired with each dish.

First, oysters on the half shell. There were two oysters – a grilled small Pacific oyster with sake butter (above picture) and a kumamoto oyster with yuzu ponzu (below picture). Both were farmed in Washington state.

Believe it or not… this was my first time eating oysters. Ever. The verdict? I enjoyed them both. The small Pacific oyster was slightly chewy and a little fishy – a taste I’m still getting used to. (Two years ago I would barely eat fish at all, so I’m getting there.) But that kumamoto oyster… I absolutely loved that one. It was quite tender, and very buttery. Delicious.

The next course was rainbow trout with sunomono, ponzu shoyu, and shiso infused grapeseed oil. Mashiko gets the rainbow trout from Select Fish – the supplier for and owned by Whole Foods. The trout was farm raised in Idaho, in a way that produces very clean trout that is up to health and sustainability standards.

Though I’m not sure whether I’ve eaten cooked rainbow trout or not, I’m absolutely certain I’ve never had rainbow trout sashimi before. But I’m positive I’ll be looking to have it again. Rich, decadent, with a flavor reminiscent of pork fat, it melted in my mouth and left me wishing I could have more. The tart sunomono accompanying it was just like the one my grandmother makes – thinly sliced cucumbers, with a slightly sour vinegar taste to them. A perfect complement to the sumptuous rainbow trout.

Next, Tombo poki with roasted macadamia nuts – Hajime’s interpretation of the traditional Hawaiian fish salad. The albacore was hand line caught in Hawaii. Hajime commented that he’s been using this albacore for several years now – it’s quite delicious indeed – but somehow it hasn’t yet caught on in the sushi industry. But the really great thing about the albacore is that unlike some of the larger, more popular tunas, this is sustainable. Casson went on to explain that sustainability encompasses much more than how the fish are caught or whether they’re overfished, though that’s certainly a significant part of it. If a fish makes you sick, it is not sustainable. But so many of the larger carnivorous fish, like bluefin, yellowfin, or bigeye, have such high levels of mercury in their bodies that has built up over their lifetime – not good for us humans eating them. Albacore, on the other hand, is a small tuna… therefore has a low level of mercury in its body.

I have tried poke several times in the past year – at a restaurant when we visited Hawaii last year, and a recipe that a reader emailed to me. Maybe not enough to say I know poke, but I’m not completely ignorant when it comes to poke either. The one I had in Hawaii… meh, it was alright. Not my favorite. The one I made at home… really freaking good, although a little spicy for my tastes. The one I had at Mashiko… perfect. Just enough sauce to flavor the seared albacore without being overwhelming or drowning the rest of the ingredients. A beautiful crunch from the macadamia nuts and wakame seaweed. Perfectly seared albacore that simply melted in your mouth. Delicious. Absolutely delicious.

The fourth course (out of nine!) was a scallop and Dungeness crab salad wrapped in prosciutto with lumpfish caviar and avocado. This has been a signature item at Mashiko for quite a while – and once you try it, it’s obvious why. The scallops are farm raised in Hokkaido, a northern island in Japan. The prosciutto is from Italy (I agree with what Hajime said – “I don’t even know if it’s sustainable or not, actually, but it tastes good.”) Inside is the Dungeness crab which was grown locally, with a little garlic mayo mixed in. On top is lumpfish caviar which is definitely more sustainable than beluga caviar, a more popular alternative.

Then Casson took the floor, and explained how sustainability relates to seasonality. These days, so many people are trying to eat local and seasonal produce by frequenting their local farmer’s markets. So why wouldn’t you do the same for seafood? Traditionally, you can’t have every fish any time you want it – in Japan there are even holidays celebrating the arrival of certain fish. It makes so much more sense to only eat certain seafood – like the Dungeness crab – when it’s naturally available. The practice of trying to grow or import fish so they’re available year-round is a large part of why we have these sustainability issues today.

Out of all nine courses, this was by far my absolute favorite. The slightly spicy Dungeness crab salad was sandwiched between two slices of creamy scallop, then wrapped in a thin slice of salty prosciutto. All the different flavors played wonderfully off of each other, topped with the smooth avocado and salty lumpfish caviar. This is one of those dishes that the moment you bite into it, you just know you’re going to have to find some way make something similar on your own… because sadly for me, Seattle is quite far away. Just thinking about it makes my mouth water.

The next course was something called “Charlie’s Angel” – a roll of salmon, grilled asparagus, shiso, and masago, all tempura fried and accompanied by some buckwheat soba noodles. Believe it or not, we were eating farmed salmon. Now, anyone who knows enough about sustainability of seafood is probably thinking, “Bad! Bad! Bad!” And ordinarily, Casson and Hajime would have agreed with you. But if you’ll let me quote Casson for a moment…

“This is a big moment for me. If you would have told me two years ago, two months ago, two weeks ago… that I was gonna be standing up in front of a crowd and telling you to eat farmed salmon… I would have told you you were absolutely crazy. I have spent years fighting farmed salmon. I have given so many speeches against it. I don’t like farmed salmon. I don’t like what they’re doing to the salmon … I don’t like the human rights issues, I don’t like all the nonsense, branding going on… I don’t. Like. Farmed. Salmon. So I’m gonna tell you guys all to eat it.“

The reason why Casson and Hajime can, in good faith, tell us to eat this farmed salmon they were feeding us is because this is very different from the normal farmed salmon you hear about. This salmon comes from a company called SweetSpring – a salmon farm in Rochester, Washington, about 80 miles south of Seattle. If you look at Rochester on a map, you’ll notice that it’s not a beach city – it’s actually inland. This is a huge part of what makes the farms sustainable. They took the salmon farm out of the ocean, and put it on land. To quote Casson once again (because he says it far better than I ever could), “All the problems with salmon farms – parasite issues, genetic pervertation of local stocks, waste going up and down and around, seals getting their brains blown out by people who don’t want them in the salmon farms… all these horrible problems, they don’t exist with this. This is a closed, contained salmon farm – salmon farming on land… This is innovation. And this is the way to sustainability.”

As for the dish itself… delicious, of course. By now I wouldn’t expect anything less from Hajime. The salmon was silky, with a crunch from the asparagus and the tempura. Perfectly fried, and not too oily or heavy. The soba noodles… there was something very familiar about them. Although the noodle used was different, it tasted very similar to the somen salad that my family has made for as long as I can remember. The soba noodles went very well with the salmon roll.

Then came the sautéed Geoduck with mushrooms, sautéed with aonori butter and bonito flakes. Geoduck is caught or dug up along the Washington coast, so something very local to Mashiko. Casson discussed “edomae” sushi – a term often taken to mean “traditional sushi”, but that actually translates to “in front of Tokyo”… meaning it’s made from the fish that came from the waters in front of Tokyo. So it’s actually silly for us to use most of the seafood that we eat in sushi here… they’re natural to Tokyo, not to Seattle or Los Angeles or cities elsewhere. It makes much more sense to use that seafood which is local – which for Seattle, includes geoduck.

Son loved this dish. I, sadly, was not a fan, though I found the mushrooms to be delicious. The problem for me wasn’t with the taste, but more with the texture of the geoduck. It was chewy, similar to octopus… which, surprise surprise, I don’t particularly like and Son absolutely loves. So I suppose it comes down to this – if you like octopus or other similarly chewy seafood, you’ll love this. Because aside from the texture, I found the dish to be fantastic. (I know, I know… I’m working on getting over my texture issues. In a year, maybe, I’ll have no problem eating it.)

After the geoduck were two rolls. The first was namagi, tempura sweet potato, and avocado, rolled maki style in a white soy paper speckled with black sesame seeds and drizzled with a sweet sauce. The second was tempura onion rolled uramaki style, topped with black cod and tarako infused aioli then seared with a blowtorch. Unagi is not sustainable – but an American favorite. Unfortunately, it’s one of the absolute worst things you can eat, in terms of sustainability. So these two rolls were conceived as a sustainable way to mimic the dark, sultry, sweet unagi experience that the American palate has fallen in love with. The black cod is from a farm in British Columbia, on the northwest side of Vancouver Island… a more sustainable alternative to wild black cod. (Speaking of sustainable alternatives, don’t let me forget to tell you about the black cod liver we got to try when I later interviewed Hajime and Casson… both interviews will be posted in the upcoming days.)

The other roll uses namagi as a replacement – catfish. Although I’ve never understood it (and never had a problem eating and enjoying catfish), it seems that a lot of people have a huge aversion to catfish because of the muddy flavor and the texture. And because it’s a “bottom feeder”, which some people seem to find disgusting (though really, unagi – eel – is just the same, is it not?) This catfish comes from a North Carolina-based producer called Carolina Classics Catfish. It’s farm-raised with no herbicides, hormones, or antibiotics, and the water that they grow in is managed to the point that the catfish doesn’t eat any algae or anything to give it that muddy taste people normally associate with it. Then to get the sweet sauce that gives it a taste more like unagi… in the spirit of using every part of the fish, Hajime made a stock out of the remainder of the black cod, simmered it for a week, and ended up with this very rich sauce that he used for the namagi roll.

I found both rolls to be absolutely delicious, though the namagi roll pulled ahead as my favorite. The sauce on the namagi roll seemed very familiar – almost like something my mother used to make when I was younger. Although I could see how they taste similar to unagi, the replacement seemed unnecessary to me – while I do enjoy unagi and have used it quite often in my own sushi making in the past, I don’t feel a need to try to mimic it. I would rather have the fish shine on its own rather than trying to be something else, and I felt that both rolls did just that.

The eighth course was a sanma oshizushi topped with fresh ikura. Samna are pacific saury – a small, silver fish related to the mackerel and the sardine. The great thing about these fish is that they are small – far less mercury – and at the bottom of the food chain. It takes 25 pounds of sardines to get one pound of bluefin tuna… so Casson argues, why not just eat these and feed twenty-five times more common people, rather than feeding just a few very rich who can actually afford bluefin tuna?

The small silver fish was very… fishy. It tasted much more of the sea than any of the other seafood we ate that evening. For that reason, (and yes, this is another one of those things that I’m working to learn to enjoy) I wasn’t so fond of it. But Son loved it.

The last course was a small bowl of organic jasmine pearl crème brulée. This dessert involved no seafood, so there was no discussion of sustainability with it. It was delicious, though it did have a strong jasmine flavor – so if you’re not a fan of jasmine, it’s probably better to try a different dessert.

So after that meal of only sustainable seafood, did I feel like I was missing out on anything? Not at all. In fact, that was easily among the most enjoyable sushi meals I have ever eaten. Not once did I find myself pining for bluefin tuna, or hamachi, or unagi, or any of the less sustainable sushi that you would normally find at a sushi restaurant.

So what can you do if you want to be sustainable? Keep an open mind. Be willing to try all sorts of new seafood that you might not normally find at a sushi bar. Ask your sushi chef, your fishmonger where the fish comes from, if it’s sustainable. Educate yourself and your friends about the issue. Keep these “Four S’s” in mind when you’re choosing seafood to eat: small, seasonal, silver, and shellfish. And stay tuned for my next two posts, where I have an opportunity to interview both Hajime and Casson about sustainability and the process of changing Mashiko into a sustainable sushi restaurant.