These fish weren’t necessarily typical sushi fish: They included wrasse, sole, mullet, and pollock. But Bennett says her chefs have found the variety, new flavors, and environmental message to be a bonus. Today Bennett is working with Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, the Slow Food Movement, other local fishermen, and chefs around Europe to develop small-scale, local, sustainable alternatives for supplying seafood to restaurants. “The whole tradition of Japanese food,” Bennett told The Daily Telegraph recently, “is based on what is to hand and what can be found locally.”
Will Moshi Moshi’s wake-up call reach American shores? There is the first glimmer of an awakening. This spring a sushi restaurant opened in San Francisco with little fanfare but huge ambitions: to serve no seafood that hadn’t been rated as completely sustainable and ocean-friendly by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s well-known Seafood Watch program. The restaurant is called Tataki Sushi & Sake Bar, and its staff includes not just chefs, waiters, and dishwashers, but also an official “sustainability guru”—advisor Casson Trenor, who is not a cook but a fisheries analyst.
Trenor told me that he wants to take sustainability much further than any purveyor of sushi has so far. That means some dramatic and difficult choices: “No unagi [eel], no hamachi [farmed Japanese yellowtail], no farmed salmon, no longlined fish, no bottom-trawled fish—nothing that leaves any scars on the face of the deep,” Trenor explained in an email. “Ranched bluefin is an offender as well.” Indeed, bluefin tuna are frequently labeled as “farmed,” but the vast majority aren’t farmed in the usual sense at all—they’re simply caught from the wild as juveniles and fattened in ranching pens, a practice that probably puts even more pressure on wild populations, not less.
Whether American sushi fans will choose restaurants that refuse to serve some of their usual treats remains to be seen. But the sad truth is that as fish populations and ecosystems come under increasing pressure, those treats are going to disappear anyway. Like Caroline Bennett at Moshi Moshi, Casson Trenor and Tataki are actually attempting, in a way, to redefine sushi by offering up interesting, tasty, and sustainable alternatives. The menus at Tataki will feature farmed amberjack from Hawaii and Australia; handline-caught local albacore; and instead of farmed salmon, closed-containment farmed arctic char. “We’re going to be an honest, eco-friendly sushi place,” Trenor says, “not just a greenwashed marketing ploy.”
It’s a noble sentiment, but it’s probably also a shrewd business strategy. Nowadays, a genuine commitment to the environment is one of the best marketing ploys in town—just look at the success of seafood advocates like Barton Seaver, the young former chef at the restaurant Hook in Washington, D.C., whose concern for sustainability has earned him a bucketful of awards and attention from the likes of Oprah. Sushi chefs in the U.S. would do well to take note.
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