The Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, with its 2 000 stalls, has every imaginable fish on display. Photograph: James Fischer
The Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo must be the closest commerce has come to a man-made wonder of the world.
A vast warehouse with 2 000 stalls, you see old women with cellphones clamped to their ears while calculating on abacuses. There isn’t a fish lurking in a remote bay or river estuary of the world that can’t be accessed in 48 hours through this network. On display is every imaginable fish, from the salted entrails of sea cucumbers to giant blue-fin tuna, which on the sushi table are worth more than R1-million each.
I felt a pang of guilt seeing the immense pillage of the world’s oceans and considered going back to vegetarianism. Well, that is until I stepped into a restaurant just off the market, where I was served some sublime nigiri a moment after its last heartbeat. I doubted then I could ever eat Cape Town sushi again.
From about the mid-1990s, many South African restaurants started to serve sushi. I count 47 in Cape Town, 35 in the Johannesburg metro. Yet we lack other Japanese cuisine styles. For 10 days in Tokyo I could eat in a different style of restaurant every night. At an okonomiyaki restaurant, you order raw ingredients and are given a jug of batter. Using a spatula, you cook for yourselves, what turns out to be a kind of filled pancake, eaten directly off the hot iron plate.
Then there’s Japanese pizza. The place I tried had English on the menu, but at first I thought they must have had a rotten translator. The combination of toppings was bilious. Japanese pizzas may have spaghetti on them or mayonnaise and lettuce leaves. My Tokyo friend’s pizza was a shock. It looked almost normal, with large shelled shrimps neatly curled on top, threads of red bell pepper and cubes of white fish, but it was pitch-black!
‘They use squid ink instead of tomato,†he said. ‘Is it better than tomato?†‘No, we like the colour.†Soon his tongue and the interior of his mouth were stained deep black.
Most of our local Asian restaurants also serve Thai and Chinese dishes, but Fujiyama and Benkai have a Japanese-only menu, with sushi, teppanyaki (fish, meat or chicken grilled on a teppan hot plate), yakitori (kebab), tempura (vegetables or seafood deep fried in batter) and noodles (udon and soba).
Fujiyama still has teppan tables at which you can sit. When it opened 15 years ago it was the headlining act, but these days it looks rather unkempt. As far as price goes, Benkei is good value. It sometimes runs ‘all you can eat†specials. Others with good reputations are Willoughby & Co, Tank and Haiku.
The upstart is the beautifully designed Kyoto Garden Sushi laid out in beechwood, an aesthetic oasis amid a busy street. The owner, who hails from Los Angeles, combines Japanese culinary skills and West Coast sophistication. Everything is done with pizzazz: skill, knowledge and attention to detail.
The wine list is short, but hand-picked and not wanting. The house wines are stunning. To my taste, its bar serves the most delicious cocktails in the city. A dash of wasabi in the Asian Mary (R36), a variation on the Bloody, makes all the difference. It also stocks some pricey, but prize-winning, Japanese whiskies measured in metric tots, definitely not North American servings. I preferred the less-smooth, 12-year-old Suntory (R55) to the rounded 18-year-old (R65).
It’s the only sushi place I know of in town that serves real wasabi from the grated root.
The green stuff you get in almost all establishments the world over is a mixture of wasabi powder with horseradish and mustard.
Kyoto’s menu can be slightly restricted at times because of its insistence on freshness so a number of options may not be available if the ingredients weren’t top-notch at the market that day. In addition to sushi it serves salads and main courses with a Japanese character. I highly recommend the ‘special fish†(R110), which comes steamed on a bowl of rice flavoured with the chef’s sauce.
Desserts are as innovative as the rest of its dishes and the green tea crêpes (R34) are close to perfection. Newcomer Kyoto may yet become the title holder.