Sushi Ichifuji, San Diego

Courtesy of Sushi Ichifuji

Last week Hiroshi Ichikawa and Masato Fujita combined their four decades of sushi experience to open Sushi Ichifuji—a name created by fusing their surnames. Their 10-seater ode to Japan is slightly off the beaten track in Linda Vista, the ideal locale for the duo who spent nearly a year scouting it. Only being able to serve a few dozen guests nightly is intentional. For those lucky enough to get a reservation, that will mean you’ll have the undivided, meticulous attention of two of the city’s best.

For Ichikawa, he sought inspiration and opportunity when leaving home in the Gifu Prefecture region of Japan. He flew to New York City to work in sushi restaurants, where the allure of the city satiated his appetite for adventure. But a decade of braving east coast winters had him reevaluate his long-term plans. “I love surfing,” he says with a smile. “My mind was always on California.” So he packed up and moved to San Diego, landing a job downtown at Taka Sushi, where he met his future business partner Masato Fujita.

Fujita has collected experience at many of the county’s premiere sushi houses, including Soichi (University Heights) and Sushi Tadokoro (Old Town)—both of which hold one Michelin star. His career was foreshadowed by the days he spent hanging around his family’s century-old sushi spot in Osaka. He never actually worked at their restaurant, but proximity to the craft proved invaluable.

Sushi Ichifuji, exterior San Diego

Courtesy of Sushi Ichifuji

Ichifuji’s menu presents diners with two options: an eight-course omakase or a nigiri course. Both include sakizuke (a three-dish seasonal appetizer), shirumono (dark red miso soup), three-day miso-marinated Alaskan black cod, a selection of nigiri, and dessert. The omakase course offers a few more bites like sashimi and chawanmushi (a traditional Japanese savory custard, one of life’s greatest treats). Ichikawa teases an a la carte menu once they’ve found their rhythm, but insists the omakase concept is how they’ll get their start.

Their sakes are sourced almost exclusively from Japan, where premium water quality and well-tended rice fields produce an unbeatable product, Ichikawa says.

The interior design attempts to recreate the tranquility felt in many traditional Japanese homes. “We don’t have any design experience, but we painted everything ourselves, for like three months,” Ichikawa says. “I want people who come in to feel like they are in a small town Japanese house.” Ichikawa and Fujita achieve this with small but intentional touches: bamboo water features, wood features, and traditional plates brought back from Japan.

There are two seatings a night each consisting of groups of 10. The first seating occurs from 5-5:30 p.m., the second from 7:30-8 p.m. The 30-minute time window allows guests to trickle in at various times, further curating an individualized experience.

Ichikawa says the plan is to continue to build slowly. With warmer weather and increased demand, you may see a dozen or so seats pop-up on the covered patio this summer.

Have breaking-news, exciting scoops, or great stories about San Diego’s food scene? Send your pitches to [email protected].

The post Incoming: Sushi Ichifuji appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Chef JoJo Ruiz has become one of the city’s most celebrated names in sustainable seafood, and his long-awaited new handroll concept in Encinitas is finally open. Temaki Bar is a Clique Hospitality thing, the same group who brought local concepts like Lionfish and Serea.

Walk through Temaki’s front doors, you’ll find an original hand-painted mural by artist Todd DiCiurcio, who also partnered with Rob Machado for custom-designed surfboards-as-art for the space. “It’s a really cool design, I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it in San Diego—let alone anywhere—because we’re so close to the beach,” says Ruiz. “It’s a Southern California vibe for sure.”

handroll temaki

Arlene Ibarra

Temaki is a sushi bar-only experience—38 seats in the petite 1,500-square-foot-space (formerly Eve Encinitas). The point is to be up-close with the highly curated sustainable fish in the case, to be handed your food direct from the chefs seconds after it’s made.

“When you sit there and you have a really warm, crunchy nori roll, and you put the rice on still warm, and you put the fresh fish on it, the texture is wonderful,” says Clique founder, Andy Masi.

temaki-bar-crispy-rice-sdm1122.jpg

Arlene Ibarra

Each roll is served one at a time instead of table-drop buffet style, encouraging guests to focus and appreciate the charms of each. Ruiz says a couple of his favorite items are the spicy tuna crispy rice and the yellowtail sashimi. Masi is a fan of Dre’s Pop N’Rock handroll which mixes bang bang shrimp, mango and Pop Rocks (yep, those Pop Rocks). All told, there are 12 handrolls on the menu, along with a variety of sashimi and starters like beef tataki and tuna poke bowl.

“It’s giving a high-quality product at a local price and a local vibe. It’s super casual. Hand rolls are $4-5. You can get in and out of here for lunch for $15,” says Masi. “We wanted to take a super high-end concept and make it very casual and very approachable.”

temaki-bar-poke-bowl-sdm1122.jpg

Arlene Ibarra

“I think we’re excited to do something different. There’s not really anything like this in San Diego at all, whatsoever. The nori is going to be nice and crunchy, you have this nice warm rice we’ve worked hard to create—and make sure it’s this perfect thing—and you have this nice cold fish inside of it. It’s going to be fun,” says Ruiz.

temaki-bar-sdm1122.jpg

Arlene Ibarra

Have breaking-news, exciting scoops, or great stories about San Diego’s food scene? Send your pitches to [email protected].

The post FIRST LOOK: Temaki Bar appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

I thought the eyes would be the hardest. The legs look like violin bows with hair. Or are they serrated like tiny, awful knives? The torso is unsettling. It’s a dull gray-brown suit of armor. Like a dirty infant lobster. But eating eyes is uncomfortably intimate. You can see death in eyes.

Wait, no. The torso is definitely unsettling. There are bones and guts in there, right? No food marketer ever bragged, “Now with 20% more bones and guts!”

I’m looking at a plastic ramekin full of crickets at Tacos Perla in San Diego. Actually, there are no guts. These crickets have been dehydrated, deep-fried, spritzed with lemon and dusted with chiles. And for $1.50, they are food. Add them to Perla’s tacos. Eat them straight and impress/disgust your friends. Taste the future.

Because, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, this is the food of our past and our future. In 2013, the UN advocated that the world needs to start raising insects as food for both cattle and humans.

Sound gross? Well, you’re already eating bugs. The average American eats about two pounds of flies, maggots and other bugs each year.

The FDA’s Defect Levels Handbook explains it all. Frozen broccoli is legally allowed to have an average of 60 or more aphids per 100 grams. Your morning coffee? Allowed to contain up to 10 percent insect-infected or insect damaged beans. That craft beer? Hops can have 2,500 aphids per 10 grams. Peanut butter? Average of 30 or more insect fragments per 100 grams.

According to the FDA, the reason a certain amount of insects are allowed in commercial food is that it’s “economically impractical to grow, harvest or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects.”

Granted, many foods contain far fewer insect parts than what is legally allowed. Still, it’s all but guaranteed you’re eating bugs.

And you’re not alone. Around 2 billion people eat insects across the world, according to the FAO. They’re staples in Africa, Asia and South America. The most consumed are beetles (31 percent), caterpillars (18 percent), bees, wasps and ants (14 percent), and grasshoppers, locusts and insects (13 percent).

It’s called entomophagy, or insectivory. They’ve been eaten since the dawn of time—by the entire world before the advent of hunting and farming. Raising them for food is called mini-livestock.

Why is it the future? Because world population is a real concern. We add about 200,000 people to this planet every single day, or 140 every minute, about 70 million people every year. We’re supposed to hit 9 billion people by 2050. That will require TWICE as much food as we need today. There aren’t enough burgers to feed everyone (and beef production is by far the worst agricultural action on the environment). Global wealth is increasing in countries like China and India, and they’re already out-bidding the United States for much of the “elite” proteins (just ask San Diego chefs, who each year are priced out of the local spiny lobster season because the Chinese are buying them at the docks).

Our seas are dangerously overfished. What we’re pulling out of the waters gets smaller and smaller every year. Some scientists have predicted the world’s fish could collapse during this century. Farmed fish is getting more and more effective and ecological, but it’s still not enough.

We need alternative sources of protein. Thanks to its affluence, America likely has a long while before it becomes an insect-hungry populace. But millions of Americans are food insecure. Insects are a real, economically and ecologically-friendly solution to this problem.

Insects are high in protein, good fats, iron, zinc and calcium (because you’re eating the entire body, including bones). Several studies have found insects a far more environmentally friendly source of protein than traditional livestock. Insects grow faster, take up less space, use less water, produce less ammonia. We currently use about 70% of agricultural land to raise livestock. Raising bugs uses far less acreage. Cattle takes 8 kg for 1 kg of beef, and only 40% is considered edible. It takes 1.7 kg of feed to produce one kg of insect meat and 80 percent is considered edible. Because insects are cold-blooded, they don’t use energy from feed to maintain body temperature. They can also feed on organic byproducts (animal and human waste), which reduces environmental contamination.

Some companies in the West have been making them into a powder (insect flour, cricket flour, cricket powder). Chapul was the first company to do cricket flour, selling protein bars full of the stuff. A company called Exo followed suit.

And it’s not that they should only be eaten by humans. Or maybe not even primarily. But especially as feed for traditional livestock, they’re a relatively untapped resource. Mealworms are already being farmed and used as pet food, zoos and recreational fishing.

As far as disease? It seems insects pose less threat to us than cows, pigs, and other livestock under the current production methods. Since there is a huge difference genetically between us and insects, that might also lessen the potential for disease like swine flu. It’s also something that could be done on a small scale, lowering the investment capital needed for small growers/ranchers (thus making it easier for craft crickets). It’s not as clear cut to implement this. Certain government rules and regulations need to be changed, and I won’t get into that here.

Crickets are the gateway bug. They are served at Typhoon in Santa Monica, at Sushi Mazi in Portland, and wold-famous chef Jose Andres serves them at Oyamel in D.C. In San Diego they’re sold at Perla and Escondido Mexican restaurant, El Tejate. On the wholesale side the American Cricket Ranch in San Diego is micro-ranching. San Diego Wax Worms is also raising bugs for food.

I like the future. But I can’t ignore that, as a Westerner, a ramekin full of salted crickets is the stuff of nightmares. Insects make people scream. Perla’s manager tries to get two employees to try them. Both decline, cast up-yours-I’ll-quit faces. Insects are the alien villains of horror movies. Our primal instinct is to squish them, squash them, exterminate them. Perhaps the worst of all is that they have become known in Western culture as harbingers of filth. They’re the squires of trash. Of shit!

If you have them in your kitchen, it’s a sign that you’re a pretty unclean human. It’s well-known that inside the decrepit hovel of any self-respecting serial killer, there are bugs everywhere.

In Guadalajara, Mexico, at a restaurant named La Tequila, I had a taco full of ant eggs (escamoles). Each egg, a millimeter in diameter, was covered in a gel-like white protein. I also had a taco full of agave larvae (gusanos de maguey). They looked like large, well-caramelized maggots, with hairy anuses on both ends. They were crunchy, yet let out a creaminess when bit. They were incredibly delicious, and visually and mentally disgusting.

When you put a cricket in your mouth, the first thing you feel are the legs. They feel like soft splinters. It’s simultaneously crunchy and soft, like a wet sunflower seed. Fitting, since there’s a grassy, dried-herbal flavor that tastes similar to a seedpod. At Perla, the body lets out a lemony juice. The legs crackle. As you chew, the legs and parts turn to shrapnel. I ate one 5 minutes ago and I can still feel leg parts in my mouth. Again, like a sunflower seed.

The taste is not offensive at all. More lemony than gross. But it’s definitely not what I’d call impressive. You might never crave this food in your life. The same restaurant that serves you crickets hires someone to kill their fruit flies.

But this blog on the Scientific American post makes a good point. When sushi first arrived in the US, Westerners thought eating raw fish was fairly gross. Now they pay big bucks for the opportunity.

Tacos Perla sells them because they’re a Mexican restaurant, and crickets are a delicacy in Oaxaca. And, sure, they might be doing it for the novelty as well. But whether their intentions are as noble or merely Fear Factor-ish doesn’t really matter. They’re doing their part to reduce stigma and even create some allure in trying to eat bugs.

So take a friend down to Perla. Taste the future. They serve beer, too.

A side of crickets at Tacos Perla in North Park.

The post Eating Crickets appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

“LOOK YOUR FOOD IN THE EYE”… an excerpt

If I could eat only one single food for the rest of my life, it would be good bread with good butter. Second would be sushi. OK, no—Fruity Pebbles with ice cold milk (it would be a short, highly energetic life, with an insulin needle constantly dangling out of some part of me). But sushi is definitely third.

No other food makes you feel lighter than you were prior to eating it. Compare eating sushi to, say, eating lasagna. When the waiter asks if I would like anything else after a six-layer stack of carbohydrates, I think a pillow, my mouth guard, maybe some half-ass foreplay you gotta promise won’t go anywhere because I’m real tired. Pasta makes gravity feel like the plus-sized bully from grade school, squashing you because—well, why do bullies bully? Because you have a mom.

Eating sushi is the exact opposite; it’s pure helium for dinner. As if a burdensome part of you dislodges, turns into a mist, goes away. I always feel satisfied after eating sushi, but am also confident that I could moonwalk two inches above the pavement all the way to the car.

I know people who do drugs. They’re always talking about how a certain brand of street cocaine is a “clean” high. Apparently during an unclean high, your body feels like it has an infestation of some sort. Like maybe you need to call Corky’s Pest Control and see if you can get an IV filled with DDT. With a “clean” high, your body feels like it’s full of some sort of pure, electrified water, which makes it hum to a more inspiring frequency. Being full on sushi is a “clean” full.

In the ’80s, us Americans went fairly ape shit for sushi. Actually, we went ape for most things Asian. We went ape for Voltron, a robot made of many other robots, the toy industry’s riff on multiple personality disorder. We went ape for Hello Kitty—the most innocent toy in the world, which parents bought for their daughters thinking please god don’t learn of sex until we’re dead. Top Ramen became the Spaghettios of the 80s, with enough salt to turn our insides into prosciutto.

We especially loved Japan. It was this island of incredibly hard-working, well-mannered, straight-A people who got drunk and sang bad American songs into a Japanese-made microphone. Their porn was so creepy—seedy vacuum cleaner with eyes, meet animated schoolgirl—it was hard not to admire. The Japanese were like a cultural mullet: Business in the front of their day, party on the back. And the freaks ate raw fish! In personals ads, “love ngiri” became as popular as “really just want sex—don’t be clingy, please.”

Cynics claimed sushi was a yuppie fixation for Americans.

“TEN BUCKS?!” chortled Excessively Loud, White Coworker Who Still Talks About High School On Occasion. “Why don’t you come over to my condo. I’ll unwrap some fish and lay it on a ball of rice for ya, pal.”

True, we were paying good money for what was essentially a raw material. In Loud Coworker’s boob-shaped brain, it was like going to a baseball game and ordering a box of un-popped kernels.

I think America loved sushi precisely for this reason. A million years of evolution ingrained a lot of core, primal impulses into humans. We need to procreate, or at least screw each other. We need shelter. Every cell in us craves water. And we need real food like veggies, fruits, nuts, grains, meat and fish. Just plain old fish from the sea.

Not frozen fish sticks.

Looking like George Hamilton’s well-tanned but highly diseased fingers, America ate billions of fishsticks in the decade preceding the sushi boom (the ’70s). They supplied our growing bodies with important ingredients such as partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (trans-fats), caramel coloring (looks yummy, thought to cause cancer), sodium tripolyphosphate (makes fish look glossier, suspected neurotoxin) and TBHQ (a preservative, and a chemical relative of butane).

It wasn’t the only Frankenfood we enthusiastically ate in the ’70s. Most of our food was flavored, preserved, colored, fillered and tweaked. Our food was no different than that 60-something housewife who’s had so much plastic surgery that it looks like, instead of aging gracefully, she just went ahead and had her young face killed, stuffed and placed atop her shoulders like taxidermy.

You’d think that we’d be ashamed of this Frankenfood. Nope. We’re capitalists. Capitalism is the practice of taking a raw material and messing with it in a signature way. That way, it becomes something more and justifies a higher cost. We grind a corn kernel into flour. We add water to that flour, bake it into chips. We sprinkle those chips with radioactive Nacho dust. Nuclear chips are bent in half by Taco Bell to become nuclear taco shells. Nuclear tacos then become dinner for the food-sad and the stoned.

Eventually, some county fair employee pours Coke on it and deep-fries it in liquid pig fat. The end result is a mouthgasm—fun for the whole family and national headlines. But it’s worlds away from something the earth produced.

Don’t get me wrong. If offered 15 minutes alone in a closet with the object of my affection, it might be a Chili Cheese Frito. But I do think at the moment before sushi invaded America, our pantries were filled with so much pre-packaged, adulterated, transmutated frankenfood that we had a deep, cultural need to tackle a gazelle in the serenghetti with our teeth.

Sushi was as a close compromise. A piece of raw fish is remarkably near the nexus where life suffers death so that it can feed another life. It’s where the circle of life stops and starts, the endbeginning. For millions of years, when we were hungry we grabbed a sharp rock, tied it to a long stick, and swung it at the nearest unlucky living thing. With the packaged food industry, we’d become incredibly far removed from the food chain. We lost a little of that deep reverence, that primal connection, that necessary emotional impact of eating meat, and what that means to the rest of life on this planet.

With sushi, the finished “product” requires only three steps: death, butchery and artful presentation.

Plus, sushi could make your stomach explode. Or at least that’s what we’d been taught about any uncooked animal protein. You get salmonella or ebola or some little microbe that acts like Moses and leads your guts on an exodus into the outside world.

Did that scare us off? Heck no. It could kill us? Great.

Humans, especially the American brand, like to dangle a foot into traffic. Our country has become a prohibitively boring, safe place to live. Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Don’t have sex with people who have lots of sex, even though those people are generally the funnest people to have sex with. Legislated into well-preserved submission, we take calculated risks in other areas. And food is a very common outlet for pent-up adventurism.

Why sushi and not, say, carpaccio? Blame Upton Sinclair. The Jungle sufficiently scared the crap out of us regarding our beef industry. Eat that stuff raw and your aorta was sure to exit your body through your nose. Plus, raw beef looks like raw human, whereas raw salmon looks like a 50/50 bar. So we put tartare in a box with the Speedo and David Hasselhoff and let Europe go nuts with it. For Americnas, sushi became a tamely dangerous, highly stylized, sake-fueled approximation of what it’s like to be a lion and eat raw food off the freshly dead bone.

A chef in San Diego brought me even closer to that moment….

In the next installment, I’ll tell the story about the time I ate a rock fish as it was dying on my plate. Please do join me at Pirch on Aug. 7. I’m tired of reading to myself.

Why Americans Love Sushi

The post Why Americans Love Sushi appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

“LOOK YOUR FOOD IN THE EYE”… an excerpt

If I could eat only one single food for the rest of my life, it would be good bread with good butter. Second would be sushi. OK, no—Fruity Pebbles with ice cold milk (it would be a short, highly energetic life, with an insulin needle constantly dangling out of some part of me). But sushi is definitely third.

No other food makes you feel lighter than you were prior to eating it. Compare eating sushi to, say, eating lasagna. When the waiter asks if I would like anything else after a six-layer stack of carbohydrates, I think a pillow, my mouth guard, maybe some half-ass foreplay you gotta promise won’t go anywhere because I’m real tired. Pasta makes gravity feel like the plus-sized bully from grade school, squashing you because—well, why do bullies bully? Because you have a mom.

Eating sushi is the exact opposite; it’s pure helium for dinner. As if a burdensome part of you dislodges, turns into a mist, goes away. I always feel satisfied after eating sushi, but am also confident that I could moonwalk two inches above the pavement all the way to the car.

I know people who do drugs. They’re always talking about how a certain brand of street cocaine is a “clean” high. Apparently during an unclean high, your body feels like it has an infestation of some sort. Like maybe you need to call Corky’s Pest Control and see if you can get an IV filled with DDT. With a “clean” high, your body feels like it’s full of some sort of pure, electrified water, which makes it hum to a more inspiring frequency. Being full on sushi is a “clean” full.

In the ’80s, us Americans went fairly ape shit for sushi. Actually, we went ape for most things Asian. We went ape for Voltron, a robot made of many other robots, the toy industry’s riff on multiple personality disorder. We went ape for Hello Kitty—the most innocent toy in the world, which parents bought for their daughters thinking please god don’t learn of sex until we’re dead. Top Ramen became the Spaghettios of the 80s, with enough salt to turn our insides into prosciutto.

We especially loved Japan. It was this island of incredibly hard-working, well-mannered, straight-A people who got drunk and sang bad American songs into a Japanese-made microphone. Their porn was so creepy—seedy vacuum cleaner with eyes, meet animated schoolgirl—it was hard not to admire. The Japanese were like a cultural mullet: Business in the front of their day, party on the back. And the freaks ate raw fish! In personals ads, “love ngiri” became as popular as “really just want sex—don’t be clingy, please.”

Cynics claimed sushi was a yuppie fixation for Americans.

“TEN BUCKS?!” chortled Excessively Loud, White Coworker Who Still Talks About High School On Occasion. “Why don’t you come over to my condo. I’ll unwrap some fish and lay it on a ball of rice for ya, pal.”

True, we were paying good money for what was essentially a raw material. In Loud Coworker’s boob-shaped brain, it was like going to a baseball game and ordering a box of un-popped kernels.

I think America loved sushi precisely for this reason. A million years of evolution ingrained a lot of core, primal impulses into humans. We need to procreate, or at least screw each other. We need shelter. Every cell in us craves water. And we need real food like veggies, fruits, nuts, grains, meat and fish. Just plain old fish from the sea.

Not frozen fish sticks.

Looking like George Hamilton’s well-tanned but highly diseased fingers, America ate billions of fishsticks in the decade preceding the sushi boom (the ’70s). They supplied our growing bodies with important ingredients such as partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (trans-fats), caramel coloring (looks yummy, thought to cause cancer), sodium tripolyphosphate (makes fish look glossier, suspected neurotoxin) and TBHQ (a preservative, and a chemical relative of butane).

It wasn’t the only Frankenfood we enthusiastically ate in the ’70s. Most of our food was flavored, preserved, colored, fillered and tweaked. Our food was no different than that 60-something housewife who’s had so much plastic surgery that it looks like, instead of aging gracefully, she just went ahead and had her young face killed, stuffed and placed atop her shoulders like taxidermy.

You’d think that we’d be ashamed of this Frankenfood. Nope. We’re capitalists. Capitalism is the practice of taking a raw material and messing with it in a signature way. That way, it becomes something more and justifies a higher cost. We grind a corn kernel into flour. We add water to that flour, bake it into chips. We sprinkle those chips with radioactive Nacho dust. Nuclear chips are bent in half by Taco Bell to become nuclear taco shells. Nuclear tacos then become dinner for the food-sad and the stoned.

Eventually, some county fair employee pours Coke on it and deep-fries it in liquid pig fat. The end result is a mouthgasm—fun for the whole family and national headlines. But it’s worlds away from something the earth produced.

Don’t get me wrong. If offered 15 minutes alone in a closet with the object of my affection, it might be a Chili Cheese Frito. But I do think at the moment before sushi invaded America, our pantries were filled with so much pre-packaged, adulterated, transmutated frankenfood that we had a deep, cultural need to tackle a gazelle in the serenghetti with our teeth.

Sushi was as a close compromise. A piece of raw fish is remarkably near the nexus where life suffers death so that it can feed another life. It’s where the circle of life stops and starts, the endbeginning. For millions of years, when we were hungry we grabbed a sharp rock, tied it to a long stick, and swung it at the nearest unlucky living thing. With the packaged food industry, we’d become incredibly far removed from the food chain. We lost a little of that deep reverence, that primal connection, that necessary emotional impact of eating meat, and what that means to the rest of life on this planet.

With sushi, the finished “product” requires only three steps: death, butchery and artful presentation.

Plus, sushi could make your stomach explode. Or at least that’s what we’d been taught about any uncooked animal protein. You get salmonella or ebola or some little microbe that acts like Moses and leads your guts on an exodus into the outside world.

Did that scare us off? Heck no. It could kill us? Great.

Humans, especially the American brand, like to dangle a foot into traffic. Our country has become a prohibitively boring, safe place to live. Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Don’t have sex with people who have lots of sex, even though those people are generally the funnest people to have sex with. Legislated into well-preserved submission, we take calculated risks in other areas. And food is a very common outlet for pent-up adventurism.

Why sushi and not, say, carpaccio? Blame Upton Sinclair. The Jungle sufficiently scared the crap out of us regarding our beef industry. Eat that stuff raw and your aorta was sure to exit your body through your nose. Plus, raw beef looks like raw human, whereas raw salmon looks like a 50/50 bar. So we put tartare in a box with the Speedo and David Hasselhoff and let Europe go nuts with it. For Americnas, sushi became a tamely dangerous, highly stylized, sake-fueled approximation of what it’s like to be a lion and eat raw food off the freshly dead bone.

A chef in San Diego brought me even closer to that moment….

In the next installment, I’ll tell the story about the time I ate a rock fish as it was dying on my plate. Please do join me at Pirch on Aug. 7. I’m tired of reading to myself.

Why Americans Love Sushi

The post Why Americans Love Sushi appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Now, it’s open. You should check it out. (Yes, that’s a pretty woman with sushi all over her. K7 is not coy about what kind of fun they like.) When you’re there, here are five points of conversation to impress your unimpressable friends:

FIVE THINGS: Kamikaze 7

From left: Japanese Whiskey and the bathrooms

THE JAPANESE WHISKEY

Maybe you’ve heard of Japanese whiskey. It’s all the rage in the brown crowd. K7 is serving some of the top in the world, including Suntory, Hibiki 12-Year and Yamakazi 18-Year. The latter is supposed to blow your mind and make you a better human. (The dubious pink creature with the cigarette is a “labbit,” from artist Frank Kozik.)

THE BATHROOMS

Going with the kamikaze theme, Roberts had them made out of riveted gun metal to resemble Japanese fighter engines. The facilities are perfectly circular. “One customer from the Midwest said it was exactly like being inside a corn silo,” says Roberts.

THE SUSHI

Roberts is using Ocean Fresh—the same seafood purveyor used by SD’s famed sushi chef, Master Ota—for daily deliveries of bigeye tuna and Japanese yellowtail. He’s also using top local seafood guy—Tommy Gomes of Catalina Offshore—for live uni, live shrimp and live halibut. “My guys are killing the halibut as we speak in the kitchen,” says Roberts.

FIVE THINGS: Kamikaze 7

THE SPAM

Roberts is deep-frying Hawaii’s staple meat-in-a-can—a natural evolution of musubi (SPAM sushi). “I can’t keep it in stock,” says Roberts. “People are going crazy for it.” God help you people.

FIVE THINGS: Kamikaze 7

THE SWORDS

The Hattori Hanzos that make up chandelier hanging over the communal table were used as prop swords in the movie Kill Bill. Weapons and sake bombs, a classic combo.

Swords

The post FIVE THINGS: Kamikaze 7 appeared first on San Diego Magazine.