Steak - Mark Schatzker [78]
When the auction was over, my guide led the way out toward the perimeter of the market. We passed a knife shop, in front of which stood a man honing a large silver blade on a whetstone with an air of religious seriousness. Nearby was a seaweed shop that stocked more than one hundred different varieties, at least ninety of which come from the island of Hokkaido, which is itself divided into five different seaweed-producing regions. In a single three-hundred-foot stretch of market—which I would estimate to hold no more than 1 percent of Tsukiji’s biodiversity—I cataloged the following: piles of dried fish that were just thicker than yarn and shorter than a baby’s pinkie; clams as large as a dinner plate; stacked cans of corned beef; wooden bins filled with dried tuna shavings piled into huge fluffy mounds; stacked cans of Spam; trays of salmon steaks marinating in yellow miso; boxes of whole dead salmon resting in crushed ice; whole mackerel; various dried fruits; grilled scallops, ready to be eaten; raw fish eggs; pickled fish eggs; large dried fish; frozen Alaska king crab legs; boxes of strange root vegetables as long as a man’s arm; and aquariums full of puffer fish that have to be expertly sliced so their poisonous organs will not taint their flesh and make it deadly.
We arrived at a sushi shop called Sushisay. Sushi isn’t generally a breakfast food in Japan, but the reputation of Sushisay is such that if you want to eat lunch there, you’d better show up at breakfast. Even at eight thirty in the morning, the lineup to get in was twenty minutes. Inside, three sushi chefs cut and assembled raw fish and hand-shaped mounds of rice at a clip reminiscent of a bus hurtling through a Japanese tollgate. When they talked, which was not often, they sounded ferocious and constipated, as sushi chefs are supposed to.
The fattiest cut of tuna is called otoro, which comes from the belly of a bluefin tuna. A slightly leaner cut is known as chutoro. We ordered both, bypassing the even leaner akami. Raw tuna is usually a deep red, but the otoro was so fatty as to be mild pink. It had a thick grain of white fat running diagonally across it, along with thinner veins of fat woven like lacework into its flesh. As promised, it melted in my mouth, but not the way chocolate melts. It simply gave way under pressure from my tongue with the ease of a bowling ball falling through wet tissue paper. It may have been cut from a big ocean-dwelling fish, but it didn’t taste of the sea. If anything, it had a pleasing sweetness, but I don’t think the Japanese eat otoro so much for the taste as for the texture, which is unlike anything my mouth had ever experienced. The chutoro was firmer and possessed a mild briny tang. I liked both, but of the two, the otoro tasted much more expensive.
Otoro tastes so expensive that single bluefin tunas occasionally go for as much as a top-of-the-line sports car. But only in Japan. Like their bullet trains and shuttle buses that push the tollgate envelope, otoro is another case of far-reaching specialization. I mentioned this to my guide, whose name is Seichi Chada and who is the owner of Michi Travel, which specializes in culinary tourism. He was puzzled by what I said and asked me for an example. The one I supplied is not what you would call judicious, considering I had known Chada-san for all of three hours. Perhaps it was the fog of jet lag or the caffeine-induced effects of two hot cans of coffee, but the example I raised to illustrate my point was the notoriously deranged and fetishistic sexual tendencies of Japanese businessmen.
Chada-san is himself a Japanese businessman, a fact I would have done well to note. He asked me, once again, politely, what I was talking about. I pointed out the well-known fact that there are vending machines on subway platforms all over Japan that dispense underwear that has been worn by teenage girls, which isn’t all that surprising for a country that massages its cattle with wine.
Chada-san was now more puzzled. The