Sustainable Sushi Restaurant Drops Tuna From Its Menu
By Hanna Raskin,Epicurious.com
A New Haven, Connecticut, sushi restaurant that bills itself as "the East Coast's only sustainable sushi" purveyor is stripping tuna from its menu.
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"Miya's will be the only sushi restaurant in the world without shrimp or tuna, which is considered the bedrock of sushi," chef-owner Bun Lai this week told scientists gathered in Seattle for the American Fisheries Society's 141st annual meeting.
Lai acknowledges that certain tunas are classified as sustainable--pole-and-line-caught skipjack from the Pacific has received Greenpeace's blessing--but doesn't want to contribute to consumer confusion. By weaning eaters off tuna, Lai hopes to erode demand for big underwater predators that are overfished or harvested in destructive ways.
"The idea is to imagine a cuisine that doesn't use ingredients that are bad for the environment," Lai says.
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Lai, who has worked at Miya's since his mother opened the restaurant in 1982, invented the sweet potato roll and takes credit for the world's only invasive species menu, featuring dishes made with foraged ingredients that are threatening indigenous sea creatures. He's now developing a series of soul food sushi rolls, made with fish and grains native to Africa.
When Lai began slanting his mother's traditional Japanese restaurant toward sustainable seafood, some of his customers questioned his choices.
"When we got rid of eel, people would say 'what kind of Japanese restaurant is this?" he recalls.
Lai's decision to remove shrimp from his menu was considered so revolutionary that the local press covered it.
"We can get spot prawns, for sure," says Lai, referring to a popular type of Pacific Northwest shrimp that's approved by environmentalists. But shipping prawns across the country is a pricy proposition, he adds.
"We want it to be available to everyone," he says.
So on the next iteration of Miya's menu--a 60-page beast that Lai readily acknowledges is the sort of document every restaurant consultant would advise against issuing--there won't be any shrimp or tuna. But Lai, who yesterday prepared "hyper-local" sushi for the conference's farewell event, doesn't think his cuisine will suffer for it.
"My rolls delve into what it means to be human," he says. And for Lai, at least, being human entails taking care of the sea and the tasty critters who live in it.
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Photo: Gourmet
