What Sushi Actually Is

Before Tokyo I thought I knew what sushi was. I’d eaten it in decent enough places across Europe—clean-tasting, aesthetically pleasing, fine. After Tokyo I understood that all of that had been a reasonable facsimile of something I had never actually tasted.

The difference is almost cruel in its simplicity: freshness. The fish at Tsukiji Market arrived that morning, sometimes within the hour. When you eat tuna that was swimming before dawn, everything you ate before it stops counting. The fat in the fish hasn’t had time to change. The texture is still alive in some basic sense. You’re eating something that is barely past being a fish.

I got there early—obscenely early—and queued before the city woke up. Sushi Dai is the one everyone talks about; the line ran two hours. Iwasa Sushi draws less of a crowd and loses nothing by it. Okame is quieter still. It probably doesn’t matter much which you choose—what matters is standing there in the cold before dawn, smelling brine, watching a chef slice fish with the focused patience of someone who has been doing exactly this for thirty years and will continue until he doesn’t.

The problem with eating something at its source is that you spend the rest of your life comparing everything else to it. Every piece of sushi since has been measured against those early mornings at Tsukiji, and most of it comes up short. Not bad—just not that. The ghost of the real thing still haunts every substitute, which is probably a good problem to have.