A Brooklyn Chef’s Quest for Locally Caught Sushi

Before he became the proprietor of the popular Williamsburg restaurant Okonomi, the chef Yuji Haraguchi worked for nearly a decade in the Japanese wholesale seafood industry, moving fish from Japan to high-end sushi restaurants, primarily in New York and Boston. It was in that job that he first noticed a paradox in the American market for sushi-grade fish: the freshest seafood was the stuff living in domestic waters, the striped bass and mackerel, fluke and flounder that could be caught in the Atlantic and consumed far more efficiently than anything he imported from Tokyo, which travelled thousands of miles before reaching diners’ plates. But the vast majority of Japanese restaurants relied on imported seafood, in part because they could trust Japanese fishmongers to handle their catch carefully, preventing the kind of bruised or nicked flesh that is a deal breaker for chefs preparing fish raw. Haraguchi recalls once visiting the commercial fish pier in Boston to see if any of the day’s catch was suitable for his high-end sashimi-restaurant clients. He found fish that was “gorgeous” and as fresh as can be, but, as he put it to me recently, “the fishermen were standing on top of the fish!”