Omnivore Atlanta

LIVIN ON THE EGE: Ege Sushi's uni tofu

On a bright fall day around 2 p.m., Ege Sushi only has two tables occupied in its modest dining room. One by me, huddled over a bowl of steaming udon, slurping comforting broth and fat noodles muddled with scallion and nori and the occasional wisp of egg. A young black woman and an older, Eastern European-looking man occupy the other table. They’re speaking a language that sounds like a cross between Russian, German and Portuguese. Perhaps they’re speaking Russian but she has a Spanish accent. I imagine they’re spies, or doomed lovers, their affections thwarted by grand tribulations and vast distances.

The waitress appears at the table, answering requests with a short nod and an enthusiastic “Hai!” As I look around the room at the slightly shabby but comfortable brown décor — sushi bar stretching down one side of the room, a lone beer tap standing over a keg refrigerator at the back of the room (pouring Sapporo), signs handwritten in Japanese — I realize I could be almost anywhere in the world. The authenticity of the food and the Japanese staff suggest we could be in Anytown, Japan. But the international clientele and the place’s almost transitory feel indicate that we could be in any city large enough to support small pockets of intercontinental authenticity.

In fact, we’re in a strip mall in Marietta.

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(Photos by Jennifer Zyman)

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Every few months, my sister and I inevitably find ourselves debating which three cuisines we could eat for the rest of our lives if we had to choose. Typing it makes the whole thing seem ridiculous since I can’t fathom a scenario where we would need to do so. But the debate is always interesting because our choices evolve as we broaden our food horizons. Yeah, we are food-obsessed weirdos.

Although my sister and I tend to have wildly different tastes and appetites (I am always snacking while she is more regimented in her meal times), we both, without fail, rank Japanese in the highest position. Japanese food has everything you could want. Raw. Fried. Stewed. Steamed. Grilled. Sautéed. The list goes on and on. The ingredients are handled with reverence. Precision is of the utmost importance. And the flavors and presentation are simple, but stunning.

I don’t know how or when it happened, but Atlanta has accumulated quite the assortment of Japanese restaurants. People think San Francisco is rife with Japanese cuisine. But let me tell you something: I lived in San Francisco and it has nothing on Atlanta. My mind actually races with indecision when I have to choose a spot because there are so many options–Sushi House Hayakawa, Yakitori Jinbei, Shoya Izakaya, Taka, Tomo, Hashiguchi Junior and Nakato just to name a few of my favorites. We. Are. Lucky. And now, I found another Japanese spot to add to my rotation, Ege Sushi and Japanese Cuisine.

Continue reading about Ege at Blissfulglutton.com

(Photo of Ege’s special menu by Jennifer Zyman)

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The Utne Reader’s website features an article about two chefs who have opened sustainable sushi bars. The article summarizes the five most endangered fish:

Take salmon, number one in U.S. popularity. Wild fish are pricier than farmed, and aquacultured salmon are voracious feeders, crowded like factory hogs in filthy ocean farms. Ditto hamachi, also known as amberjack. Most wild shrimp are bottom-trawled, a practice as devastating as slash-and-burn, while farming shrimp often entails ecological destruction. Unagi, freshwater eel, are snatched and penned young before they can breed, then fattened on wild fish. And the numbers of bluefin tuna, which is nearly always wild caught, are crashing about as precipitously as stock prices.

A bigger problem with the five—dubbed the toxic five—is that they also tend to be a sushi bar’s biggest profit makers. Meaning that, even if a chef wanted to do the right thing and banish them, the economics of the sushi bar are skewed in favor of keeping them in the case.

It’s pretty amazing how much sushi Americans are eating:

In 2007 Americans picked up chopsticks and dipped 2.5 million sushi meals into slurries of wasabi and soy sauce. It’s a figure capped with a question mark: Is sushi as we know it—from prepacked supermarket rolls to exquisite omakase meals—doomed, inevitably, to extinction?

Consider the face of most American sushi: It is the realm of monster maki: hefty, gooey with spicy mayo, often deep-fried, and lavished with layer upon layer of fish. Like meat lover’s pizza and the Croissan’wich, monster maki were born in the USA, for people with a seemingly bottomless craving for proteins and no fear of calories. Not to mention an apparent lack of curiosity about where the rolls’ hefty layers of seafood originate.

“We’ve somehow moved ourselves into this strange relationship with food,” says Sheila Bowman, manager of outreach for Seafood Watch at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “Look at how Americans eat shrimp. Forty years ago, you most likely ate five shrimp a year, probably in a shrimp cocktail on Christmas Eve. Now we just gorge on them whenever we want. Some things simply should not be all you can eat, and fish is one of them.”

The article was written by John Birdsall and was excerpted from Edible San Francisco.

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Salon has published a fascinating interview with Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist, argues that the signal event in the evolution of apes into men was learning to use fire to cook — not the development of tools, as is usually said.

Wrangham observes that cooked food is more efficiently digestible and nutritious than raw food (and he thus criticizes the so-called “raw food movement”). He also argues that cooking shaped our households and notions about gender.

It’s a great read, but I was surprised that neither the author of the interview or Wrangham himself credited Claude Lévi-Strauss for his seminal book, The Raw and the Cooked (1964), which argues (by looking at mythological themes) that the axis of the raw and the cooked signifies the binary opposition of nature and culture. It’s arguably a rather small step from Lévi-Strauss’ argument to Wrangham’s.

Maybe Wrangham takes up Lévi-Strauss in the book’s text….

Economy got you down? Home in foreclosure? Don’t worry. Bake cakes….

Atlanta did not make Huffington Post’s list of the 10 Best US Cities for Local Food. But you can still nominate us….

Hollywood organizes to help save the sushi favorite, bluefin tuna, from extinction.

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From the PR folks:

RAW: “The Untold Sake Stories” at MF Buckhead on Thursday, June 25th, 2009. Complimentary sushi appetizers from 8 to 9 p.m. followed by a sake tasting and presentation by world famous sake sommelier, Toshi Kojima. Beats by DJ Heather B and Japanese video montage by Bean Summer. RSVP to: raw@mfbuckhead.com.

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ALL RISE: The sashimi dinner at Rise Sushi Lounge

There’s never been more choice in Atlanta when it comes to Japanese food. We now have a wide range of quality establishments, from authentic sushi restaurants along Buford Highway to small Japanese pubs to swank temples of raw fish flown in daily from Tokyo. We may have become spoiled. There are worse problems to have.

I suspect this raising of standards, while good for our palates, may not be so good for the standard sushi spots around town. It may well be the problem at the newly opened Rise Sushi Lounge. Despite being open only two months, the restaurant’s been practically empty on recent evenings.

The folks at Rise would argue that their restaurant is far from a standard sushi spot. Waiters stress that Rise has at its helm “Atlanta’s only master sushi chef,” Tony Wang. Wang’s best known for opening Peachtree City’s popular Ginza Japanese Steak and Sushi in 1991, which he sold a decade later. Rise is Wang’s attempt to re-create his success in a downtown Atlanta venue. He joins the glut of new restaurants surrounding Centennial Olympic Park and the Aquarium in the Luckie-Marietta District. (more…)

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The New York Times reported the results of its own study of mercury levels in sushi tuna a few days ago. The results were pretty shocking:

Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. The sushi was bought by The New York Times in October.

No one should eat a meal of tuna with mercury levels like those found in the restaurant samples more than about once every three weeks,” said Dr. Michael Gochfeld, professor of environmental and occupational medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J.

And how have sushi-eating New Yorkers reacted? Yawn.

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