If you’ve grown up in Metro Vancouver, you may not realize what an oddity the sushi thing is for many people from other parts of the country.
I grew up in a small prairie town where there were only two types of fish available: triangle and rectangle, and both were prepared by a multi-talented fellow who also apparently drove the boat. Cheers to you, Capt. High Liner.
For us landlocked folk, sushi was like some made-up joke food that you’d never actually eat, like frogs’ legs or caviar or vegetables. Raw fish? Gross. No thank you, I’ll have a T-bone steak, still mooing, please and thank you.
You can get sushi in many other parts of the country now but that doesn’t mean you should. Obviously things are different out here, where municipal bylaws stipulate that you must never be more than six city blocks away from kappa maki.
I first tried sushi when I was 24. It tasted like salt and fear. Contrast that with my North Shore-born children, who have been eating sushi since they were nine months old.
Here’s the weird part, though: Just by living here for the past decade or so, I now am Iron Chef Sushi compared to my friends and relatives from the prairies. Just last week, another one of my friends came out here and mustered the courage to try the west coast sushi experience, asking me to be his guide.
Going through that process made me realize there are still many good folks for whom sushi remains a mystery. For them, I came up with is this handy cheat sheet: The Redneck’s Guide to Sushi.
• Price: Before you walk in the door for your first sushi experience, make sure you are going to a place that is suitably cheap. All sushi in Vancouver is pretty good and it all tastes mostly the same to those with untrained palettes, so don’t bother trying to find some fancy sushi joint where they expect you to pay real restaurant prices. When you get to Vancouver, just walk 50 paces in any direction and you are guaranteed to bump into a man with sharp knives and a white hat who will sell you good sushi for a cheap price.
• Miso soup: From the Japanese words “miso,” meaning “me so,” and “soup,” meaning “salty.” Many sushi orders first come with a bowl that contains two bits of green floaties and three cubes of tofu trapped inside a weird broth within a broth that expands and contracts like a lava lamp. As far as I know, miso is purely decorative.
• Tempura: From the Japanese words “tempe,” meaning “fried,” and “ura,” meaning “stuff,” this is some easy-to-eat food that can ease even the most timid landlubbers into the sushi experience. Heck, prawn tempura is so yummy and unchallenging it could almost be called regular food.
• Rolls: Now you’re ready for the real deal. The rolls are where the adventure begins — and may end for newbies. They are made with a seaweed square that is laid on a bed of sticky rice, filled with stuff like avocado, cucumber, real crab, fake crab or barbecued eel, and then rolled into cylinders and cut into bite-sized pieces. Mmmm, eel.
Don’t worry too much about what is inside these rolls because you are going to drown them in so much soy sauce that each piece will look like a soggy hockey puck and taste like a heart attack. Each roll comes with a pile of shaved, pickled ginger, because this meal wasn’t weird enough. Rolls also come with wasabi, a Japanese word meaning “green death paste.” It is similar to horseradish in that it is not so much a good-tasting food and more of a test of your ability to stay calm while eating super-spiced Play-Doh. (Pro tip: Start small.)
• Chopsticks: You will be using two round sticks held in one hand to pick up dense, slippery food cylinders — what could go wrong?!
If you’re a real coward, there are also things like yakitori and udon, simple skewers and noodle soups that really aren’t part of the truly exotic sushi experience. I ate a ton of yakitori in my early sushi days but you don’t have to, because you have this guide.
Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News.
[email protected] • @Sports_Andy
