Flounder isn't the only fish in the Gulf that could easily be used in sushi preparations if only it were harvested correctly: There's red snapper as tai, flounder as hirame, Spanish mackerel as saba, amberjack or cobia as hamachi, tuna as toro.
But Gulf fisherman aren't going to start fishing for a market that doesn't exist.
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Groovehouse
PJ Stoops and Shinobu Maeda would love to sell sushi-grade Gulf fish at Louisiana Foods.
Photo courtesy of Jason Hauck
Jason Hauck, executive chef at Soma Sushi, plating his Gulf-caught snapper sashimi last year.
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"The Japanese deem the Gulf of Mexico to be a toilet," says Carl Rosa. "Even though that's absolutely unfair."
Over a simple meal of saba and tamago nigirizushi and tempura at Zushi one quiet afternoon, Rosa is explaining the severe image problem the Gulf of Mexico has abroad. Rosa's background in Japanese culture and cuisine is as extensive as his roots along the Gulf Coast; the New Orleans native was the former executive director for the Japan-America Society and currently works with a number of local Japanese restaurants on making their traditional menus more accessible to Americans.
What's ironic is that Japanese longline fishing vessels once navigated our waters, the 200-foot-long vessels pulling in bluefin and yellowfin tuna. On board, the fish were quickly processed and flash-frozen for transport back to Japan. International fishing laws have made these Japanese fishing fleets more or less obsolete in recent years, but our waters were considered attractive hunting grounds as recently as the late 1970s, according to an 1979 article from Marine Fisheries Review.
It isn't just the Japanese who have misconceptions about the Gulf. Ask any sports fisherman about eating Gulf fish raw, and most of them will laugh at you. And even among those who venture past the warm, muddy waters on the continental shelf and out into the deep, cold ocean, there is an idea that the Gulf is dirty.
There's also the issue of parasites and bacteria. Fishermen and chefs alike are convinced that Gulf fish are swarming with deadly microbes — deadlier, for some unknown reason, than all of the other microbes everywhere else.
"I guarantee that in other fish swimming in the Pacific or even off the coast of Hokkaido, there are parasites," Rosa laughs. "I mean, of course there are parasites. They're not swimming in Ozarka water!"
PJ Stoops has eaten his Gulf catches raw his entire life and never suffered any ill effects. "There's bacteria everywhere in the world — it's inconsequential," he says. "The FDA doesn't consider [Gulf fish] hazardous or that they shouldn't be eaten raw — there's no real reason it's not an intrinsically good product."
Anyway, Stoops says, "Several types of parasites are of interest to the FDA, and the really nasty ones are found in cold saltwater — like nematodes — but they don't cause a long-term problem. You can't get an infestation of worms like you could from eating wild salmon raw."
That's right: Those wild-caught salmon that everyone is so fond of carry a dangerous, mammal-dwelling parasite that can only be killed by freezing. And yet we eat it. In fact, salmon (along with tuna) is the most popular fish in any given sushi restaurant, its extremely fatty flesh easy for even novice sushi "chefs" to cut. Mackerel — an equally popular fish, especially in Japan — also contains parasites, but Japanese sushi chefs serve it raw regardless.
Another hurdle of perception is the almost ingrained idea that fish from the "warm" waters of the Gulf of Mexico wouldn't be fatty enough. It's true that mackerel and salmon are popular because they're fatty, and they're not found in the Gulf. It's also true that the colder the water, the fattier the fish.
But there are plenty of extraordinary fish dwelling in the deep, blue, breathtakingly clear waters off the continental shelf. "If we feel really hot, we try to get cold. So do the fish; they go to cold water," says Shinobu Maeda, a 20-year veteran sushi chef who works at Louisiana Foods with Stoops. "The fish know where to live."
Bluefin tuna can dive to icy depths 3,000 feet beneath the surface of the Gulf, depths that require the tuna to be fatty to protect itself from the cold. That tuna is extraordinary.
And, in fact, so is the fish from "warmer" waters: snapper, flounder, amberjack. It doesn't have to come out of cold waters to be eaten raw. "I don't think the temperature of the water matters in the Gulf," says Maeda.
To Rosa, the Gulf's image problem is ridiculous. "I don't care what anyone says," he says as we finish our lunch. "Growing up in New Orleans, when I had Blue Point oysters and blue claw crab, my eyes would roll back in my head they were so good."
"It's worthy. Gulf seafood is worthy."
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Sushi is one of the things that Manabu Horiuchi does best. The executive chef at Kata Robata, Hori-san (a title of respect) is regarded as one of the best sushi chefs in the city. He began his career as a sushi chef over 20 years ago, in Tokyo, and was brought to Houston to serve at the Japanese consulate. Eventually, he left the consulate to work at Kubo's, before moving on to Kata Robata, where I spoke to him one rare quiet afternoon.
