#2 - CHIYODA SUSHI SHOP - DUCK, CORN, AND ITALIAN HAM SUSHI

Date: February 19, 2010
Location: ちよだ鮨店　(KaitenZushi restaurant), north side of Koenji Station
Subject: Peking Duck Sushi, Parma Ham sushi, Corn roll sushi

I first heard about Chiyoda sushi from my friend who dines on the cheap. 100-yen-a-plate sushi is pretty exciting, but Chiyoda sushi featured something even more impressive: over this past summer, the kaiten-zushi restaraunt had been throwing hamburger sushi on their conveyor belts.

I'd like to point out from the start that the concept of 'Western sushi' is not the same as Japanese sushi with Western influences. Western sushi refers to sushi made westernized for a Western consumer base, as opposed to what it seems we had at Chiyoda sushi, Japanese sushi westernized for Japanese.

Initially, I felt kind of horrified by the concept of hamburger sushi. Gastronomically speaking, I was repulsed; and I felt a bit like this was some freaky deconstruction of a part of Japanese traditional culture that I liked. And I'll admit it, I grew up thinking of sushi as something 'quintessentially Japanese.' How did the Japanese feel about the hamburger sushi?

I had been very excited to try it, but it turns out that hamburger sushi wasn't available anymore at Chiyoda. I asked one of the shop staff about it, and he told me that it had been a summer item. Fortunately, however, there were several new 'non-traditional' sushi items. When I tried to ask him what he thought about the sushi having 'foreign toppings' he didn't seem to understand my question. Nor did one of the chefs at first seem to understand when I asked for them to make another plate of the Italian ham, (it was near closing time so not everything was going around on the conveyor belt anymore) and he sent out a staff member to start counting my dishes, thinking I was asking for my check. So I'm afraid my Japanese failed me a bit...

I did get to make a number of observations in the restaurant, even if I wasn't able to really speak as much with the staff as I would have liked. The Japanese who came to Chiyoda Sushi weren't in the least bit bug-eyed over seeing unusual adaptations of the sushi dishes rolling past their eyes. But then, Chiyoda is a sushi shop with a broad range of appeal, and a bit more 'freedom' in style compared to other high-end sushi shops. Kaiten-sushi allows a huge freedom of choice, unlike traditional shops where you might recieve a plate of arranged sushi according to the chef's preference. Most notably, at this establishment in particular, I noticed that the customers did not follow prescribed or traditional sushi etiquette as I had seen it followed when taken out by Japanese friends to more expensive restaraunts. For example, I watched several customers at Chiyoda seperate the rice from the raw meat, and dip it into their soy sauce with their chopsticks before replacing it on the rice. Other 'faux paus' included dipping the rice into the sauce and mixing wasabi and ginger in the soy sauce. But one might say that the atmosphere accomodated the behavior: after all, the plates that carried the food was chipped and the chefs more or less ignored the customers after the perfunctory 'irrasshaimase.'

On my visit to Chiyoda, I was focusing on the customers and the environment, but I was also there for the food. I ordered a number of fish plates, which were prepared in the standard way. For the purpose of this assignment, I grabbed the 'novelty' western-sushi items: roasted Peking duck with shredded onions, Parma Italian ham with shredded onions and mayonnaise, as well as corn and mayonnaise on rice wrapped with seaweed. I know that the corn combination is fairly popular, but I'd like to point out that it really has nothing to do with sushi at all.

It's commonly known, of course, that sashimi refers to 'uncooked, raw fish' and sushi is what you get when you put sashimi on rice, with some wasabi basting them together. Wallah! Sushi. Right?

Wrong!

The word sushi has nothing to do with fish, it's all about the rice. While the rice grain in sushi is just like any other grain of rice eaten in Japan, there's a reason that sushi rice tastes different. It's covered in rice vinegar (a vinegar created by fermenting rice, traditionally with a mold called koji) that gives rice sushi its sweet and sour flavor.

So it's not what's on the sushi that makes it sushi, it's the rice -- and maybe that's why the customers didn't appear too concerned with having Italian ham and Chinese duck as regular fair on the line-up of the sushi shop. And it didn't have to go around the restaurant too many times before it would be picked up by a customer, as well.


Learn more:

See Chiyoda Sushi store review & information here: Tabe-Blog (Japanese)

Corson, Trevor. The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket. Harper Collins, 2007.

I recommend this book - it's not quite a scholarly book per sé, because it's a culturally and historically informative piece of creative non-fiction, which I think is one of the funnest things to read ever. I also got a lot of my information from it and used it in this blog post. It made me pretty interested in studying sushi, to be honest!