The Danish restaurant’s Japanese pop-up has hit the headlines for its ‘live’ seafood. Food writer Joe Warwick waited tables and tried the still-twitching crustacean
It is just shy of 2am and I’m sitting at a 24-hour sushi bar in Tsukiji market, Tokyo. I’ve just had some of the best nigiri of my life, and I’m watching the chef who sliced my fish dip a set of very long chopsticks into a tank behind the bar. It looks as though he’s trying to grab a rather large and lively mackerel. My immediate thought is that he’s going to make it into sashimi, ikizukuri-style.
My basic Japanese (I spent a week in Tokyo getting by in restaurants with sumimasen, hai, omakase, okanjo onegaishimasu and arigato) means that it takes a while to get to the bottom of what’s actually going on. “Sashimi?” I eventually ask, with a concerned look on my face. The chef smiles and shakes his head. “Pet,” he says. “Six years old.” He’d been tickling his pet mackerel. We all laugh and I take another gulp of sake. I love sushi and sashimi, the fresher the better, but I’m relieved. A live fish being dispatched, sliced and served up inches away from me is not something I want to see.
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