The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones

by Anthony Bourdain

And then there's sushi, and the sushi bar. To say that chefs have always been well disposed toward sushi and sashimi would be an understatement. No single development in Western gastronomy has changed our lives as drastically or as well as that first moment when Americans and English-speaking restaurantgoers decided they could let go of their instinctive wariness of raw fish—that sashimi and sushi were cool and desirable and worth paying for. From a marketing standpoint, the spread of sushi lifted all boats for all chefs. Now that there was always a Japanese chef willing to pay twice the going rate for quality seafood, standards shot through the roof. And more importantly, the choices of ingredients we could reliably expect to sell our customers expanded. Customers willing to eat eel, sea urchin, belly tuna, and monkfish liver meant that French and Italian and American chefs could now offer the neglected, nearly forgotten traditional items once almost impossible to sneak onto our menus; we were now free to serve the oily, bony, squiggly, and delicious delights like octopus, mackerel, rouget, and fresh sardines that we had always loved—and that had always been essential parts of our various "mother" cuisines. Just as importantly, chefs liked to eat sushi. It was a flavor spectrum markedly different from what we were elbow deep in all our working days. Freshness and quality were immediately apparent—just look in the display—and gratifyingly devoid of disguise or extravagant ...