MOTTAINAI

We practice a philosophy called Mottainai which means we don’t waste any food – we try to use everything we buy. We always save the heads and all the bones. Usually we make broth with it, but if we don’t need to make broth, we will eat it for “family”. This is a local porgy. Porgy is a very underutilized fish because it’s very small and it requires a lot of work -getting pin bones, taking skins off… A lot of people don’t use it. I never see porgy on the menu unless it is served like whole and fried. It’s really a delicious and special fish. So we have been using it a lot lately. I think it should be one of the nicest fish on the market, but the market is determined by the customer demands and a lot of people aren’t aware of it or just don’t want to use them.

“We practice a philosophy called Mottainai, which means we don’t waste any food – we try to use everything we buy”

A lot of fish have teeth. You don’t really think about them or see them, but porgy especially. They have rows of them. They eat a lot of small shellfish and shelled animals like crab. Their teeth break through the shells and they end up taking on the flavor of the things they eat. To me it tastes just like crab, the texture of the skin and meat.

It’s like that with seafood. With meat the animals are on farms and are eating the same thing, but fish are eating different things in the water. It’s really interesting when you eat a blue fish that eats a lot of squid. You get to learn all those flavors. It’s totally seasoned by nature.

FISH TAILS

Because the porgy is a very small fish, we break it down and cut off sashimi from each loin. But at the end of the loin, which happens very quickly, the tail gets too chewy. We usually cut down to the tail ends, and then we don’t serve the tail ends but we save them for “family”. That’s a thing we can always have for family, sashimi tails.