Are You Eating Sushi the Right Way?

If you dip the rice in the soy sauce, you will make the sushi chef sad

Sushi-making class at The Sakai Tokyo in Roppongi. (All photos by author.)

Hello readers! How often do you eat sushi?
Do you think Japanese people eat sushi frequently?

You may be surprised to learn the answer is no. According to myVoice survey, Japanese people eat sushi only a month on average, or 2 to 3 times a month at the most.

However, due to my business involving sushi-making classes at high-end restaurants, I eat sushi 4 times a week. Fortunately, I love sushi so I don’t mind eating it every day.

While providing sushi-making classes, I realized that many foreign tourists didn’t know the proper way to eat sushi so I thought I would write it here.

So let’s start by checking if you’re eating correctly or not.

1. Do you put the soy sauce on the fish, or on the rice?
Sushi chefs are sad to see rice dissolving in the soy sauce plate if you put the soy sauce on the rice. Just put the soy sauce on the tip of the sushi. Many high-end sushi restaurants brush the appropriate amount of soy sauce onto the sushi so you don’t need to dip the piece into the soy sauce at all and spoil the sushi.

2. Do you eat from the fish side or the rice side?
When you eat sushi, put the fish on your tongue, not the rice, so that you can enjoy the taste of fish and condiment (soy sauce or salt) first, followed by the balance of vinegared rice. The best sushi restaurants makes sushi rice airy so the sushi seems to dissolves in your mouth.

By watching how you eat, whether you are eating with your fingers or comfortable using chopsticks, the sushi chef will change how he serves you. If he sees you having trouble with chopsticks, he will make the sushi rice firmer so it doesn’t fall apart. He will change the direction of the sushi depending on whether you are right-handed or left-handed to make it easier to eat it. If you are right-handed and your friend is left-handed, you will notice that the sushi placed on the plates in opposite directions.

I am right-handed so the chef placed the sushi diagonal like this to make it easy to pick it up.

3. Do you eat sushi with chopsticks or your fingers?
You may think it’s strange or rude to eat sushi with your fingers, sushi is finger food. Delicious nigiri sushi is airy. When they make nigiri, watch closely how they do it. You might see the sushi chef making a dent in the center, which they call the airhole.

I have been to many famous sushi restaurants including Sukiyabashi Jiro, Sushi Saito, and Kyubei. Their sushi rice is airy. I like affordable conveyor belt sushi, too, but traditional red vinegar sushi rice is authentic and tastes better. (I wrote an article about Japanese vinegars, including sake lees red vinegar you can read here.)

Mr. Shigeru Ninomiya from The Sakai Tokyo showing sushi ingredients

Lastly, make sure you talk freely to the sushi chef. They enjoying talking with customers. Tell them what you like and what you don’t like in omakase. They will tell you many details, like the kind of tuna they are using, and where and how it was caught. They will tell you which fish is in season and what they chose at the Toyosu fish market that the morning.

Michelin-starred and other high-end sushi restaurants want to buy fresh bluefin tuna from the side of the fish which didn’t face the ground. At the fish auction, the tuna is usually placed with the head on the right and the tail on the left. Whether frozen or fresh, right side head, left side tail. That is the rule. So the left side of the body touching the ground will be compressed due to weight of the fish. So the right side is more expensive than the left, and the stomach area more expensive than the tail. (From the picture below of the tuna auction observatory deck, you would see it opposite, head side on the left, and the body side on the right but do notice that the stomach side is above. The tuna bidders on the floor look at the tuna from the opposite side.)

Toyosu fish market auction site from the observation deck: Face on the left, tail on the right. The chopped-off defrosted tail is essential to identify the fattiness.

Thanks to all the fish vendors and sushi chefs I meet almost every day as a foreign media coordinator and cultural experience provider, have provided deep insights into the industry.

Thanks to Mikami-san for all the knowledge I got about tuna!

Here is a video from Singapore National TV Channel 8 featuring the closing of Tsukiji fish market and the opening of the new Toyosu fish market in 2018. (Sorry it’s in Chinese but you will find me there in the video.)

If you are interested in learning more about the fish market or sushi making, please send me a message! (I appear in Best Ever Food Review Show on YouTube introducing about fish market here. )