Midwest Sashimi
Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2016 5:04 am
My throat and stomach have agreed; the disgusting, slimy mass I’m currently chewing will be exiting the way it came.
I was born and raised in the Midwest. I’m a bit more adventurous than your average “meat and potatoes” guy and have certainly tried my fair share of interesting delicacies, but I associate weird and exotic food with weird and exotic people. Every time I see celebrities eating crickets and maggots on faux-survival television programs, I ask myself the same rhetorical question: “Have we run out of hamburgers?” Given the choice I avoid weird and exotic foods (and the places that serve them), but there are occasions — on business outings and formal celebrations, for example — when patronizing them becomes unavoidable. On the rare occasion I do find myself in such an establishment, I avoid foods and ingredients I cannot pronounce and gravitate toward the known.
I’ve never lowered myself to ordering from the children’s section of a restaurant’s menu, but once I came close. On the evening of my niece’s graduation, I found myself uncomfortably sitting inside an authentic Indian restaurant. When our waiter suggested I try the vermicelli, I pilfered a joke from Mel Brooks’ classic film Young Frankenstein and asked if he was referring to the worm or the noodle. When he replied, “Yes?” I came dangerously close to ordering a corn dog before settling for a bowl of mushroom soup.
I can’t say I loved every food I tried growing up in the Midwest, but rarely was I confused as to where they came from or what they were. Corn looked like corn, carrots looked like carrots, and potatoes looked like potatoes. I never cared much for Brussels sprouts or broccoli, but again, at least I could recognize them. My parents taught me at a young age not to put things into my mouth I didn’t recognize. As an adult, I see no reason to stop now.
Because of the Three Stooges, I also learned not to eat things that looked like they could still be alive. Whenever Curly sat down to eat seafood, he either got pinched on the nose by an undercooked crab or spit on by an angry clam. Every time I see a lobster, crab, or crawdad sitting on a plate in a restaurant, I can’t help but think of Curly’s pain, and I fully expect the little crustaceans to scuttle off (or worse, fight back) the minute someone pokes them with a utensil.
It wasn’t until I landed a job at a local chicken restaurant that I discovered people actually ate livers and gizzards. The first time my boss sent me back to the walk-in freezer to fetch a bag of livers, I thought he was pulling my leg.
Moments later, alone, and shivering inside a freezer the size of my bedroom, I discovered he was not. I plunged my arm down into a waist-high metal tub filled with water and ice and pulled out a plastic bag filled with livers soaking in blood. I was barely able to keep myself from throwing up into the tub of ice water and death. When I returned to the kitchen holding the bloody bag of organs as far away from my body as my arm would allow, my manager laughed.
“What makes livers so disgusting and ribs okay to eat?” he asked. Does this need to be explained? Why is it okay to marry your neighbor and not your cousin?
“Just be glad we don’t serve cow tongue,” he said. I laughed, only because I didn’t know people actually ate cow tongues. Twenty years later while standing in front of a taco truck with a group of coworkers, I learned the awful, horrible truth. I thought surely “beef tongue tacos” was slang for something else. While standing with my coworkers in the hot summer sun next to a rusty food truck, I discovered what the buzzing flies already knew.
For lunch, I drank a bottle of pop.
Fortunately, experiences such as that one were the exception. Usually, even at the most exotic of restaurants, I get by. Most seafood restaurants have fried catfish on the menu. Every Polish restaurant that serves blood sausage also serves potato pancakes.
That didn’t help me tonight.
Tonight, thanks to a friend’s promotion, I find myself at a sushi restaurant. There is no teriyaki chicken to be found on the menu for the less adventurous. The menu consists of sushi and sashimi, which my friends are quick to point out are not the same thing; sushi is raw fish served inside rice, while sashimi is raw fish on top of a piece of rice. It is a hazy line in the ocean between the two, at best.
Every ingredient on the menu reminds me of the time my third grade teacher took our class to visit the local aquarium. Eel, octopus, sea urchin and prawn — they were all there at the zoo, and tonight, they’ve been reunited.
Through the process of elimination I have ordered the least offensive sashimi I could find on the menu. I pray that eel sauce is made for eels and not from them, and hope that my meal will arrive with it lightly drizzled atop rather than drenched in it.
Multiple shots of saki have not boosted my courage as quickly as I need them to. As my friends make toasts and laugh, all I can think about is the inevitable. Soon, something strange will be placed on the table before me.
It is not until my dinner arrives that I realize a comma has been dropped in translation. When the waiter sets my plate down, it is immediately obvious that my sashimi does not contain eel sauce, but rather both eel, and sauce. Lined up straighter than a military marching band are six cubes of rice, each one adorned with an oversized slice of raw eel, covered in a light stripe of sauce.
Suddenly I wish it were drenched. In anything.
I am taken back to first grade. In the dirt under the playground’s biggest metal slide, Sally Grone convinced me that earthworms tasted like licorice. She convinced me by digging one out of the ground and pulling it apart with her bare hands. Sally closed her eyes and popped one half in her mouth, chewing and smiling the entire time as she tapped her stomach with her dirty black fingernails. After swallowing, she let out the world’s most satisfied sigh, as if she had just finished her first glass of ice water after crossing the Sahara.
Then it was my turn. Convinced I was about to sample a delicious treat, I stuck the other half of the earthworm in my mouth and began to chew. The worm did not taste like licorice. It tasted like juicy, chewy, fatty, dirt.
My gag reflex ejected the worm back to the hole from which it came. As my stomach continued to heave, Sally Grone clapped and cackled with delight.
“That was gross!” I said, tears mounting.
Sally smiled, revealing tiny bits of worm stuck in between her teeth.
I can’t help but wonder if everyone working in the restaurant knows slices of dead eel covered in what looks like dried blood is disgusting? Is everyone working here in on the joke? Is Sally Grone back there in the kitchen, laughing her head off as she slices up denizens of the sea and attaches them to tiny slabs made of rice before sending them out to customers?
All my friends are devouring their fish and rice and it will soon be obvious I’m not eating mine if I don’t do something soon. The waiter is moving toward us, replacing bottles of saki and refilling water along the way. When he arrives, he will come with questions for me.
The eels look like tapered tongues; smaller than a cow’s and pointed on the ends, just like the Devil’s.
The waiter glides closer, and I wait for my opening. Someone at the table makes a joke. When everyone throws their heads back in laughter, I pick up a disgusting pile of rice and eel and shove it into my mouth.
At first the eel feels like chicken in my mouth, and I do my best to convince my brain that this is the case. But unagi (eel) sashimi is much too large to swallow without chewing, and as my teeth press into it, I realize the eel is chewy. Just like an earthworm.
Somewhere, Sally Grone is cackling.
When the sweet and salty sauce hits the back of my throat, the passage closes. Neither the sauce nor anything it’s slathered on is leaving my mouth that way.
The laughter at the table stops when someone notices my odd behavior and becomes convinced that I am choking. All eyes are on me now, including the waiter’s.
“Is everything okay?” the waiter says with a thick accent. Of course everything is certainly not okay, for neither me nor the eel. My chest spasms from the inside-out. I cover my mouth with my hand, but tiny grains of rice begin to escape from the corners. More is coming.
I leap from the table and, unsure where the bathroom is, run toward the light coming from the front door. My left hand presses hard against my mouth to keep the eel from escaping, while my right arm extends in front of me like a football running back’s, ready to spear anyone between me and the door. My legs are kicking on autopilot, mostly (but not completely) working together to propel me toward the door.
Standing in the aisle is a busboy. In his hands he holds a black plastic tub full of dishes and glasses and rice and whatever fish the last group of customers didn’t finish. As they were in the ocean, there in the plastic tub, the fish are reunited. The busboy sees me coming and whisks the tub to one side like a matador. The busboy spins around, successfully avoiding contact with the American charging bull.
Separating the lobby from the restaurant is a giant aquarium. The water is crystal clear and bluish-white lights make the water glow like a television. Most of the fish in the aquarium are also available on the menu. Maybe, if the price is right, you can scoop your own dinner out with a green fishnet. I wonder if people would eat less meat if steakhouses kept cows in the lobby.
Floating in the aquarium is an eel who stares at me with its unblinking yellow eye as I run by.
He is smiling.
I hit the doors with my shoulder and burst into freedom. Outside, from the sidewalk, the eel joins the earthworm.
Inside the restaurant, my friends are doing a round of saki bombs on the house with our waiter.
The busboy I almost ran over has already forgotten the incident and is in the kitchen, dumping fish into the garbage disposal.
The eel in the aquarium is still smiling.
I was born and raised in the Midwest. I’m a bit more adventurous than your average “meat and potatoes” guy and have certainly tried my fair share of interesting delicacies, but I associate weird and exotic food with weird and exotic people. Every time I see celebrities eating crickets and maggots on faux-survival television programs, I ask myself the same rhetorical question: “Have we run out of hamburgers?” Given the choice I avoid weird and exotic foods (and the places that serve them), but there are occasions — on business outings and formal celebrations, for example — when patronizing them becomes unavoidable. On the rare occasion I do find myself in such an establishment, I avoid foods and ingredients I cannot pronounce and gravitate toward the known.
I’ve never lowered myself to ordering from the children’s section of a restaurant’s menu, but once I came close. On the evening of my niece’s graduation, I found myself uncomfortably sitting inside an authentic Indian restaurant. When our waiter suggested I try the vermicelli, I pilfered a joke from Mel Brooks’ classic film Young Frankenstein and asked if he was referring to the worm or the noodle. When he replied, “Yes?” I came dangerously close to ordering a corn dog before settling for a bowl of mushroom soup.
I can’t say I loved every food I tried growing up in the Midwest, but rarely was I confused as to where they came from or what they were. Corn looked like corn, carrots looked like carrots, and potatoes looked like potatoes. I never cared much for Brussels sprouts or broccoli, but again, at least I could recognize them. My parents taught me at a young age not to put things into my mouth I didn’t recognize. As an adult, I see no reason to stop now.
Because of the Three Stooges, I also learned not to eat things that looked like they could still be alive. Whenever Curly sat down to eat seafood, he either got pinched on the nose by an undercooked crab or spit on by an angry clam. Every time I see a lobster, crab, or crawdad sitting on a plate in a restaurant, I can’t help but think of Curly’s pain, and I fully expect the little crustaceans to scuttle off (or worse, fight back) the minute someone pokes them with a utensil.
It wasn’t until I landed a job at a local chicken restaurant that I discovered people actually ate livers and gizzards. The first time my boss sent me back to the walk-in freezer to fetch a bag of livers, I thought he was pulling my leg.
Moments later, alone, and shivering inside a freezer the size of my bedroom, I discovered he was not. I plunged my arm down into a waist-high metal tub filled with water and ice and pulled out a plastic bag filled with livers soaking in blood. I was barely able to keep myself from throwing up into the tub of ice water and death. When I returned to the kitchen holding the bloody bag of organs as far away from my body as my arm would allow, my manager laughed.
“What makes livers so disgusting and ribs okay to eat?” he asked. Does this need to be explained? Why is it okay to marry your neighbor and not your cousin?
“Just be glad we don’t serve cow tongue,” he said. I laughed, only because I didn’t know people actually ate cow tongues. Twenty years later while standing in front of a taco truck with a group of coworkers, I learned the awful, horrible truth. I thought surely “beef tongue tacos” was slang for something else. While standing with my coworkers in the hot summer sun next to a rusty food truck, I discovered what the buzzing flies already knew.
For lunch, I drank a bottle of pop.
Fortunately, experiences such as that one were the exception. Usually, even at the most exotic of restaurants, I get by. Most seafood restaurants have fried catfish on the menu. Every Polish restaurant that serves blood sausage also serves potato pancakes.
That didn’t help me tonight.
Tonight, thanks to a friend’s promotion, I find myself at a sushi restaurant. There is no teriyaki chicken to be found on the menu for the less adventurous. The menu consists of sushi and sashimi, which my friends are quick to point out are not the same thing; sushi is raw fish served inside rice, while sashimi is raw fish on top of a piece of rice. It is a hazy line in the ocean between the two, at best.
Every ingredient on the menu reminds me of the time my third grade teacher took our class to visit the local aquarium. Eel, octopus, sea urchin and prawn — they were all there at the zoo, and tonight, they’ve been reunited.
Through the process of elimination I have ordered the least offensive sashimi I could find on the menu. I pray that eel sauce is made for eels and not from them, and hope that my meal will arrive with it lightly drizzled atop rather than drenched in it.
Multiple shots of saki have not boosted my courage as quickly as I need them to. As my friends make toasts and laugh, all I can think about is the inevitable. Soon, something strange will be placed on the table before me.
It is not until my dinner arrives that I realize a comma has been dropped in translation. When the waiter sets my plate down, it is immediately obvious that my sashimi does not contain eel sauce, but rather both eel, and sauce. Lined up straighter than a military marching band are six cubes of rice, each one adorned with an oversized slice of raw eel, covered in a light stripe of sauce.
Suddenly I wish it were drenched. In anything.
I am taken back to first grade. In the dirt under the playground’s biggest metal slide, Sally Grone convinced me that earthworms tasted like licorice. She convinced me by digging one out of the ground and pulling it apart with her bare hands. Sally closed her eyes and popped one half in her mouth, chewing and smiling the entire time as she tapped her stomach with her dirty black fingernails. After swallowing, she let out the world’s most satisfied sigh, as if she had just finished her first glass of ice water after crossing the Sahara.
Then it was my turn. Convinced I was about to sample a delicious treat, I stuck the other half of the earthworm in my mouth and began to chew. The worm did not taste like licorice. It tasted like juicy, chewy, fatty, dirt.
My gag reflex ejected the worm back to the hole from which it came. As my stomach continued to heave, Sally Grone clapped and cackled with delight.
“That was gross!” I said, tears mounting.
Sally smiled, revealing tiny bits of worm stuck in between her teeth.
I can’t help but wonder if everyone working in the restaurant knows slices of dead eel covered in what looks like dried blood is disgusting? Is everyone working here in on the joke? Is Sally Grone back there in the kitchen, laughing her head off as she slices up denizens of the sea and attaches them to tiny slabs made of rice before sending them out to customers?
All my friends are devouring their fish and rice and it will soon be obvious I’m not eating mine if I don’t do something soon. The waiter is moving toward us, replacing bottles of saki and refilling water along the way. When he arrives, he will come with questions for me.
The eels look like tapered tongues; smaller than a cow’s and pointed on the ends, just like the Devil’s.
The waiter glides closer, and I wait for my opening. Someone at the table makes a joke. When everyone throws their heads back in laughter, I pick up a disgusting pile of rice and eel and shove it into my mouth.
At first the eel feels like chicken in my mouth, and I do my best to convince my brain that this is the case. But unagi (eel) sashimi is much too large to swallow without chewing, and as my teeth press into it, I realize the eel is chewy. Just like an earthworm.
Somewhere, Sally Grone is cackling.
When the sweet and salty sauce hits the back of my throat, the passage closes. Neither the sauce nor anything it’s slathered on is leaving my mouth that way.
The laughter at the table stops when someone notices my odd behavior and becomes convinced that I am choking. All eyes are on me now, including the waiter’s.
“Is everything okay?” the waiter says with a thick accent. Of course everything is certainly not okay, for neither me nor the eel. My chest spasms from the inside-out. I cover my mouth with my hand, but tiny grains of rice begin to escape from the corners. More is coming.
I leap from the table and, unsure where the bathroom is, run toward the light coming from the front door. My left hand presses hard against my mouth to keep the eel from escaping, while my right arm extends in front of me like a football running back’s, ready to spear anyone between me and the door. My legs are kicking on autopilot, mostly (but not completely) working together to propel me toward the door.
Standing in the aisle is a busboy. In his hands he holds a black plastic tub full of dishes and glasses and rice and whatever fish the last group of customers didn’t finish. As they were in the ocean, there in the plastic tub, the fish are reunited. The busboy sees me coming and whisks the tub to one side like a matador. The busboy spins around, successfully avoiding contact with the American charging bull.
Separating the lobby from the restaurant is a giant aquarium. The water is crystal clear and bluish-white lights make the water glow like a television. Most of the fish in the aquarium are also available on the menu. Maybe, if the price is right, you can scoop your own dinner out with a green fishnet. I wonder if people would eat less meat if steakhouses kept cows in the lobby.
Floating in the aquarium is an eel who stares at me with its unblinking yellow eye as I run by.
He is smiling.
I hit the doors with my shoulder and burst into freedom. Outside, from the sidewalk, the eel joins the earthworm.
Inside the restaurant, my friends are doing a round of saki bombs on the house with our waiter.
The busboy I almost ran over has already forgotten the incident and is in the kitchen, dumping fish into the garbage disposal.
The eel in the aquarium is still smiling.
