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Cool, so I can bring in a hotplate and sautee them before I eat them. No rule against that
So ketchup on sushi is acceptable
baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarf
but funny, yeah
I assume it’s fine as long as you don’t get any on the rice
I have never seen a sign saying I shouldn’t cut spaghetti, shouldn’t order pizza Hawaii, must split the potato with a fork, must have the knife in my right hand, or that the different cutlery for side dishes are mandatory.
Might be different in a high class restaurant, but whatever.
The only things signs in restaurants tell me is either “we only serve real meat, pussies can beat it” and “we did indeed pass the last inspection, here’s the grossest looking cartoon implying we shouldn’t have”.
None of this is mandatory, the sign says so. They’re social norms, not legal rules. It’s just saying “this is how this food is consumed in its original country, and breaking these norms may result in inadvertently offending someone or embarrassing yourself”, which might be something you’d like to know if you plan to travel to that country, or simply to try experiencing it in the traditional way - after all, most social norms have a hidden logical reason. Many of these exist simply to avoid making a mess.
You’re free to eat however you want, however some cultures do place a lot of significance on food and how it is consumed. People in Italy will lose some respect for you if you try to order a Hawaii pizza, put ketchup on pasta, or use a knife improperly. The same goes for Japan and many other places. You’ll still be served and probably treated with superficial kindness, it just depends on how much weight you put on your experience vs that of others.
I have read the sign, yes, but you have to agree that a sign saying these are big taboos and that it is seen as an offense to Japanese culture and to the chef if I broke them makes it seem like I will be blacklisted and kicked out.
What I didn’t know was where exactly the restaurant is, the people in Italy can after all think whatever they want when the Italian chef is in Sri Lanka and happy to acclimate to local customs.
So anyways, the restaurant is probably “Sushi Kisen” in California, it seems to be a high class one. Given that I am probably expected to identify a salad fork in an equivalent french restaurant, and I don’t sit in front of the chef in that one. They probably in a position to make these demands of their customers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-gp-xjCUjU
You won’t last long in Italy.
I love seeing everyone try to reason their way out of accepting a polite request that literally says that it’s not mandatory.
Now in fairness we dont know how high end this Sushi place is, if its a place where your paying for the experience its more understandable but It does read a little bit passive agressive.
The only one I really would avoid is passing things between or touching chopsticks together. This is reminiscent of Japanese funeral rituals and thus considered rude to do at the table.
The others are more about common sense and trying to help you enjoy the sushi as the chef intended:
- They are bite-sized pieces, designed as a flavour combination, so don’t break them up in any way
- If you don’t want rice, sashimi is a good way to get that
- Putting too much soy sauce on the rice can make it fall apart
- (real) Wasabi is delicate and mixing it with soy sauce will certainly destroy its subtle flavour. In any case in a high-end place the sushi chef will have added everything that’s intended as part of the flavour combination before serving the sushi, so adding stuff is not necessary
But again, these are suggestions. Enjoy the sushi how you like, you’re not hurting anyone.
You still add Wasabi and soy sauce before eating though.
Both? I always do one or another. It’s nice variety too, if you have an entire roll of the same thing.
I was taught to pass food with the back end of the chopsticks, not the part that goes in your mouth. Is that your understanding as well?
Passing to their plate, not their chopsticks.
Wait, you don’t pick it off the leaf on the person, and put it directly in your friend’s mouth?
No, but I prechew it for them for easy digestion. Its a courtesy in my culture.
Generally, if you want to pass food to someone, put it on a plate so they can pick it up themselves.
The only reason to use the back of the chopsticks, is if there is a shared plate of food in the center without a separate set of serving chopsticks. Taking from the shared plate with chopsticks that have been in your mouth could be considered unhygienic. You can use the back of the chopsticks to move the food to your own plate, then eat it.
However this is more like advanced etiquette and not a crucial rule, in my opinion. The only really bad things to avoid are sticking your chopsticks upright into rice and passing food between chopsticks.
well put. and I’d add: support your local talent.
Seattle’s best bang-for-the-buck experience hands down, Shiki, in lower queen anne. One of the few places certified to server Fugu, but even if you don’t go for the exotic stuff, an amazing spot.
Yep. To turn the tables, is anyone going to stop you if you order a well-done steak and douse it in ketchup? Probably not unless you’re at a very high end establishment, but will it come off as uncultured, rude to the chef and raise a few eyebrows? You bet.
Likewise, there are Italian places where they will outright refuse to cut your pizza for you or to put parmesan on seafood pasta. British high tea is loaded with rules for serving and consumption order. Lots of cultures have these rules and expectations.
This is a helpful guide to general politeness and etiquette in a culture that highly prizes those things. It’s meant to be helpful to those who care. Why people are shitting on it as some show of defiance is beyond me and comes off childish as all hell.
Lemmites love being difficult thran bastards.
When I lived in Japan (around 15 years ago, so etiquette might have changed since then) it was common to take the fish off of the rice and dip it in soy sauce, then put it back on the rice bed in instances where it was just placed atop the rice. Likewise, it was perfectly fine to mix wasabi into your soy sauce.
I’ve done things that way since without any overt disdain, so I think these are generally good guidelines, but you can probably get away with doing some things your own way.
So am I supposed to flip the sushi over to dip the fish side in the soy sauce? That seems a bit awkward
But yes, you’re supposed to flip the nigiri 90+ degrees when dunking. It’s why I usually just stick to the sashimi. 9/10 chance I drop the chunk in the sauce. Can’t go wrong with that.
All within 30 seconds after waiting 20 minutes to get a tray of 4.
It’s actually culturally appropriate to eat sushi with your hands if you want, making the turn over dipping easier. The only reason they say not to dip the rice side is the worry that it’ll soak up too much soy sauce and the fish flavor will be overpowered. But it’s not that big a deal.
The passing food from one set of chopsticks to another is pretty strictly avoided in Japan though. They pass bones like that as part of funerary rites so it’s pretty closely wired into Japanese people as a cultural taboo.
3 bucks for some extra wasabi and ginger?! That better be the real stuff for that price
Real wasabi is way more expensive than $3.
What’s with the wasabi and soy mixing? I saw someone do that recently for the first time. He looked very confident at it and I assumed i had been doing it wrong all this time. Why is mixing a thing suddenly?
It depends. In really high-end and authentic sushi restaurant, there is already wasabi between the fish and the rice. You are supposed to dip the fish side in the soy sauce only.
On the other hand, it’s okay to mix the wasabi if the sushi is not prepared that way. People do this even in Japan.
My Japanese friend did this. I always wondered if you was meant to (I seen them do it on Jackass).
Since then I just assumed it was the right thing to do.
the one where Steve-O snorts the wasabi?
Haha yea.
I hadn’t seen wasabi before so I always remembered it and wondered what wasabi tasted like.
It’s just personal preference.
I learnt it from a chef in Japan in 2009, and I assume he had been doing it for many years at that time.
Generally, that’s something done at a sushi train restaurant where the dishes won’t have wasabi in them already. I’m guessing these notes are for a sushi restaurant where the chef prepares the sushi specifically for each customer, so if you wanted wasabi they’d put it in the sushi itself.
People in Japan do it all the time. Ideally, the chef would get the proper amount of wasabi on everything and you wouldn’t need/want to do it, but that is not always the case. It is generally looked on more favorably to dab some wasabi on each piece rather than mixing, though.
Why is mixing a thing suddenly?
Definitely not new, people have been doing this since at least the 90s, when I was a kid.
I also know plenty of Japanese people who say dipping the rice lightly into soy sauce is the correct method, so take literally any “sushi etiquette” guide with a grain of salt.
Eat your food in whatever way brings you joy. Anyone that says otherwise is a pointlessly-gatekeeping idiot.
I like my sushi with ketchup
BLOCKED!
I like mine with mayo
I think that’s fine. You can put mayo and spring onions on every dish and it’ll look more Japanese in my opinion. There is no reason to be cheap with the mayo anyways. Never.
A few local places incorporate mayo into so many of their rolls that I actually avoid those places because with me not really liking mayo, I can only order from like 30% of their menu.
The proper authority has been notified.
Come at me bro! Ketchup is good with everything. And I’m willing to die on this hill. Name me one thing that is not better with ketchup and I’ll tell you you’re wrong.
Breakfast cereals
Cotton candy
Bananas
The GameBoy.
Gameboys aren’t edible, but with ketchup, you can at least lick off the ketchup
Strawberries? White wine?
You’re wrong
You’re loony!
You MONSTER!
That’s true. On the other hand, frying a good piece of beef beyond well-done also isn’t how it’s supposed to be. It’ll just get dry and destroy the thing. And similarly, if you put a high quality piece of raw salmon on rice and then proceed to make it just taste of too much wasabi and salty soy sauce, makes the salmon kinda pointless. I’m not sure. People do all kinds of silly stuff with foreign food. Including mixing all the sauce, wasabi and ginger and stuffing it in their mouths… There are worse sins available to do, but I always wonder what kind of taste buds these people have.
I mean I don’t care about that stuff too much. I just put whatever I like on sushi. I think that happens to align with what is deemed appropriate. It’s a bit boring without salt, but I want to taste the fish and rice so I use the sauce sparingly. In the end the important thing with food is that it ends up in my stomach and feeds me.
I can taste the fish quite well with soy sauce and wasabi. The saltiness raises specific flavor profiles and the wasabi kicks as those profiles are coming down. Don’t put your mouth feel on someone else unless it’s identical (it’s probably not).
The more important difference is the quality of the meal. I’ll do whatever I want with low- and mid-tier meals. I don’t know about you; my dining out budget isn’t regularly hundreds of dollars a plate so it doesn’t really matter what the chef intended they can’t express it that well at that price point.
My budget for going out also isn’t that high. But I don’t think there is a strict correlation between price and tastiness of food anyways. Sure it’ll get more fancy the more you pay. And there is some minimum if you want some quality. But after that it’s not necessarily getting more and more tasty. At least in my opinion. I’m perfectly fine with the more affordable food. Some nice Tantanmen ramen every now and then, or those tasty rice bowls with tofu and minced meat. Or middle eastern food. That’s almost always nice. It’s not super cheap, but doesn’t cost an arm and a leg either. Unfortunately my favorite pizza and burrito place isn’t around anymore.
There are some exceptions to the rule though. Some ingredients are just pricey. But I really don’t need those kinds of things on a regular basis. Sushi also isn’t something I get often.
I found that I liked bibimbap in the stone pot, and ate it a few times enjoying it, before one time one of the Korean waitresses saw me eating it unmixed as it had come out, grabbed my bowl away from me, squirted a bunch of the hot sauce into it, mixed it aggressively for me with my spoon, and then handed it back to me explaining that that’s the way to do it and I should do it that way from now on. And, some of my friends were in Thailand and had some kind of dessert come out for them that was in the shape of a snowman, and they had a member of their party who was a big fat guy, and when the food came out all the wait staff started messing with him that he and the snowman were the same shape.
I feel like Japan got all the politeness for the whole region rerouted to them and everyone else just kind does whatever kind of elbow-jabbing food-correcting baldness-making-fun-of thing that comes into their head to feel like doing at whatever time and if you don’t like it you can deal with that on your own.
Asia in general is just much more “honest” than the West. If you’re fat, they won’t beat around the bush and say “you’re beautiful the way you are.” If you’re ugly, they won’t hide in platitudes, they’ll say “damn, it must suck that you’re so ugly.”
It’s not malicious, these are simply facts that they don’t ignore. And, to be honest, I think it’s healthier in a lot of ways. The west has a ridiculously massive weight problem that we just completely ignore - or even actively support - because people are afraid to make anyone feel bad.
I took the phone to do a video chat with someone’s central Asian friend and he immediately said “Aw, shit, big fake American smile.” I sort of checked myself like yeah he’s right I do have a big fake bullshit meeting-someone smile on my face. Well now I feel like a dummy.
It gave me some cultural perspective.
Hehe. Yeah, Bibimbap is Korean. So not exactly the same thing. And as far as I know the word literally means “mixing” and “rice”. I think it’s really tasty. And it comes pretty spicy in the restaurants I’ve had it (Which is far away from Korea.)
love me some authentic Bulgogi though
I’ll try to order that next time.
I mix my wasabi and soy sauce every time. I also dip my sushi in this mixture rice-side down. I’ve never had anyone complain about this. If any sushi chef ever does complain I will just leave and never give business to that gas station again.
gas station
Gottem
Please shut the fuck up im trying to eat
Wasabi and soy sauce one is a lie. You are also supposed to eat ginger before and after every dish
Yea I was like WTF. I went to Japan for work for several months and when the guys at Yokohama office took me eating sushi that’s what they did.
Don’t mix wasabi with soy sauce? So… chuck it into your mouth like a gumball?
No, you broken chopstick, you dab a little on your sushi if you want extra. Moreover, most of the wasabi in the West is just green horseradish. Real wasabi is a root that comes from a river and tastes nothing like what we commonly find outside of Japan.
The tradition of adding it to sushi remains even if the wasabi we’re given isn’t wasabi.
How bad is it if I enjoy mixing soy sauce and fake wasabi and shower it over my pieces?
This feel like the whole “chefs are insulted if you order well done steak” thing. I get the sentiment, and you probably can’t show the limits of your skill with a well done steak, but the customer isn’t going to enjoy it more if you give them what they don’t want.
You do you my man. Go hogwild.
So it’s not actually wasabi and then it’s OK to mix it with the soy?
Er, what if it’s not actually soy sauce? Like, imitation or reduced sodium soy sauce? I can’t handle this.
What if it’s not sushi but instead the Double Decker from KFC?
When I was in Japan, you could indicate when ordering whether you wanted wasabi and the chef would place a dab between the rice and the fish. My understanding is that real wasabi loses flavour very fast after being grated. Placing it so it doesn’t contact air helps to preserve flavour.
I would not say real wasabi tastes nothing like the horseradish fake. You can tell the plant is still part of the horseradish/mustard family. It’s definitely a more “clean” flavour though. It’s pretty easy to tell when you get the real thing. The fake stuff looks like a quite intensely green uniform mushy paste. The real stuff looks a bit like grated ginger, but with a pale green colour, often with some variation in colouration.
Thanks for the explanation, now that makes sense. I feel like dabbing a small piece of wasabi on the sushi makes an uneven taste when you first chuck it in your mouth, that’s why I’ve always mixed it with the soy sauce so it’s spread evenly. Having it integrated into the sushi when it’s made makes sense.
This seems like one of those higher end sushi counters, where you get one or two pieces at a time. You generally shouldn’t put rice in the soy sauce as the rice would fall apart. And you really shouldn’t pass the sushi with your chopsticks to another set of chopsticks. All of the other things are fine in an izakaya setting. A colleague of mine who was in sales and had to make sure to cater to our customer’s wishes was absolutely fine with mixing wasabi with the soy sauce for example. She one hundred percent knew about etiquette.
My question is…how do you eat it within 30 seconds? I get that this type of etiquette exists in many different cultures but while I have never eaten sushi, I don’t exactly get how that one is even possible?
The context of this sign being in a sushi restaurant would be the key here. In higher-end, “omakase” sushi restaurants, you’ll be served a set of sushi piece by piece as the chef makes it in front of you. Typically you’ll want to eat it as soon as it is placed on your plate.
I always find such guidelines strange. Like I get the intention is to share some experience, but I rarely find the intended way of anything enjoyable at all. Even western traditional etiquette is weird. I shall hold the fork in my right hand and you can’t stop me aunty! My tea shall be hot juice! And my side shall be mixed with the sauce and meat into a big ol pile before consumption!
I switch my knife and fork as I need to use them, knife in right hand when I need to cut and fork in right hand to eat, that’s all I know how to do 🤷
This one is hilarious to me. Let’s get you a spork
I mean I can use the fork in my left hand to help cut something with my knife in the right hand but lifting to my mouth? Nope brain no work
I do that too and I couldn’t properly cut anything with the knife on my left hand if my life depended on it lol. It’s interesting that I don’t think anyone taught me to switch, I just instinctively did that and they rolled with it.
Yeah I don’t believe most of these are real “big taboos” and will continue eating food the way it is most tasty to do, regardless, thanks.
