Fishy Decisions

I’m an adventurous eater. I’ll try anything. I’d even consider eating a person if it was on the menu, provided the person was a serial killer, a genocidal fascist, or one of those jabronis who tailgates me when I’m driving the canyon—ya know, people you could justify sending to the slaughterhouse. So when some of our best friends suggested we try omakase at a Michelin-starred restaurant, I was all in.

My favorite feeling, especially in a restaurant.

Omakase, if you’re unfamiliar, is a Japanese phrase that translates as follows: "I leave it up to you." I often subscribe to an English version of this philosophy when I go out to eat. “Surprise me,” I say, when the server takes my order. Some servers are cool about this, others don’t like the pressure, and my casual approach to ordering sends them into a panic attack.

“What if you don’t like it?” the server sometimes asks.

“I’m wondering the same thing,” I tell the server. Then I lean forward in a semi-creepy fashion and whisper, “Isn’t the suspense wonderful?”

“Do you have any preferences? Like is there anything you love or hate?”

“I prefer not to micromanage a professional of your stature.”

“Um…”

“Go. Choose my gastronomical fate. Believe in yourself, my friend.”

So I was excited to go to a restaurant anchored by the same type of chaotic guiding principle that I use to navigate most menus. I also liked that this omakase dinner was going to be high stakes. After wine and sake, it was a $500 dinner for my wife and me. Maybe for some of you big ballers out there, that’s a reasonable price tag. For my wife and me, it was more than our car payment. Our justifications were as follows:

• We were coming out of COVID, and we hadn’t been to a nice dinner in way too long.

• We were going with some of our favorite people, and historically, our favorite dinners are less about the food we eat and more about the people sitting with us.

• It was a new experience. Novelty makes for great stories. Usually.

• We’d eaten plenty of sushi over the years, but it never felt authentic. Like, the sushi we’d eaten was Japanese in the same way that Taco Bell is Mexican. Not really.

We got to the restaurant where a lovely hostess checked us in and waxed poetic on the chef, his background, his training, his culinary aesthetic, and the artistic philosophy that informed his sushi-making processes. It added mystique and foreshadowing. By the time she finished talking, I was certain that schools of fish were surrendering themselves to this chef’s nets, eager to be part of his oeuvre. His knife skills could turn cucumbers into sculptural monuments. His sauces could bring people back from the dead. He was a transcendent artist, I was sure.

This guy was more storyteller than chef.

Next, the hostess invited us to sit, eight of us total, our party of four and two other couples—a small, intimate seating. Plexiglass partitions separated us from the 4’x10’ kitchen where the chef would be orchestrating our culinary fates. Ornate ceramic containers were arranged all over the counters, filled with any number of seafood delights, mysteries waiting to be sliced, pressed, rolled, garnished and dolloped.

One thing gave me pause. Directly in front of us, on the other side of the plexiglass, stretched something that looked like an unused prop from the first Alien movie. It resembled a dark red umbrella handle, and two black pupils revealed that it was, at some point, a living thing. My wife couldn’t take her eyes off it, the way my son can’t take his eyes off a clown.

”Are you okay?” I asked her.

”What is that?” she said.

“That’s Chekhov’s gun.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Chekhov’s gun is that storytelling principle that says if you hang a gun over the mantle in the first act of a play, you have to pull the trigger in the second act.”

“Well, if the chef puts that on my plate, he better have a gun if he wants me to eat it.”

This is what the fish looked like to my wife when we sat down to dinner.

After a couple sips of sake, the chef materialized into the kitchen from behind a velvet curtain and began brandishing a small arsenal of knives, each one long, slender, and fit for a museum. He said nothing as he sharpened his knives and nothing as he prepped the first course. Initially, his silence felt a bit unsettling, but there was nothing he could have said to prepare me for that first bite.

I recall the taste and texture in vivid detail—lukewarm fishy slime. I’m pretty sure that’s not what it was called, but that’s what you would call it if you were going for literalness. I choked it down. There was resistance. Not from me. I was trying to end the experience of that bite as soon as possible by fast-tracking it to my colon. The resistance came from the bite itself. It seemed as if the bite was crawling back up my throat, to get access to my brain through my sinus cavity.

A fairly accurate representation of my reaction to my first bite of omakase.

I excused myself to the bathroom, where I pounded my chest and jumped up and down for thirty seconds, befriending gravity so that it would save me from what was sure to be some sort of demonic possession or parasitic takeover.

I returned to my seat. I noticed my wife had requested a stack of napkins. She had already vacated the bite from her reality and left it half chewed in her first linen napkin. We stared at each other, the dread palpable between us. This was just the first course of twenty. To be clear, though, we were the only ones feeling this way. Our friends and the other two couples had what my wife later described as “sushi boners.” They were all about the lukewarm fishy slime.

That was about the limit of my wife’s omakase capacity. Moving forward, she passed every one of her bites to me. And because we were already in for a car payment, I ate everything put in front of me. Sauces that looked like marinated entrails. Foams that elicited images of toilet water in backed up beach bathrooms. Chunks of fish that solidified my belief in UFOs. Garnishes fit for a dinner in the Temple of Doom.

The Temple of Doom may have been catered by a Michelin-starred chef.

The chef worked sea urchin into several courses. Many friends have expressed to me their love of sea urchin. They concede that it’s an acquired taste, but over several of the courses I tried, I failed to acquire anything except that sensation that a dying mermaid had just taken a shit in my mouth.

Finally, we arrived at the climax, the second act, the Chekhov’s gun, the alien umbrella fish. I have since learned that it is technically called a red cornetfish. With a theatrical flourish, the chef hoisted the alien monstrosity aloft. All of the diners, myself included, offered a gentle applause, which was weird. It’s an odd thing to celebrate one’s own spiritual execution. My jaw tightened in preemptive rebellion.

Quickly, precisely, the chef dismembered the cornetfish, slicing it into thin, translucent sheets. He assembled the pieces into rose-like forms and arranged them on a sushi boat, flanking the pieces with the still-intact head and eyes of the alien fish. He garnished it with gold leaf and a drizzle of something that looked like liquified soullessness.

This effectively captures the psychological state of that last bite.

The boat was placed in front of us, and my wife insisted that she was full and selflessly abdicated her portion to me. I took up my chopsticks and pinched the otherworldly flesh between the metal tips. I brought it to my lips and it occurred to me that I had run a marathon that was easier on my soul than this omakase dinner. As I placed the bite into my mouth, I made direct eye contact with the beady little eyes of the cornetfish. Rebelliously and victoriously, I chewed that little bastard until I could force it down my gullet. It was nowhere near as bad form as the sea urchin, but I was twenty rounds in. My spirit was taxed.

The chef took a bow and the rest of the diners clapped him out, overwhelmed by their lingering sushi boners. And to be clear, I’m happy for them. I am definitely the philistine in this situation, the one lacking in sophistication and refinement. I am the one who failed to fully appreciate the chef’s artistry, the one whose palate wasn’t evolved enough to savor the intricacies of each bite. And while I own my sushi-related erectile dysfunction, I stand by the spirit of omakase. Surrendering to the chaos beyond the familiar makes for the best kind of life, even when it involves the excrement of dying mermaids.

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Thanks for reading. If you liked this recount of shenanigans, consider reading some of my other posts, like:

Manslaughter, Santa Claus, and a Hatchet, in which I attempt to create my own holiday tradition that goes absolutely sideways. Or…

The Finger, a story about how teenaged boys handled dismemberment in a the pre-cellphone days of old. Or…

Parenting, Pranks, and Pappo, a tribute to my dad who is to pranking as Picasso is to painting. Or…

Marriage Boot Camp, an archive of my wife’s crazy-making across Europe. Or… if you’re in the market for some light reading about dark characters making bad decisions, consider picking up my new dark crime comedy novella, Dig.