From simply cooked Spanish prawns and sustainable Maine scallops to herb-scented Finnish fish soup, Japanese oysters and a citrussy tuna salad from Indonesia, explore a bountiful catch from around the world. These recipes, food experiences and ingredients from coastal communities both near and far will inspire fish-focused adventures in the kitchen and on your travels. And while this seafood menu is fresh, light and summery, it also includes some filling and fiery options, too, whether it’s Tuscan fish stew, Singaporean chilli crab or Sri Lankan fish curry.
Japan
A raw food delicacy often downed whole in fine-dining restaurants, oysters are a revelation to be savoured in Japan’s informal izakaya bars, where they’re cooked and served steaming, and even wrapped in pork rashers. Words: Jo Davey
Folding into a small wooden seating space, barely two feet wide, I glance up at a chalkboard. Scrawled on it is today’s menu, an artistic rendering of a language it’s easier to recognise when written in a crisp computer font but trickier when handwritten. Typed menus aren’t common in izakayas, Japan’s traditional bar-restaurants that fall somewhere between a gastropub, tavern and tapas bar, but thankfully my local companion offers to make the order —as she does so I can make out the word ‘kaki’: oysters.
Whenever oysters are on the menu, I have to prepare myself. Rather than whinny with delight at an oncoming icy platter of briny bivalves, I see it more as something of an unpleasant necessity, albeit one worth being undertaken by any self-respecting gourmand.
To most people, though, oysters signal the finest haute cuisine and that’s certainly the case in Japan. The country’s almost 400 Michelin-starred restaurants are awash with them, raw, garnished and citrus-spritzed.
My companion tells me the oysters served here at Kakigoya, an izakaya in the Fukuromachi area of Hiroshima, are the best he’s had anywhere. I nod, pasting on a smile as thick as the ceramic dish that thuds on the heavy wood table in the customarily dimly lit venue. But there’s not a sparkling ice shard in sight: instead, there’s a pile of bacon-wrapped goodies glistening with grease. And they smell glorious.
Each is a sweet-salty parcel that when bitten —a novelty itself for many oyster eaters who gulp, not bite —bursts with juice and umami. Suddenly, finally, I get what oysters are about.
Believed to have been eaten in Japan since the paleolithic Jōmon period (circa 14,000 BCE), oysters have become a millennia-long staple for the masses. And for all its reputation as a nation of raw seafood lovers, Japan consumes more cooked oysters than uncooked, a
