Tuna in Los Angeles Never Tasted This Good
Tuna in Los Angeles Never Tasted This Good
The chef Junya Yamasaki taught ike-jime and shinkei-jime to a handful of small commercial fisherman. Now, there's a new kind of bluefin tuna in town.
Photographs by David Gurzhiev
This article contains graphic depictions of killing fish.
“Get something into these things, they are size nice!” Conner Mitchell shouts from the helm of his 34-foot Boston Whaler back to Danny Miller and Bailey Raith, who are scrambling to get their fishing rods in the Pacific waters off Catalina Island. It’s the last day of August, just under halfway through the season for California bluefin tuna, and the three fishermen are hoping to bring at least one, although ideally more, iridescent 100- to 200-pounders—with their silver-blue scales, small yellow fins, and fatty, fresh flavor—back to shore, where they will end up in the hands of a lucky few Los Angeles chefs. One of them is Miller, who also works for Mitchell as the chef de cuisine at Dudley Market, the seafood-focused restaurant he owns (and fishes for) in Venice. Another is Junya Yamasaki, the chef of the critically acclaimed progressive Japanese restaurant Yess, who is also on the boat, decked in a black cotton sunhat and waterproof tabi booties.
Soon enough, all four of them have mobilized, their shoes squeaking across the boat’s damp floor, working swiftly in tandem to reel in their first catch of the day. It’s 11:45 a.m., about five hours since we departed the dock at Marina del Rey. Mitchell has taken off his Dudley Market hoodie emblazoned with the coordinates in which he caught his largest bluefin tuna (over 300 pounds) to date and is hunched over his rod, turning the handle at rapid speed. Then Yamasaki hops in to take over. Then Raith. Within ten minutes, an 89-pound bluefin tuna is hanging off the side of the boat, and it’s time to ike-jime.
Ike-jime and shinkei-jime are Japanese methods of killing fish that are more humane and that better preserve the quality of a fish, resulting in fish with a longer shelf life that is richer in color with a cleaner flavor and a more desirable texture. First, a fisherman performs ike-jime by inserting a spike through the brain of a fish to euthanize it. Shinkei-jime, the dispatch of the nervous system, comes next. This requires running a wire through the fish’s spinal column to stop all nerve reaction and electrical functions. Then, the fisherman bleeds the fish out by opening its major artery, relying on its still-beating heart to push the blood out of its system. Yamasaki, who is also a free diver, taught himself these techniques using YouTube more than ten years ago while he living in the UK. His initial foray into ike-jime and shinkei-jime was with eels, which are notoriously difficult to kill and must be consumed very fresh.
Yamasaki, who made his mark at the helm of London’s lauded Koya restaurant, moved to Los Angeles in 2019 to open Yess, first as a sashimi truck during the pandemic, and then, this past spring, as a fine dining restaurant. When he arrived here with the intention of working with local fish, he was disappointed by the quality of what distributors were supplying. But he found a solution in teaching a select number of small commercial fishermen how to process their catch through the methods of ike-jime and shinkei-jime: Eric Hodge of Rock Bottom Commercial Fishing, Raith (who operates as San Ysidro Seafood), Mitchell, and another small boat fisherman named Ari Jamon.
Together, these techniques significantly minimize the release of stress hormones and chemicals that normally occur when an aminal dies. “So the things that are generally in sweat when animals die that attract and grow decomposition and bacteria is not all there,” explains Raith, who has become an impressive practitioner of ike-jiime and shinkei-jime, including on rockfish and other groundfish, which he specializes in catching. “You’re not going to have that same color loss, flavor loss, texture loss.” He’s gone as far as to custom-make the various-sized spikes and wires they use to perform these methods in his garage in Santa Barbara. (Yamasaki used to have to go home to Japan to buy these tools.)
“I’m sure you’ve had a piece of fish in your life that tastes like tinfoil in your mouth,” adds Mitchell. Fish undergo stress at various stages during harvest (when they are caught and killed), causing lactic acid to build up, which is what generates a metallic flavor. Ike-jime and shinkei-jime meaningfully reduce this buildup, making room for the amino acid development that begins at harvest and creates the much more desirable, umami flavor in fish (which can then be intensified through dry-aging) to shine. “The biggest thing that Junya taught me right off the bat is that it’s not just about the spike and wire, it’s about controlling the decomposition process the whole way through, and keeping it slower,” says Mitchell. An important step, then, is to keep their catch as cool as possible, avoiding fluctuations in its body temperature, before putting it on ice. To do this, they aim to perform ike-jime and shinkei-jime while the bluefin tuna is still in the water, and then “swim” the fish off the back of the boat until it finishes bloodletting.
The final step of ike-jime and shinkei-jime processing at sea is to begin curing the fish on ice. This requires one pound of ice for every one pound of fish at all times and takes at least 48 hours. That’s when rigor mortis—the postmortem stiffening of muscles, which is greatly reduced in severity and timespan by ike-jime and shinkei-jime—is complete, and it’s time to dry age the fish. Both Dudley Market and Yess have kitchens with sizable walk-in refrigerators where they can hang bluefin tuna by the tail for several days. At the former, they serve bluefin tuna that’s been aged between five and nine days, depending on the grade and the amount of fat content in the fish. Yamasaki, on the other hand, often stretches his aging window even longer. “Junya blew my mind when he served me a piece of a 206-pound bluefin tuna after a month of dry age,” Mitchell says. “I never would’ve known it wasn’t caught yesterday.”
He and the others were aware of ike-jime and shinkei-jime beforehand, but it wasn’t until 2020, after he met Yamasaki and invited him out fishing, that he realized how much of an impact they could have. “We were out catching mackerel and some rockfish, and we caught a big lingcod,” Mitchell remembers. “I watched [Yamasaki] take this lingcod that was as stiff as a board and run the wire down it, and now this thing is as loose as a rubber band. That’s when my whole mind just exploded, and I was like, ‘Alright, now everything we do has to be about learning how to make that happen.’” He says his practices for brain-spiking, bleeding, and gutting haven’t changed since before Yamasaki’s influence, but that his understanding of the cause and the effect has been transformed, which includes how he approaches the fight—once he has a bite. “Years ago, we would’ve been okay with a fight going a few hours, but now that’s not really an acceptable way to get a fish in the boat,” he says. Now, their goal is to reel in a fish in 12 minutes or less to minimize the amount of stress a fish undergoes during the fight.
“I watched [Yamasaki] take this lingcod that was as stiff as a board and run the wire down it, and now this thing is as loose as a rubber band. That’s when my whole mind just exploded, and I was like, ‘Alright, now everything we do has to be about learning how to make that happen.’”
Last bluefin season (which starts in June and goes through November), before Yamasaki got too busy opening his new restaurant, Mitchell got him and Raith to regularly go out tuna fishing with him in order to pin down the process. This year, they’re seeing the results of that work. The headline photograph of Los Angeles Times critic Bill Addison’s glowing review of Yess captures Yamasaki searing a piece of their bluefin tuna over an open flame. Meanwhile, on the Instagram page for Queen St., the Southern-focused seafood restaurant in Eagle Rock—one of this past summer’s hottest openings—you can see the chef Ari Kolender excitedly breaking down his own supply.
Altogether, the group has spurred a movement. More local fishermen have adopted the technique—out on the water, they’re always talking to one another, sharing tips over radio signal—and as a result, more chefs are asking for and serving the results. “So many people are doing it, especially in small fishing,” Yamasaki says. “I think every chef just woke up in the last couple of years,” adds Mitchell. “Largely in part because of people like [Junya] having a lot to do with it, but also other chefs realizing that they’re missing out on something and wanting to work with fish that’s being handled correctly.” (At one point in the day, we gave a few scoopfuls of extra bait to a fisherman named Todd on a tiny one-man boat, whom Raith complimented on his recent ike-jime efforts. “I’ve been doing it a lot,” he replied. “I do it on every fish, it makes for such better quality.”)
Mitchell’s fishery, which is just over four years old, is small in scale. His boat can fit up to ten tunas, depending on the size. (However, he’s currently building out a bigger boat with an increased capacity to hold fish and a custom-outfitted chef galley.) So, for now, his client list is compact. The top priority and biggest customer is his own restaurant, where the kitchen can get through an entire 200-pound tuna in three days. “I’ve cut more shinkei-jime fish than most people in the world,” jokes Miller. They serve it in myriad ways: simply as sashimi with shoyu and housemade ponzu, in tuna burgers and tuna meatball subs, and with the collar as the centerpiece in giant al pastor taco platters. It takes Yamasaki, on the other hand, about a month to plate the same amount at Yess, where he’s currently incorporating it into several of his tasting menu’s dishes, including a stunning tartar on top of an utterly soft mound of miso eggplant and a loin steak seared and smoked over hay, plus additional specials. At Queen St., Kolender likes to serve his bluefin tuna as crudo and grill cuts of its belly. Mitchell’s fourth and final buyer is the chef Brian Bornemann, who owns the two Santa Monica fish-forward restaurants Crudo e Nudo and Isla.
On this day, Yamasaki is able to join us on the boat as it’s during his restaurant’s three-week summer break. Kolender and Bornemann, however, want bluefin tuna—as soon as possible—to serve their customers. And so does the deep roster of regulars who frequent Dudley Market. That means that one 89-pound tuna is not really enough.
89 is at the low end of the crew’s favored tuna size, which is big—up to 250 pounds—meaning they’re around six years old, and have had a chance to live life. To catch them, they use flying fish as bait, one of bluefin tuna’s favorite things to eat, plus a kite and a balloon that attach to the rod and function to conceal its hook and line so that the flying fish appear as natural. Today, however, the winds that generally gust off the coast of Catalina Island have taken the day off. And this approach is proving difficult.
Before the 89-pounder has bled out, Mitchell, Raith, Miller, and Yamasaki are back at it, attempting to land a flying fish in the middle of a patch of tunas frenetically feeding on anchovies, their other favorite bait. The task is especially tricky, given the lacking conditions. There is no wind to help guide the kite at 12:30 p.m. on this balmy summer day. Soon enough, though, Mitchell maneuvers the boat to drag the bait just where it needs to be, and they’ve got a bite! The second bluefin tuna catch of the day is larger, at 142 pounds. By 3 p.m., they’ve caught a third tuna, their biggest yet, at 155, which will end up in pristine slices on Dudley Market’s fish-shaped glass plates a week from now. Mitchell sends satellite messages out to Kolender and Bornemann: they have their fish for the weekend. Finally, it’s time to make lunch, and the crew chefs up halibut ceviche and swordfish tacos. We eat. We digest. And then it’s back to tuna.
After several more unsuccessful attempts to reel in bluefin, sunset comes, and we ride back to shore as the twinkly reflection of the boat’s disco ball ricochets off the serene water. “We like to come home with six to eight, but three is great, one is great,” Mitchell says. “Sushi is great. Those are toro boys, too.”
I appreciate how this process could reduce overfishing by nature of the time consuming methodology.
I appreciate how well-researched and thoroughly immersive this post is. Thank you!