Where is sushi popular

Shepherd Dr. Sushi has a long history, but really only started becoming a dish in America less than a century ago. If your taste buds have tried sushi, you know why. The most obvious reason sushi is so popular now is the taste. There are three different ways to eat sushi.

Sashimi is just the meat, sliced and served, and Nigari is the meat and rice, but without it being in a roll. Different types of fish, and crab, also provide an extensive variety, plus other styles of sushi are gaining popularity as well, like hand rolls.

Basically, sushi is never boring. Sushi is also going to be healthier than most other dishes. Most often sushi is made with rice, vinegar and fresh raw fish. I also notice more and more people are being more adventurous when eating. The origins of sushi are in fact more Yo! It was a street food, a working-class dish - as so often, haute cuisine borrowed and tarted up a staple of the poor. Modern sushi - in the sense of raw fish served on vinegared rice - began at a street-food stall in the city of Edo, now Tokyo, in The stall's owner, Yohei Hanaya, was the first person to shape vinegared rice with his hands and then crown it with a slice of raw fish - prompted, it's said, by impatient customers, who couldn't be bothered to wait for the traditional pressing in a box.

Long before, at least years before Christ, southeast Asians discovered that cooked rice begins to ferment, and that fish packed in this will be preserved.

The technique is believed to have arrived in Japan in about AD. Around then in Europe we were learning that fish - for most people, the cheapest and the most readily available source of protein - could be made to last with vinegar or salt. Thus, starting with the same intentions, the Japanese got sushi.

We got salt cod and pickled herring. Hanaya's innovation made him sushi's Colonel Sanders. So popular were his nigiri hand-rolled sushi that nigiri-sushi stalls soon outnumbered most other food outlets in Tokyo. As with the sandwich - invented by an 18th-century Earl of Sandwich as handy food for eating when gambling - convenience was and remains the selling point. His rice fingers with their fish topping were and still are eaten usually by hand, upside-down, in two mouthfuls.

Westerners have their own method with nigiri sushi - we take up the chopsticks and try hopelessly to scissor them in half. Then we may dunk the mouthful in a bowl of soy sauce until it disintegrates so we have to eat it grain by grain.

Or we prod the whole nigiri into our mouths in one go - and choke. This is why many Japanese people would rather not watch Westerners eat sushi: it's not just gross, it's wrong.

Hanaya's sushi are recognisably what you'll find at Yo! Sushi, at Sainsbury's or even Boots. But there's debate about how much of Hanaya's fish was raw. Certainly some would have been marinated in soy or part-cooked, as prawn and eel usually are today. Raw sushi only became plentiful when refrigeration arrived in Japan in the s. Salmon and salmon eggs aren't even listed among the contributing fish in my sushi cookbook - but now Japan imports nearly a-quarter-of-a-million tons of farmed salmon a year, approaching the levels for tuna.

What's now the most expensive cut of tuna, the fatty belly-meat of bluefin tuna called otoro and shimofuri, was cat-food until the s: it became a delicacy as a result of a Japanese government marketing campaign to deal with tuna shortages caused, it's said, by nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific. The next innovation was in the delivery. Not long after Ray Kroc of McDonald's was inspired by Detroit motor industry assembly-lines, Yoshiaki Shiraishi visited a beer-bottling factory in Osaka.

He had run an under-performing sushi bar in the city. It didn't lack customers: his problem was the speed at which he could serve them. In retail economist-speak, he needed to up the foot-fall and lower the dwell-time. So he removed the chairs from his restaurant. That increased the customer numbers, but then he was faced with the problem of having to employ more staff to serve them. The bottling-factory conveyor belt was the answer.

Yoshiaki's first Genroku Sushi restaurants opened in and were an instant, profitable hit - especially after he put the customers at four-seater tables at right angles to the belt, instead of all facing it. That way four times as many customers got served.

His chief problem was working out the right speed for the belt - too slow and the customers got impatient; too fast and there were accidents. And the air-flow was liable to dry the sushi. In the end, 8cm a second proved perfect. In a few years Shiraishi had conveyor-belt sushi restaurants; Japan now has 2, of them. He died in he later lost most of his money trying to bury the profession of waitering for ever by developing sushi-serving robots.

When the World Fair was held in Osaka in Genroku Sushi set up a restaurant there - an exhibit that fixed the event in the minds of foreign commentators who were among the 64 million visitors. Looking back, it's startling that those wide-eyed Western visitors didn't just grab the idea. But both raw fish and conveyor belts travelled slowly, and reached Europe and Britain last.

We didn't get our first conveyor-belt sushi restaurant until Moshi Moshi opened in Waterloo station in Sushi's migration and the process of its globalisation started in the large expat Japanese communities all round the Pacific rim - in western and southern America, Australia and Brazil. It became a rite of passage for Japanese chefs who'd been through the long sushi apprenticeship to go to these outposts, where the cuisine was less rigorously traditional.

Nobuyuki Matsuhisa - now proprietor, in Nobu, of the poshest Asian cooking franchise of them all - made sushi in Lima, Buenos Aires and in Anchorage, Alaska before he settled in Los Angeles in But the key moment in sushi's crossover from native cuisine to global snack is the invention of the California roll.

It's the spaghetti bolognese of sushi now - a confection of cooked crab, avocado and mayonnaise inside a roll of sushi rice, probably bound with a strip of nori seaweed. If sushi were Abba, the California roll is Waterloo. It is said to have been invented in at Los Angeles's Tokyo Kaikan restaurant which still exists by a chef called Ichiro Manashita.

Take the California roll, substitute apple - 'it's the Big Apple, right? There's a Philadelphia roll that does the same with cream cheese. Aki grew up poor in rural Japan, where sushi was a once-a-year family treat. After his five years training with a sushi master - 'the boss used to slap me round the head' - he left to work in a restaurant in Manhattan's Upper East Side.

After seven years, he went to California - 'just me, my sushi knife and my dog'. Aki found a new world. It was like a revolution in Japanese cooking. So many different kinds of sushi! This was liberating; he never went back to Japan. Sushi's penetration happened slowest in Europe. Most English people who started eating sushi in the Eighties had that first, mind-opening bite in Manhattan, Sydney or San Francisco. London had Japanese restaurants but they chiefly fed the Japanese.

Mark Edwards, now executive head chef of Nobu Group, and undoubtedly the greatest Japanese cook to emerge from Kent, lost his sushi virginity late - in in New York. His partner was a piece of otoro tuna belly served as nigiri.

It was very exciting. But it was marinated fish dishes, or smoked salmon rolls. You have to understand, London was nowhere in the late Eighties. The sashimi is from Japan and so is the chef, also this restaurant is very popular with Japanese people living in Manila.

Open every day for lunch and dinner. Sushi has become extremely popular in North America over the past 50 years, nowadays there are numerous Japanese restaurants in almost every single city. Sushi chefs have created their own versions of more traditional Japanese dishes, most notably the California Roll.

However, it is still possible to find authentic Japanese sushi all over the country. Where to get real sushi in the United States? There are countless excellent options so it is difficult to choose just one. Tsujita is open for lunch and dinner every day. Japanese people have been moving to Thailand since the 16th century and there still is a huge Japanese influence in the country, particularly in Bangkok and Chonburi. I was in Thailand 2 years ago and I will admit that Thai food is amazing, but most people prefer to have some variety throughout their trip.

Where to find real sushi in Thailand? Sushi Masato is a classy traditional Japanese restaurant in Bangkok. Sushi Masato is open for dinner Tuesday — Sunday and closed on Monday. As a Canadian native I have been eating sushi since I was in elementary school. I developed a taste for sushi from a very young age, the sushi bar at the Marina Restaurant in Victoria BC was actually my favorite restaurant.

Where to find real sushi in Canada? I lived in Vancouver for 4 years and I can assure you that we have countless excellent sushi options in the city. I will recommend the very authentic Tetsu Sushi Bar in downtown Vancouver. Come here in the summertime, they actually fly in fresh sea urchins from Hokkaido, Japan. Reservations are suggested, Tetsu Sushi Bar is open for lunch and dinner Wednesday — Sunday, only dinner on Tuesday, and closed on Monday.

He runs a blog on independent travel , giving people the skills and confidence they need to travel the world without a tour company. Cut sushi rolls are actually recommended to be eaten by hand. Sashimi, however, should be eaten only with chopsticks.