According to a philosophy known as “compassionate carnivorism,” the most ethical way to eat animals is to kill them yourself, as humanely as possible, thereby fully acknowledging their sacrifice for your sustenance. Does shooting fish in a barrel count? There aren’t barrels, per se, at the first U.S. outpost of Zauo, a novelty restaurant chain with thirteen locations in Japan, and there certainly aren’t guns, but there are open tanks crowded with live fish, and dinky little rods with which you, the diner, are meant to catch them. (...)
No matter how you feel about eating fish, eating at Zauo is a disaster. Where to begin? The endearing Japanese ritual of restaurant staff emphatically greeting all customers feels perverted here: every time someone catches a fish, employees are required to cheer, chant, and strike a taiko drum, resulting in an endless dystopian cacophony. “It’s so extra, but it’s cute!” a hostess said unconvincingly, as she led me to my table on the second floor, which is designed to look like a Japanese fishing boat, suspended in air over the first floor. In order to fish, you have to “apply for a license,” which turns out to mean signing a liability waiver, releasing Zauo Inc. from responsibility if you lose an eye to an errant hook, or drop your phone into a tank. This is not to say that phone use is discouraged at this Instagrammers’ Atlantis. “It’s like Color Factory with murder,” quipped one diner. A selfie-happy gentleman succumbed to the fantasy, hook, line, and sinker. “If this were the fourteen-hundreds, I’d be a hero!” he crowed to his companion. “I’d feed our whole village on a single fish.”
But the restaurant’s greatest offense, to both predator and prey, is the food. In an episode of the Japanese reality show “Terrace House,” a group of characters visit a Zauo in Japan, in search of lobster and mackerel, and make it look almost like eating at a hip, charming fish market. In New York, it feels like getting fleeced on whatever was left over when the market closed. Tables are set with stacks of cards offering descriptions of each ordinary-sounding yet steeply priced fish and crustacean, along with options for how they can be served; once you’ve made your catch, it’s whisked away to the kitchen to be prepared to your specifications.
The card for the rainbow trout—the cheapest fish on the menu, at thirty-eight dollars (forty-five if you opt not to catch it yourself)—reported that such a creature inhabits “rivers with low temperatures, high speeds, and high levels of oxygen”; the one I was about to eat, a server admitted, came from a farm in Pennsylvania. Did it have “a simple flavor with a touch of sweetness”? It was hard to say after half of it had been simmered in soy sauce to a bony mush, the other half grilled in salt until chewy and served with its head still on, propped up with a wooden stake like a Big Mouth Billy Bass about to sing. Muddy-tasting flounder sashimi had a texture that might be best described as “rigor mortis.” And pity the lobster whose succulent flesh is smothered in half an inch of puffy tempura batter.
by Hannah Goldfield, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: David Williams
No matter how you feel about eating fish, eating at Zauo is a disaster. Where to begin? The endearing Japanese ritual of restaurant staff emphatically greeting all customers feels perverted here: every time someone catches a fish, employees are required to cheer, chant, and strike a taiko drum, resulting in an endless dystopian cacophony. “It’s so extra, but it’s cute!” a hostess said unconvincingly, as she led me to my table on the second floor, which is designed to look like a Japanese fishing boat, suspended in air over the first floor. In order to fish, you have to “apply for a license,” which turns out to mean signing a liability waiver, releasing Zauo Inc. from responsibility if you lose an eye to an errant hook, or drop your phone into a tank. This is not to say that phone use is discouraged at this Instagrammers’ Atlantis. “It’s like Color Factory with murder,” quipped one diner. A selfie-happy gentleman succumbed to the fantasy, hook, line, and sinker. “If this were the fourteen-hundreds, I’d be a hero!” he crowed to his companion. “I’d feed our whole village on a single fish.”But the restaurant’s greatest offense, to both predator and prey, is the food. In an episode of the Japanese reality show “Terrace House,” a group of characters visit a Zauo in Japan, in search of lobster and mackerel, and make it look almost like eating at a hip, charming fish market. In New York, it feels like getting fleeced on whatever was left over when the market closed. Tables are set with stacks of cards offering descriptions of each ordinary-sounding yet steeply priced fish and crustacean, along with options for how they can be served; once you’ve made your catch, it’s whisked away to the kitchen to be prepared to your specifications.
The card for the rainbow trout—the cheapest fish on the menu, at thirty-eight dollars (forty-five if you opt not to catch it yourself)—reported that such a creature inhabits “rivers with low temperatures, high speeds, and high levels of oxygen”; the one I was about to eat, a server admitted, came from a farm in Pennsylvania. Did it have “a simple flavor with a touch of sweetness”? It was hard to say after half of it had been simmered in soy sauce to a bony mush, the other half grilled in salt until chewy and served with its head still on, propped up with a wooden stake like a Big Mouth Billy Bass about to sing. Muddy-tasting flounder sashimi had a texture that might be best described as “rigor mortis.” And pity the lobster whose succulent flesh is smothered in half an inch of puffy tempura batter.
by Hannah Goldfield, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: David Williams
