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The Pleasures of Going Beyond Tuna

Posted by Brian Halweil, January 28, 2008 at 3:30 PM

Undaunted by the recent New York Times discovery that tuna served in Manhattan sushi houses often contains dangerous levels of mercury, my wife Sarah and I took our 9-week-old daughter to our favorite East End sushi restaurant, Yama Q on Main Street in Bridgehampton. Sarah is still sensitive to government warnings that pregnant and breast-feeding women should avoid tuna, swordfish and other big, long-lived fish that are likely to contain high levels of mercury. Although she didn’t crave sushi during her pregnancy, she seems to think about it constantly while she nurses. And she’s well aware of the extensive medical evidence that fish oils nurture baby brains.

Yama Q serves some of the freshest seafood on the East End, owing partly to its talented sushi chef and its owner’s extensive connections with local fishers. (The non-sushi part of the menu has also built ranks of fans; it’s an ever-changing and eclectic combination of veggie-rich, eco-healthy, fusion dishes that recently included monk fish fritters, Caribbean style cod, and a tea kettle of bay scallops in their own broth.)

Despite the bad tuna P.R., the hand-written sushi menu still offered tuna from Montauk boats as sashimi and in a spicy roll. But because Yama Q also goes out of its way to offer a range of local seafood, there were plenty of other delectable offerings that didn’t carry the mercury risk.

As I wrote on the Worldwatch Institute’s “Good Eating” blog last year, the best way to avoid toxins in your seafood is to eat lower on the marine food chain, where smaller species don’t accumulate as much mercury or other contaminants in their short lives.

Starting at the base of the chain, Yama Q was offering Montauk squid, clams, bay scallops, and lobster rolls. Because mollusks feed on algae at the bottom of the food chain, and don’t have much fat, their flesh is very low in toxins. Same goes for squid, while lobsters and crabs eat slightly higher. (At Inlet Seafood, the fisher-owned fish joint in Montauk, the spicy lobster roll, constructed of deep-water lobsters scooped up by boats looking for squid and whiting, could go head to head with anything served from Manhattan to Maine, and justifies the long and winding trip to the end of East Lake Drive.)

Moving up the chain, we passed on spicy tuna for the refreshing spicy fluke roll; fluke isn’t at the bottom of the food chain, but it’s lower than massive, carnivorous tuna. There was moist Spanish mackerel with all the good fish oils of salmon or tuna, but a fraction of the mercury levels. There was also blackfish, an undervalued local species that feeds on mollusks. Porgie, black seabass, flounder, and whiting would be other good options.

Good sushi chefs can often tell you where and how the fish was caught, and might be able to tell you how big the fish was and what it eats. (Rule of thumb: if a fish feeds on other fish, it’s probably pretty high up the food chain.) But if you have any doubts, consider downloading one of the many seafood watch cards produced by groups like Environmental Defense or Blue Ocean Institute.

(For those who doubt that mercury in our food is something to worry about, check out this history of Minamata disease, a neurological syndrome that developed in a city in Japan that had severe mercury exposure. This well-publicized legacy has surprisingly not dampened Japan’s daily tuna gobbling, a contradiction that a Japanese colleague who studies food sociology attributes to stubborn tradition and heavy lobbying by the tuna lobby.)

Photograph from Zesmerelda on Flickr

Brian Halweil is the editor of Edible East End, the magazine that celebrates the harvest of the Hamptons and the North Fork. He is also publisher of Edible Brooklyn and Edible Manhattan (launching September 2008). He writes about the things we eat from the old whaling village of Sag Harbor, New York, where he and his wife tend a home garden and orchard and go clamming when the tides allow.

Yama Q

Address: 2393 Main Street, Bridgehampton, NY 11932 (map)
Phone: 631-537-0225

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Tags: Japanese, New York, sushi