How Does Sushi? - The Ungainly and Amsuing Tale of the Avocado Nigiri

            Sushi has lost nearly all novelty to me. Having grown up in the Seattle area and attended university in the Bay Area, the highest quality seafood and prominent Japanese communities have always been within relatively close contact. Even if it’s no longer a novel concept, I’m still in love with sushi. Depending on the quality, the subtle vinegar of the rice, the rich ocean-ness of the fish, and the accompanying glut of sides and appetizers will always remain delicious, albeit unsurprising and constant. That no longer remains to be the case, as my sushi-dining experience last Saturday at Sushi Nørregade proved to me that eating sushi still has the capacity to leave me in a state of complete satiation, cultural confusion, and mildly eclectic amusement simultaneously. This triumvirate of simultaneous and emotional overload is best encapsulated in a single piece of sushi I ordered – the avocado nigiri, perhaps the single most confused and amusingly perverted sushi item ever encountered the world over. As a discrete object of dubious artistic value but certainly of creative output, this single piece of sushi

            At first glance, a piece of avocado included in sushi doesn’t seem to be particularly problematic or out of the ordinary. Among American sushi enthusiasts, the avocado is a nearly omnipresent facet of the sushi experience. Aside from the more traditional yet exotic nigiri, the sushi restaurant in the United States usually features an unrealistic amount of avocado. From spider rolls to spicy tuna hand rolls, avocado is a purely American imposition on the archetypal idea of Japanese cuisine. In a way, it has significantly added to the growth of the cuisine across the world. Avocado as an ingredient has opened up an entirely new subset of characteristics – new textures, flavor combinations, and visual appearances, among others. While it is not a traditional ingredient or aspect of Japanese culture by any means, the avocado has become a mainstay at the Japanese sushi table. Its pairing with dried seaweed, lightly vinegary rice, raw fish, and any other myriad sushi ingredients has ossified into canon and it is unlikely to be usurped by another non-traditional ingredient in the near future. Though it is a canonical ingredient now for all intents and purposes, its usage can occasionally be disconcerting and surprising, verging on the entertaining.

            Which brings me to the avocado nigiri. Given the ordering system of Sushi Nørregade, I mostly ordered the avocado nigiri out of amusement, interest, and haste to have sushi present on my companions’ and my table. When it was delivered, I was first struck by the visual aspects of the sushi. If it’s possible to embody “ungainly” through sushi, the single piece of avocado nigiri was denotative in its embodiment. A wedge of avocado sat atop the traditional nigiri cake of rice, and then was fully connected with a thin strip of nori. When compared to the more traditional shrimp, eel, and egg omelet nigiri our table ordered, the avocado looked supremely out of place. It seemed to be anything but sushi, while still being surrounded by dozens of slices of more standard sushi fare. The juxtaposition of the two recalled a song from the 90’s TV show, Sesame Street, in a quasi-comedic way – “One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong…” It was purely the strangest “sushi experience” I had gone through in my relatively experienced sushi eating career. Never before have I seen avocado nigiri in the United States, so it seems that this piece of sushi was an oddly perverted cultural view on traditional “rice and fish”. To put it most reductively, this single piece of sushi manifested a California-inspired Japanese dish taken through some sort of Danish culinary whirlwind.

            In the end, my mind is still uncertain regarding the avocado nigiri from Sushi Nørregade. On the one hand, it was a perfectly fine tasting example of “creative” sushi. In that sense, it achieved its goal of nourishing me and reducing my hunger for sushi. On the other hand, it was almost too far removed from the sushi tradition to 1) be considered sushi and 2) caused a surprising mental split in the minds of my dining companions and me. At the very least, perhaps, it represents an amusingly warped transfer from Japanese to American or Californian culture, but viewed through a Danish cultural lens. Superficially, it makes no sense. when it’s dug into deeper, this single piece of sushi represents to me a much wider and more significant conversation about cultural interpretation and culinary creation – just in a more surprising and unintentionally pseudo-avant-garde way.