Food - Bee Wilson is seduced at London's most fashionable restaurant
The trendiest dish in London is Alaskan. I had read so many style references to Nobu's black cod with sweet miso before I finally ate it last week, I thought I knew what it would taste like. Nobu, a somewhat Japanese and very expensive restaurant with branches in New York and London, is endlessly being promoted as the choice of celebrities. Black cod is Nobu's "signature dish" and seems as hauntingly familiar from the pages of magazines as the faces of Tom and Nicole, who were habitues at Nobu in Mayfair in the halcyon days before the pouting Penelope Cruz came along. But I'd never realised that the black cod in question was Alaskan fish. Nor that black cod is neither black nor cod, but a distinct species of fish, 99 per cent of which is fished in Alaska and most of which gets shipped to Japan. Nor how delicious it is. At Nobu, the fish is marinated for three days in a mixture of mirin, miso, sugar and sake, then "roasted" and served with dewdrops of a syrupy, pale, sweet miso and an outlandishly pink-and-white stick of ginger stem, which you are meant to suck on between mouthfuls. (Apparently, they make it go pink by dipping it in vinegar.) The fish itself is much oilier and richer than cod, though the flesh looks similar. It should really be called white salmon rather than black cod, except that it wouldn't sound so desirably a must-have.
I was at Nobu to attend a lunchtime food writers' junket hosted by the governor of Alaska as a way of selling us (and therefore you) on Alaskan seafood. (Reader, I was sold, but you should take everything I say with a large pinch of sea-salt - NS food writers don't get invited to many of the most glamorous food events. On rare exciting freebies such as this one, I am shocked by my own susceptibility to cold white wine in big glasses, flattery and expensive fish.) Anyway, the governor of Alaska is a man called Tony Knowles, with the large smile and jaw of a character in Dallas, who is currently "doing" Europe to enhance the prestige of all things Alaskan - tourism, oil and fish. He seemed like a mini-president, with an entourage of business advi-sers, culinary gurus and a pretty wife in an Alice band. He even had a communications director, a brunette as feisty and professional as C J on The West Wing, who could reel off all five species of wild Alaskan salmon - sockeye, king, coho, chum and pink - while casing the joint for bigger fish to fry.
We were being sold a message that Governor Knowles dubbed "Alaska's seafood story" - that Alaska offers a model of how truly sustainable fishing can work. Before Alaska became a state, salmon catches were declining. But since the state started managing the fisheries in 1959, the stocks have been gradually replenished, through a scrupulously applied strategy of fishing only to "abundance", never to meet consumer needs. It is written into the state constitution that all fish shall be developed on the "sustained yield principle". Unlike the poor overstuffed creatures of the Norwegian salmon farms, Alaskan salmon grow to adulthood at a natural pace, on a diet of shrimp, herring and squid. In Alaska, the only fish is wild fish. Since 1990, it has actually been illegal to farm salmon in Alaska.
The salmon we were served at Nobu was a fantastic advertisement for Alaskan seafood (as indeed it was intended to be). Unlike the striated, fatty salmon we are used to, the slices of Alaskan salmon, served semi-raw with a dressing of ginger and soy with chives, were deep red, soft and meaty. Alaskan halibut was also wonderfully meaty and clean- tasting, all the more so because we knew it is not being fished out of existence.
At the beginning of the lunch, we were asked to think of Alaskan food as something more than just tinned salmon. By the end, even tinned salmon emerged in a new light. You would have to be a rank snob as well as someone with calcified taste buds to think it better to buy fresh mass-farmed salmon, with all its horrors, than a tin of fine red Alaskan salmon. There is nothing better for making fish cakes, and tinned red wild salmon is the best thing for a supper of kedgeree, much more mellow than the smoked haddock version. (Simply boil some basmati rice and, meanwhile, soften an onion in butter with ground cumin and coriander. When the rice is cooked, fold it into the buttery onions with some yogurt or cream, salt, pepper and a tin of salmon. Serve decorated with halved boiled eggs and maybe some chopped flat-leaf parsley. And lemon, naturally.) I felt rather proud when the visitors told us that Britain was by far the biggest consumer of tinned Alaskan salmon - the British market is worth about £70m a year, more even than the US. Perhaps I'd had too much wine, yet suddenly this seemed a mark not of ignorance, but of good sense.
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