One Quick Question — true stories from a world that makes less sense every day.
Last night, I went to a very high-end sushi restaurant.
Not a strip-mall sushi restaurant.
A serious sushi restaurant.
The kind of place where the lighting is so dim you need your iPhone flashlight to determine
whether you’re eating tuna or the napkin.
The kind of place where nobody gives you a menu with pictures because apparently, if you need
to see the food before ordering it, you’re not emotionally ready for the experience.
Everything was beautiful.
The room was beautiful.
The plates were beautiful.
The chopsticks looked like they had been handcrafted by an 87-year-old Japanese artisan whose
family has been making chopsticks since 1426.
And the fish was spectacular.
Until there was no fish.
About halfway through dinner, our waitress approached the table.
She had the calm, professional demeanor of someone about to tell us about the evening’s special.
Instead, she said:
“We have run out of fish.”
I assumed I had misunderstood her.
“Which fish?”
A sushi restaurant had run out of fish.
“All fish.”
I stared at her.
“All fish?”
“Yes.”
There are moments in life when the human brain simply refuses to process the information it has
been given.
This was one of them.
Not yellowtail.
Not toro.
Not salmon.
Not some obscure Japanese mackerel that had been flown in that morning from a fisherman
named Hiroshi.
Fish.
The entire biological category.
Gone.
This is roughly equivalent to Ruth’s Chris announcing halfway through dinner:
“We have run out of cows.”
Or Starbucks saying:
“We are completely out of coffee.”
Or Waffle House saying:
“We have no waffles, eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns or people named Tammy.”
At some point, you are no longer experiencing a supply-chain problem.
You have fundamentally misunderstood your business.
I had questions.
Many questions.
First:
How does this happen?
Was there no moment earlier in the evening when someone looked into the refrigerator and said:
“Guys, I’m not trying to alarm anyone, but we appear to be down to our final fish.”
Was there no inventory system?
No clipboard?
No spreadsheet?
No employee whose job description includes periodically counting the primary ingredient upon
which the entire economic enterprise depends?
This wasn’t a complicated business model.
They weren’t making automobiles.
There weren’t 14,000 individual parts arriving from 27 countries.
There was fish.
You buy fish.
People arrive.
They eat the fish.
You purchase more fish.
That’s pretty much the business.
Apparently, somewhere during the evening, that final step had been overlooked.
I started imagining what was happening in the kitchen.
“Table 12 just ordered the tuna.”
“We don’t have tuna.”
“Give them salmon.”
“We don’t have salmon.”
“Yellowtail?”
“No.”
“Snapper?”
“No.”
“Eel?”
“No.”
“Shrimp?”
“No.”
“Anything that has ever lived in water?”
“Edamame.”
And apparently nobody panicked.
That may be the part I admire most.
Because if I owned a high-end sushi restaurant and someone told me during dinner service that
we had completely run out of fish, I would not be calmly walking around.
I would be standing on the roof with binoculars looking toward the Pacific Ocean.
There would be helicopters involved.
I would be calling the Coast Guard.
“THIS IS AN EMERGENCY.”
“What is the nature of your emergency?”
“I HAVE 46 PEOPLE SITTING IN MY RESTAURANT AND THREE PIECES OF GINGER.”
At some point, somebody is getting dispatched to Whole Foods.
I don’t care how prestigious the restaurant is.
Put a hat on the sous-chef, hand him the company credit card and tell him:
“Buy everything with gills.”
Because you cannot simply surrender.
You cannot operate a sushi restaurant without fish.
The fish is not an enhancement.
It is not garnish.
It is not something you can substitute with extra parsley.
It is the central premise of the evening.
Imagine going to SeaWorld and halfway through the day an employee approaches you:
“We’re terribly sorry. We’ve run out of marine life.”
“All of it?”
“Yes, sir. But the gift shop remains open.”
Which, incidentally, is essentially where we found ourselves.
We were sitting in one of the nicest sushi restaurants in town, surrounded by elegant Japanese
décor, expensive sake, beautiful ceramic plates and absolutely nothing that could swim.
We had accidentally become vegetarians.
And this raises another question:
At what precise moment does a sushi restaurant without fish cease being a sushi restaurant?
Immediately?
Five minutes?
Does someone from the city come down and change the business license?
Does OpenTable automatically reclassify you?
Because once the last piece of toro leaves the building, you’re basically an expensive cucumber
facility.
The waitress, meanwhile, remained remarkably composed.
I was impressed.
She delivered the news with the confidence of a flight attendant explaining that they’d run out of
Diet Coke.
Except this wasn’t Diet Coke.
This was aviation fuel.
And I have to admit, there was something almost beautiful about the simplicity of her answer.
“We have run out of fish.”
No excuses.
No elaborate explanation about delayed shipments.
No blaming weather patterns in Hokkaido.
No story about an unusually aggressive tuna market.
Just:
We had fish.
You ate it.
Now there is no fish.
Good luck.
Eventually, we paid the bill and left.
I walked outside still trying to understand what had happened.
Somewhere out there, trillions of fish were swimming peacefully through the world’s oceans.
And somehow this particular sushi restaurant had failed to secure even one of them.
I don’t know where we’re going for dinner next.
But I’m calling ahead.
“Good evening. I have a reservation.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Excellent. One quick question.”
“Of course.”
“Do you currently possess the food?