Bruce Rutledge talks with Hajime Sato of Mashiko in West Seattle

Anchovies, fresh smelt and catfish are just a few of the unusual delicacies you’ll find on the menu at Mashiko, a sushi bar in West Seattle. Since mid-August Chef Hajime Sato has turned his restaurant into one of only a handful of sustainable sushi shops in the country.

The fast-talking Sato speaks passionately about the issue of over-fishing as we chat over tea and rice crackers at his restaurant. He stresses that once he started looking at sustainable alternatives, “the choices on our menu have grown.”

Over-fishing has greatly depleted the world’s supply of yellowtail (hamachi), unagi (freshwater eel) and bluefin tuna. The situation with eel is so bad, Sato explains, that ‘the angula japonica strain best known in Japan is almost gone.”

At Mashiko, you won’t find unagi; instead Sato serves catfish. “They are similar,” he explains. “They both live in the mud.” He makes a black cod stock with soy sauce and sugar and marinates the catfish for three days. He says most of his customers have been open-minded enough to try it and the other alternatives he’s come up with such as US farmed amberjack (kanpachi) instead of hamachi.

Sato stresses that it’s in the sushi fan’s best interest to think about sustainability when ordering. “If we stop eating unagi for five years, then we will be able to eat as much as we want after that,” he says.

Sustainable sushi is a relatively new idea. Casson Trenor, a sustainability advocate, wrote a guide called Sustainable Sushi: A Guide to Saving the Oceans One Bite at a Time in 2008 and was named by Time magazine as one of its Heroes of the Environment for 2009. Sato consults Trenor, as does Tataki, a sustainable sushi restaurant in San Francisco. Sato also consults the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which has been active in getting out the word about which fish are being depleted from overfishing. The aquarium puts out a handy scorecard with a red box filled with fish to avoid (imported shrimp and crab, octopus, bluefin, to name a few), a yellow box for good alternatives (North American shrimp and crab, wild salmon, albacore tuna from Hawaii) and a green box for the best choices (farmed oysters, black cod from Alaska and British Columbia, sea urchin roe from Canada). The lists are updated at www.seafoodwatch.org. Sato makes a point of giving one of these to every table of diners at Mashiko.

Sato says that true Edomae sushi is not about shipping frozen bluefin tuna thousands of miles and selling it for tens of thousands of dollars at an auction. It’s about finding what’s plentiful and local and serving it in the most mouthwatering way possible. “Edomae is about fish that is caught locally, the stuff right in front of you, seasonal stuff. Even toro (fatty tuna) has only been a sushi favorite for 40 or 50 years. The same goes with unagi. They are not really that traditional.”

Sushi fans everywhere would do well to heed Sato’s words. If we want our grandkids to know the taste of bluefin tuna or freshwater eel, and not just sardines and jellyfish, sustainable sushi will need to become the norm.