September 30, 2024 โ โItโs coming! Itโs coming!โ someone yelled. It was before dawn on a recent Sunday, and a dozen men in matching navy-blue T-shirts were waiting by a loading dock in Manhattan for the headliner of Sushi-Con, which bills itself as the largest expo of Japanese cuisine in the United States.
A truck backed into the brightly lit bay. The rear doors opened and a white Styrofoam box appeared, roughly the shape of a coffin and nearly as wide as the truck itself. Written at one end was the word โhead.โ Inside was a 399-pound bluefin tuna, a fish that when prepared as sushi can be among the most expensive forms of seafood in the world.
Sangsu Choe, a manager at True World Foods, a wholesaler of sushi-related products and a co-sponsor of the event, began waving his arms and directing. โTake it easy! Donโt rush,โ he yelled as the men tried to move the box with a manual forklift. Several times, the white container, now more than six feet in the air, teetered and appeared close to crashing to the ground. Everyone shouted and laid their hands on it to steady it.
The eagerly awaited fish had left Barcelona on Friday morning packed in ice. It spent a night and a day in a New Jersey warehouse before arriving at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, the site of the $120-a-ticket event.
Part trade show and part consumer-facing forum, the event has taken place four times since 2018. This was the first year it had been branded Sushi-Con. True World Foods was sponsoring it with Noble Fresh Cart, a start-up developing a direct-to-consumer delivery service for sushi-grade fish. The all-you-can-eat event featured over 50 vendors offering samples of their fish and other products. Though the cuisine is Japanese, the fish came from all over the world.
But only one was the star of the โUltimate Tuna Cutting Show,โ the main event where the bluefin tuna, roughly the size of a torpedo and with shimmering silver scales, would be carved up and served to the gathered attendees.