BOTH ENDS OF NEW YORK'S SUSHI PRICE LIST CAN BUY FISH OFF THE SAME TRUCK

There is a moment at every omakase counter in New York when the chef lifts a piece of tuna out of a lacquered box and the whole room goes quiet. What nobody at the counter says is where the box came from. In most cases, by the company's own count and by two decades of reporting, it came off a refrigerated truck from New Jersey, and the same truck stopped at a $45 lunch counter on the way.

In 1980 the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, preached a sermon that his followers came to call the Way of Tuna, laying out a plan for the church's members to build a business in the American fish trade. That year five church members, among them Takeshi Yashiro, opened a fish shop on Elston Avenue in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune, in a 2006 investigation, traced what grew out of it: True World Group, with 22 distribution centers, 230 refrigerated trucks and about $250 million in sales in 2005, supplying most of the nation's estimated 9,000 sushi restaurants. Of 17 prominent Chicago sushi restaurants the paper checked, 14 bought from True World. The business arm was controlled by Unification Church International, a nonprofit the church describes as legally separate; Yashiro told the paper part of the profits flowed to the church through its parent. A church spokesman said the company was founded by members, not run by the church.

The company has never hidden its scale. A 2020 release datelined Elizabeth, New Jersey, where True World Foods New York operates, said the company had been the number one supplier to North American sushi restaurants for more than 45 years and supplied 80 percent of high-end and mid-range sushi restaurants in the United States and Canada, from 26 North American locations. SeafoodSource reported in 2017 that it served 8,200 restaurants from 23 distribution centers with more than $500 million in sales. Its site today lists thirty locations and a daily Toyosu Express air service from Tokyo's wholesale market. In 2013, TIME called seventy sushi restaurants across the country and forty-eight said True World supplied them; a spokeswoman said the company delivered to 7,500 restaurants a day from sales offices in 23 cities. Among the chefs TIME named as customers was New York's Nick Kim, who now runs Shuko on East 12th Street, where the sushi omakase is $155.

No independent audit of that market share exists. The 80 percent is the company's figure. What is documented is that the trucks are everywhere and the counters do not say so.

The second truck says out loud what the first one implies. Yama Seafood, founded in 1977 by Kingo Yamanashi and run out of Jersey City, moves ten to twelve thousand pounds of tuna a week on a twenty-van fleet into the city. Its president has described its roughly 800 clients as everything from all-you-can-eat bars to the Michelin-starred Nobu; its press page lists Sushi Noz, Le Bernardin, Atomix and Daniel among the rooms that have named it. The same dock serves the bottom of the price list and the top.

Which means the spread on your check is mostly not fish. Sushi Katsuei in Park Slope has advertised an omakase at $45. Yoshino on the Bowery charges $500 plus a 20 percent gratuity, $600 a seat. Kosaka on West 13th is $295 at the counter. The industry targets food cost at around 30 percent of the check; that is a band, not either room's books. At a $45 counter, the fish is around $13. At $600, around $180, and the rest is a lease on the Bowery, a chef who trained for twenty years, a hinoki counter, a sommelier, and a name. Tuna nigiri wholesales out in New York at roughly $8 to $9 a piece on the plate, by one trade estimate, and air freight runs $150 to $200 per hundred-pound box before the fish is cut. The box lands at both doors.

There is a way around the truck and it is not cheap. Sushi Ouji, at 196 Prince Street in SoHo, told amNY last year that almost all of its fish is flown in directly from Toyosu twice a week; the omakase is fourteen courses for $129, which is about what a direct relationship with a Tokyo market costs a 20-seat room. It is the exception that explains the rule. A counter that sources itself has to be its own importer, its own cold chain and its own risk, and most of the city's 2,000-odd sushi rooms would rather make one phone call to New Jersey at four in the morning.

None of this makes the fish worse. True World's Toyosu Express is a real air bridge and the quality on most New York counters is the best it has ever been. What it makes false is the story the check tells. The $600 seat is not buying rarer tuna than the $45 seat. It is buying the room, the hands and the name, and it is buying them from the same cooler. Ask the chef where the box came from. If the answer is a company, you already know which one.

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