KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

roof, and I will tell you that my life as a chef will never be the same
again after spending the morning—and subsequent mornings—there.
Scallops in snow-shoe-sized black shells lay atop crushed ice, fish, still
flopping, twitching and struggling in pans of water, spitting at me as I
walked down the first of many narrow corridors between the vendors'
stands. Things were different here in that the Japanese market, workers
had no compunction about looking you in the eye, even nudging you out
of the way. They were busy, space was limited, and moving product
around, in between sellers, buyers, dangerously careening forklifts,
gawking tourists and about a million tons of seafood was tough. The
scene was riotous: eels, pinned to boards by a spike through the head,
were filleted alive, workers cut loins of tuna off the bone in two-man
teams, lopping off perfect hunks with truly terrifying-looking swords
and saws which, mishandled, could easily have halved their partners.
Periwinkles, cockles, encyclopedic selections of roes—salted, pickled,
cured and fresh—were everywhere, fish still bent from rigor mortis,
porgy, sardines, swordfish, abalone, spiny lobsters, giant lobsters,
blowfish, bonito, bluefin, yellowfin. Tuna was sold like gems—
displayed in light-boxes and illuminated from below, little labels
indicating grade and price. Tuna was king. There was fresh, dried, cut,
number one, number two, vendors who specialized in the less lovely bits.
There were hundreds, maybe thousands of gigantic bluefin and bonito,
blast-frozen on faraway factory ships. Frost-covered 200-300-pounders
were stacked everywhere, like stone figures on Easter Island, a single
slice taken from near the tail so quality could be examined. They were
laid out in rows, built up into heaps, sawed into redwood-like sections,
still frozen, hauled about on forklifts. There were sea urchins, egg sacs,
fish from all over the world. Giant squid as long as an arm and baby
squid the size of a thumbnail shared space with whitebait, smelts, what
looked like worms, slugs, snails, crabs, mussels, shrimp and everything
else that grew, swam, skittered, clawed, crawled, snaked or clung near
the ocean floor.