Katsuo tataki

Kochi faces the open Pacific, and the katsuo — skipjack bonito — run past it twice a year on the Kuroshio current. The prefecture eats more of them per head than anywhere else in Japan, and it eats them in a way that is essentially theatre.

The straw

A fillet is skewered and held over a fire of burning rice straw. Straw matters: it burns fast and violently, reaching around 800°C, which sears the surface in under a minute without the heat having time to travel inward. Charcoal is slower and cooler and would cook the fish through; straw scorches it and stops.

The result is a fillet with a smoky, almost blackened skin and a centre that is completely raw. It is sliced thick — thicker than sashimi — and served with garlic slices, ginger, spring onion, shiso and either ponzu or, in the more austere local style, simply salt.

Ask for it <em>shio-tataki</em>, with salt rather than ponzu, and a Kochi person will look at you differently. Salt is the version that does not hide anything.

Why the technique exists

The usual story is practical rather than culinary. One version says fishermen seared the surface to kill surface bacteria while keeping the flesh raw. Another says a seventeenth-century Tosa lord banned raw bonito after cases of food poisoning, and the population complied by searing the outside only — technically cooked, in fact still sashimi. It is exactly the kind of workaround this prefecture enjoys claiming.

Both stories may be tidy inventions. What is certain is the timing: it is best in spring, when the northbound fish are lean and clean, and again in autumn, when the returning modori-gatsuo are fat. Locals argue permanently about which is superior, and the argument is one of the pleasures of eating here.

Where

Hirome Market in the city centre is where visitors should go, and not as a compromise — the stall called Myojinmaru sears in the open, in front of you, and the flames go up two metres. You take the plate to a shared table, and somebody will start talking to you.

Kochi's drinking culture is a thing in itself. The word okyaku means a Tosa banquet, and the prefecture is famous — nationally, and with slight alarm — for how much it drinks. There are dedicated drinking games involving cups you cannot put down until they are empty. On a port day, one beer at a shared table at eleven in the morning is entirely normal here and nobody will think anything of it.