How to Kill a Fish

A full week later, when I unwrapped the bonito fillets that Yamasaki had sent me home with, I was amazed to find the skin undiminished, the flesh a rosy pink. I’d grown used to being disappointed by fish from the supermarket, its flavor so often muddy or bitter, with the occasional bracing whiff of ammonia. The bonito smelled barely of the ocean, clean and faintly salty. Following Yamasaki’s instructions, I seasoned each fillet generously before flash-searing it on a ferociously hot cast-iron pan, then sliced it into thick chunks to dip into soy sauce. The flesh was sweet, a little tart, and supple, like a piece of ripe fruit.

Several times in the past few months, when I’ve called Yamasaki on the phone—we met last year, at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market—I’ve reached him in the middle of a long drive. About once a week, he hops into his crimson 1997 Jeep and travels several hours from Los Angeles to forage for mushrooms or to dive for shellfish, at locations that he prefers not to disclose, accompanied by his dogs, Artichoke and Chanterelle. Chanterelle, a large and spirited three-year-old Belgian Malinois mix, has a challenging temperament; on the boat, Yamasaki pulled up a pant leg to reveal a big, gnarly scab where she’d bitten his calf. “I think one of the reasons she’s crazy is because, during the tuna season, I give her all the trimmings,” he joked—at least one of his fishing buddies has gotten mercury poisoning. “I’m a zero-waste chef, you know?”

As a kid, Yamasaki, who grew up near Osaka, went fishing with his father. It was only when he became a chef—a career he stumbled into while putting himself through art school, in Paris—that he taught himself ike and shinkei jime, which are associated with the Akashi Strait, a famous fishery not far from his home town. As the executive chef at Koya, an udon bar in London, Yamasaki cooked live eels, whose bodies could remain jumpy and unwieldy even once their heads had been chopped off. After learning how to paralyze the spinal cord on an eel, he found handling other fish to be easy. “Ask a vet—it’s much more difficult to do an operation on a Chihuahua than a Doberman,” he told me.

In 2018, Yamasaki moved to L.A. to open a Japanese restaurant, which evolved from a pandemic-era food truck to an idiosyncratic izakaya, called Yess, in the Arts District. (After his current lease ends later this month, he will open a cheekily named pop-up, Fuck Yess, while he looks for a new location.) From the start, he knew that he wanted to serve seafood, and that he wanted to commit to using local ingredients, as he’d done at Koya. Between London and L.A., he spent a few months at a Zen temple back in Japan, where practitioners grew their own vegetables and rice. “They pursue this as kind of a mission to learn about life,” he told me. He was dismayed that the best seafood he could access in L.A. was imported from Japan: “It’s fresher than the fish, ironically, from Santa Barbara, which takes a couple of days, sometimes a week.” He researched species native to California’s waters—opaleye, calico bass, moray eel—only to discover that most weren’t even sold commercially. “And then I found this YouTube video of somebody spearfishing, and I said, ‘Oh, my God, this is what you have to do,’ ” he told me.

Many of this era’s chefs claim to be obsessed with seasonality and local sourcing; for Yamasaki, it’s a life style, an all-encompassing pursuit. After taking swimming lessons, he learned to spearfish, and to free dive, so that he could gather fish, sea urchin, and lobster by hand. Without a commercial license, he wouldn’t be able to sell what he caught; he realized that if he wanted a steady supply of the best possible fish for Yess, he’d need some local fishermen to take up ike and shinkei jime. Most of his cold e-mails and Instagram D.M.s went unanswered. Finally, Eric Hodge, an auto mechanic in Ojai who’d been fishing commercially for a few years, agreed to take him out on the water for a demonstration. Hodge was amused that Yamasaki was prone to seasickness. “I think he threw up all day,” Hodge said, of their first fishing trip. But, after tasting what they’d caught and butchered, he was convinced that Yamasaki was on to something.