Tokyo Fish Market
The seafood counter carries more than a hundred kinds of fish, bluefin from Japan and halibut caught off this coast, with live Dungeness in the tank. The Fujita family has run it on San Pablo Avenue since 1963.
Why go
Isamu and Tazuye Fujita sold bait on San Pablo before they sold food. They left the bait trade and opened Tokyo Fish Market in 1963, in a 1,700 square foot building with a modest fish case and a shelf of Japanese groceries.2 Isamu died in 1971 and Tazuye ran it with her children. Lee Nakamura came on in 1990 to manage the fish counter and is now a partner. By the early 2000s the holiday lines curled around the building and into the parking lot, so the family built a 5,000 square foot store and opened it on 25 August 2005.2
Berkeleyside sat down with Nakamura at that counter in April 2012. He had worked eight years in seafood at Berkeley Bowl before moving here, and he had done a stint as a chef in a Japanese restaurant. He is direct about how he buys for a mixed room: We give our customers information, answer their questions, and then we let them make their own choices.
1 The old brick building out front is now the gift shop, full of Asian dishware, teapots, sake sets and origami paper.1
Order this / avoid
- Order: what Nakamura buys for himself. Asked his favorite fish in the store in 2012, he said:
Scottish Salmon 'Loch Duart' because of the oil content and the flavor.
1 - Avoid: overcooking what you buy. His own counter advice:
keep it simple. Cook it quickly in some olive oil, add some good salt and some lemon zest.
1
What locals & experts say
- Berkeleyside NOSH, 20 April 2012: the store is
an East Bay institution with legions of loyal customers who flock there for sushi-grade fish, soy sauce and rice, as well as other staples of Japanese cuisine.
1 - Lee Nakamura, fishmonger and partner, to Berkeleyside in 2012, on the questions he fields:
The first one is always: what's fresh? The second one is usually: what do you recommend? And that's followed by: how would you cook it?
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Good to know
- Timing: Monday to Saturday, 9am to 5pm.3
- Booking: walk in.
- Getting there: San Pablo Avenue at Gilman, north-west Berkeley.
Verdict
should-visit — Berkeleyside put a reporter across the counter from the man buying the fish and printed his answers, which is a better class of evidence than a description of a case. Lee Nakamura names the salmon he takes home and says why, and he says how he wants you to cook what you buy. That is checkable and it is useful. The limit is the date. That interview ran in April 2012, I have nothing later to set beside it, and the shop's own history page carries no date at all, so the rung rests on a fourteen-year-old account.