Ra 4 Food - Health and Nutritional Tips

Ok, so here’s a novelty – a restaurant advising their customers not to eat their food. Yes, bizarrely, Nobu – the acclaimed sushi restaurant is trying to put their patrons off ordering the bluefin tuna – an endangered species. Would it not be easier just to take it off the menu??

Instead, the London restaurants that are frequented by the likes of Brad Pitt and Kate Moss, have stuck a little memo in their menus, saying that the £32 bluefin tuna is “environmentally challenged”, adding: “Please ask your server for an alternative.”

It seems a bit of a change of heart for Nobu, considering they have fought off opposition by campaigners over the last five years demanding they remove the fish from the menu. The Bluefin has gone from being abundantly available for centuries, to now being almost wiped out.

Despite the fact the bluefin is thought of as a Japanese delicacy and the premium of all tunas, almost no chef will touch it thanks to the massive publicity campaign to save it.

However Nobu – named after Japanese founder Nobu Matsuhisa – went against the grain by sticking to their guns to continue stocking the endangered fish. Controversially, last year undercover Greenpeace investigators were informed by waiting staff that the tuna they were serving was not bluefin. However DNA results proved otherwise.

Nobu’s decision to advise their customers against ordering the fish has become quite the conversation starter. Giles Bartlett, senior fishers policy officer for WWF said, “They shouldn’t sell endangered species. They should change their menu to incorporate a fish that’s sustainable and not one that’s critically endangered,”

Environmental journalist Charles Clover – writer of the book, The End of the Line, which was the basis for the film of the same name, out on the 8^th June, said, “It’s amazing that they’re still selling it.” Nobu repeatedly refused to talk to Clover about the issue over a period of five years, until the £1m film was produced.

One of the most harrowing scenes in the film is the gory summer hunt in the Mediterranean for the bluefin – worth up to $100,000 for one specimen on the Japanese market. The WWF predict if fishing rates continue as they are, breeding stocks will have been wiped out by 2012.

Despite Nobu being a 24-strong chain across the world, with restaurants in Hong Kong and Honolulu, only the two London restaurants in Mayfair have a footnote in their menu warning diners about the unsustainable fish.

Michelin-starred chef Tom Aitkens noted that bluefin would be raking in big bucks for Nobu, and removing it from the menu would mean a dive in profits.

He went on to say that the footnote was “very peculiar”. The restaurateur, who himself only sells sustainable fish like line caught cod added, “That’s insane. If you’re serving it you shouldn’t say don’t order it. It’s contradictory. They should take it off.”