128431 Wed Jan 19 08:56:11 -0800 2005 2 9 New Orleans 0 696269 Celeste, I saw your response below on Wasabi and Horinoya and It's got me thinking about how all this sushi at these buffet restaurants can be sold as cheaply as it is. There's at least one sushi buffet serving sushi at .99 cents per piece and several fixed price all-you-can-eat places with a large assortment of sushi items. Is the sushi available at these negliglible prices because it's all been frozen? Is that how they do it? Because otherwise I can't get it. Wed Jan 19 08:56:11 -0800 2005 0 Amanda 1 696270 Most fish served as sushi in the US has been frozen at some point...even at high-end places; handling plays a more important part in flavor/quality than fresh/frozen. This isn't a bad thing, as freezing kills some of the undesirable bacteria/protozoans in the fish. The really cheap stuff is probably long-long-frozen from a factory-fishing boat or possibly inferior pond-raised stuff (esp salmon, tilapia, etc). Much of the buffet stuff is crabstick, which is a processed, fish-based cooked product (aka surimi or kamaboko or fishcake), or shrimp or tuna. Incidentally, the NY Times had a recent article on the use of carbon monoxide to give raw tuna that bright-red color...I'll see if I can dig it up. Even perfectly fresh tuna is grayish pink after a couple of hours' exposure to air; but the "bright" stuff sells better, so seafood dealers are gassing the tuna to meet consumers' expectations. Wed Jan 19 10:38:18 -0800 2005 696269 0 Hungry Celeste 2 696272 Thanks, Celeste. I read the Times, so I saw the article about the freshen-up treatments for the tuna. There's no need to dig it up. The reason that I asked was that two or three years ago a friend was involved in the filming of an infomercial fo the Japanese market about tuna fishing in the Gulf of mexico and part of the deal was that the best grade of tuna was flash frozen and air freighted via Houston to Japan for sushii. I wondered how much of the stuff the cheap sushi places serve was frozen and if that's how they balanced the books. Wed Jan 19 12:21:46 -0800 2005 696270 0 Amanda