Guest Author - Sherry Van Der Elst

Chopsticks...or fingertips?

For years, I pondered that question every time I sat down at a sushi bar. Sushi looked like finger food, yet everyone was eating it with chopsticks (or fumbling, it seemed).

I, too, used chopsticks in the beginning. But the fundamental ergonomics of those eating utensils didn’t seem suited for grasping sushi and keeping it together in one piece. Slippery pieces of squid somehow kept plopping into laps and wasabi-smeared bits of rice magically would appear on shirtfronts. Eating sushi with my fingers made more sense, so that's what I started to do.

I'm still eating it that way today, and I've long become impervious to the stares from neighboring diners who seem both shocked and amused by my gauche display of table manners.

So which is the correct way to eat sushi? According to Hiroshi Sakai, a Chicago-based sushi chef at Benihana for 24 years, sushi is meant to be finger food but can also be eaten with chopsticks—-whichever way you’re most comfortable with.

"There is no right and there is no wrong way," he explains. "In Japan, men use their fingers but women like to use chopsticks in public because it’s more dainty-looking."

The trick is how to pick up the sushi itself, Sakai adds. "When you eat nigiri (fish placed atop balls of small rice and often wrapped with a strip of seaweed), pick it up between your thumb and middle finger and dip the fish side—not the rice side—into the soy sauce. Otherwise the rice will get soggy and the whole thing will fall apart."