- Tuna's one of those things where
it's the riskiest business.
You can make a lot of money,
and sometimes you can lose a lot of money.
Tuna is based on trust.
In order for us to source the best quality tuna,
we always have to be honest with who we buy from.
Otherwise, why would they wanna sell to us?
Fridays are really busy because Friday is where we do
about a third of our business for the week.
So probably by a little after 3:00 AM,
we start cutting our first tuna.
Tuna's very difficult because every fish is different.
From coloring, to texture, to fat content.
So on some days, we have to keep cutting,
and cutting, and cutting, until we find the right one.
Because obviously, quality is more important
than anything else.
'Cause we obviously have a reputation on the line.
(intense music)
TsuruTonTan kitchen, one case, three piece, 14, 16.
- Hi, my name is Nobu Yamanashi.
I'm the director of Yama Seafood.
We're here in Jersey City, New Jersey.
(intense dramatic music)
There's many different kinds of fish in the world,
but tuna is definitely the core business.
It can really make or break a week for us.
Sushi is our main clientele,
sushi restaurants, but we provide tuna
to various different types of cuisines.
From three Michelin star restaurants
to poke takeout restaurants.
My father's name is Kingo Yamanashi.
He came to the States when he was 22 years old.
Heard about wild Boston bluefin tuna
that was just kinda being tossed back into the waters
'cause it was just sports fishing.
And he just offered them a dollar a pound.
Load up the van, come back to New York.
Show the chefs, "Hey this is what I have.
Cut it down yourself and take whatever cut you want."
We handle four kinds of tuna, right?
Albacore, bigeye, yellowfin, bluefin.
All yellowfin and bigeye tuna are wild.
Currently, bluefin tuna is
95% farmed because the wild bluefin's season's over.
You can get it from South America,
or you can get it from Brazil.
Pretty much any anywhere in the world.
Wherever there's good tuna,
we'll find it and we'll buy it.
(workers busily clattering boxes)
Morning!
My routine is check, make sure I didn't miss any orders
from my customers, and then start packing
in the local fish departments.
Bansha, you're a four piece, six, seven,
scale, head off, head deli.
Bonnie two, three, four size,
and Hirame two, four pound up.
You're Izakaya,
Masa, you're a four piece.
- All right, this is our sengyo section
which is our Japanese fish.
We import fish from Japan.
This is where we do our Hokkaido uni.
You got your Shim-aji madai.
All your wild, exotic fish.
This is how they come from Japan,
wild bluefin tuna from Miyazaki.
He literally told me,
"I don't care about price, I'll pay up to $20-$50 a pound.
Just give me the best thing."
So he made me start from the best tuna vendor
in Toyosu in Japan, Yamayuki, and this what it is.
This how it came out a week later.
So this is where we handle all of our salmon.
It's all over here.
We sell thousands and thousands of pounds a week,
consists of so many varieties.
Every chef has their preferences, especially king salmon.
They'll say, "Give me ora king salmon."
or "Give me bakkafrost from the Faroe islands."
This is our scale machine,
so you put a fish through it and this scales the salmon
or any kind of fish.
In a day, we probably go through
like almost 100 pounds just worth of scales alone.
So we have all of our uni.
We have a direct relationship with the uni processor
in Hokkaido, which is pretty rare,
because most people have to buy it from the market.
We sell, I think two to 300 trays a week,
either different brand,
one of our high-end Korean restaurants
are using Ogawa brand.
It's covered but it's all salt water
so it's not treated with any chemicals.
It's all pretty much as natural
as cracking uni open itself.
Live soft-shell crab.
These are shiso leaves by Oba.
Fresh wasabi from Japan that we wrapped up.
Oh, that's Louis.
He's been with us for, "Lucho, what, 15 years?"
- Me? - Yeah.
- Almost 16.
Oh, 16, young guy.
He's been managing our shellfish department.
So he's doing quality control.
He's listening the sound of the oyster
to see if it's still alive or not.
So tuna is something that we built our business off of.
My father started it from nothing in 40, 50 years ago.
So this is our tuna room.
How many tuna orders do we do on a Friday?
- Friday? - How many restaurants?
- How many restaurants?
- Yeah, on a Friday.
- Probably 250.
- Yeah, 250.
- Masakazu Ito is our tuna manager, tuna buyer.
He's been with the department for about 15 years now.
He's been our core in making sure the Yama Seafood name
remains for the tuna side.
- We move through around 8,000 pounds of tuna.
And I gotta have everything ready by 7 o'clock.
The local big guys around here,
they're my favorite 'cause of the boats.
They only go out for probably a week.
The other countries, they go out for like month.
If they go out for like a week, then it's pretty fresh.
(upbeat dramatic music)
This fish has good color.
This one on the other hand, it's little pale.
This one is really pale, no fat.
I'm kinda disappointed by this fish.
So I only got one good fish out of three.
So basically, they're gonna flip the coffin.
- [Producer] It's like, no joke?
- It's not, - [Producer] That's what you guys
call it? - That's what we call it.
So when I ask a vendor, how many coffins am I getting?
He'll be like, "Yeah, four coffins." (laughs)
(ice clattering)
Under the ice is thousands and thousands of pounds
of tuna over here.
The cutting table's here.
- We have a butcher that breaks down the tuna
into four loins, two bellies, two backside.
And then we have a trimmer that cleans it up nicely
to make it look professional.
The trimmers end up weighing it.
Hand-writes the weight on and it lays down the table.
(upbeat music)
The table here is where our best fish of the day is.
Along the back is where maybe the lesser quality per se,
or your number twos or your poke quality.
You know, we pretty much only buy number one tuna
whether it be yellowfin or a bigeye.
But we cut it, it wasn't necessarily the quality
that we pay for number one.
Now those, maybe we sell it to our number two customer,
poke customers.
- After we lined them up, my job to allocate all the tunas
depending on how much they pay.
This is the Michelin three-star restaurant, Le Bernardin.
They like the 10 to 15 pound tuna loin,
so I'm gonna give this two belly loins.
The sushi restaurant likes fatty fish,
but French, they don't like fatty fish.
They like lean fish with good colors,
so that's what I'm looking for.
So I got an order for restaurant Daniel in New York.
I'm going to give him the belly piece.
He doesn't like the tail part.
So I basically, I cut the tail off
and I'm giving him 14.8 pounds.
(boxes clattering)
- You know, the best farmed bluefin tuna is from Spain.
The Spain bluefin tuna are called jumbo bluefin.
Anywhere from 400 pounds
to
mid 500s.
We try not to go too big just because that's not a quality
that we believe is in best interest of our clients.
'Cause if it gets too big, it's too fatty
and it just doesn't taste as good.
- Okay, this is a farm-raised bluefin from Spain.
It weighs 430 pounds.
This tuna is for six restaurants.
(metal clattering)
Oh, the samurai in the house.
This is the tuna knife.
I think it cost around $5,000.
This is really sharp.
(upbeat music)
Basically, this is the Spanish bluefin.
So I'm gonna cut it in two blocks.
So basically, we gonna saku these blocks into pieces
and then we gonna deep freeze in a blast freezer.
- [Nobu] So saku is when after we break down the whole
tuna and take the skin off, take the bones out,
and cut into bop blocks, saku blocks.
So you can just cut it into sushi or nigiri.
(upbeat music)
If you use a regular freezer, that's not gonna work.
As long as you thaw it the right way,
you're not gonna see the difference between the fresh
and the frozen.
- So this is where we do a lot of our azukari.
This is our customer out in Charleston, Ridgewood, New York.
All these together, probably three or 4,000 pounds
worth of azukari
And plus like super frozen products
that we're trying to sell in the future as well.
All the smaller distributors don't have the facility
like this, where they can keep anything like this.
They may not even have a super freezer.
They may have one chest freezer, they hold a little bit.
Azukari is a Japanese term where we keep,
we hold the items for our customers.
We make sure our customers can provide the best tuna
all throughout the year during the off season.
It's not like we're a freezer storage facility
where we charge a dollar a pound a month or something.
This is something that we do for our customers.
But obviously, we can't offer it to everybody as well.
And inside here, we have eight to 10 chest freezers
that are kept at, it says minus 78, right there.
They draw a diagram or even better.
Some of them even come here and they say,
"I want you to cut it exactly this way."
Because that's how it works for them.
If we do it whatever our way,
it doesn't necessarily work for them.
So each azukari we do
has to be carefully explained and executed.
Otherwise, it won't be up to the standards of our customers.
Drivers start coming in soon
and then they just pick it out,
double check everything, and load the van with it.
Our whole process is very important, especially drivers.
Well, because they're our eyes and ears
outside of our facility.
And obviously, they're the ones that do the last check.
So if any mistake that's made in the warehouse,
they're the ones that can catch it and resolve it.
So before it goes out, they double-check everything.
And if there's any issues, we fix it before they go out.
And there's only a few rules
that my father really wanted people ingrain in their brains.
When you come in in the morning,
make sure everyone hears you say good morning.
If you can't do it here as a mentality,
you can't do it out there.
When you're doing deliveries
when no one's watching you, right?
And never steal and don't cheat.
But yeah, he always said
he may not be smarter than everyone,
but he will work longer and harder than anybody.
He'll be in first thing in the morning before anybody
and he'll be the last one out.
Very old school mentality and he lived by that.
He doesn't care how skilled you are, how smart you are.
Doesn't matter to him.
He wants loyal, hardworking people that will never lie,
cheat, or steal from him.
Those are the people that are still here today
that are loyal to him.
And will retire and have this job for 30, 40 years.