Pulling the fish off your sushi and swirling it around in your miso soup would get you some harsh looks in a lot of restaurants, but apparently not at this conveyor belt sushi chain.

You could make the argument that miso soup is, in many ways, a reflection of Japanese cuisine itself. The focus is on simple but pure flavors, letting the subtle qualities of the ingredients play across your taste buds instead of muddying the experience with copious quantities of a cornucopia of seasonings and accoutrements.

So for many Japanese people, what you see below would be a shocking sight.

Not only is dipping something into your miso soup generally considered a major faux pas, the thing that’s being dipped into it is a slice of fish, freshly plucked off a block of sushi rice!

Ordinarily, this would be seen as sullying not one, but two representatives of Japan’s food culture, since just like you’re not supposed to dip things into your miso soup, the commonly accepted condiments for strips of sashimi, such as the madai (sea bream) shown in the images above, don’t include miso soup. In an unexpected twist, though, this combination is being recommended by none other than Kura Sushi, one of Japan’s most popular sushi restaurant chains.

And just to be clear, this idea isn’t coming from one of Kura Sushi’s overseas divisions. It’s right there in a video on the company’s official Kura Sushi Inaba News Japanese YouTube channel, featuring the chain’s YouTuber employee Inaba.

The video presents three different arrangements for miso soup, with the madai one being the first Inaba tries. So what does he think of this unorthodox combination?

“It’s rule-breakingly delicious.”

The taste-test continues with another unusual addition to miso soup: natto, or fermented soybeans, once again taken from pieces of natto sushi.

“This feels like it’s gonna be pretty dangerous,” muses Inaba as he stirs in the infamously smelly and sticky substance. Once again, though, the flavor instantly wins him over, as he declares it “Just really tasty.” Finally, Inaba tries adding shirako, or fish sperm, to his miso soup. This one actually has precedent, though, since in addition to being a sushi topping, shirako is sometimes put into miso soup in Hokkaido, and once again, Inaba declares it delicious.

There are a couple of things to bear in mind here. First, while Kura Sushi is a sushi restaurant, it’s a conveyor belt sushi chain, and a particularly laid back one even within that already casual and free-spirited segment of the restaurant industry. In the vast majority of dining situations, whether in restaurants or someone’s home in Japan, plunking sushi toppings into your bowl of miso soup is going to be a pretty big breach of etiquette. Second, even if you are in a rare situation where dipping sushi toppings into miso soup isn’t going to rub the restaurant staff and your dining companions the wrong way, you’re still going to need to eat the leftover rice, since it’s poor form to waste it. But as long as you do that, it looks like Kura Sushi has given its official blessing to use its sushi toppings as miso soup enhancements.

Source: YouTube/くら寿司　178イナバニュース via IT Media
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: YouTube/くら寿司　178イナバニュース
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