(ABOVE) Without a net: Tane Vegan Sushi’s truly sustainable, ocean-friendly menu includes not a single fish—all the sushi, from the pickled vegetable bao bun (left) to the tomato nigiri with shiso (far right), is plant-based.
It's the tomato nigiri that fools people-the ruby-red slab is a dead ringer for ahi sushi. But Tane Vegan Sushi and Izakaya serves no fish. A few of its dishes mimic what you'll find at regular sushi bars, but most items flaunt their vegetable-ness, like the lotus root chips perched on pumpkin and burdock rolls or the almost naked eggplant nigiri, modestly dabbed with miso.
About a decade ago, during a break in his shift, sushi chef Kin Lui read an article about the imminent extinction of bluefin tuna, beloved among sushi lovers. He returned to his cutting board, only to be confronted with the same fish he had just been reading about. Since then, with each successive restaurant he's opened, he has aimed to be more sustainable. In 2008, when he opened his first sushi spot, Tataki in San Francisco, he eschewed the ubiquitous tuna and hamachi for lower-impact alternatives like albacore and Kona kampachi. Time magazine called Tataki "America's first sustainable sushi restaurant" and designated Lui and his partners, Raymond Ho and Casson Trenor, "Heroes of the Environment."
By their fourth restaurant, Shizen, which opened in 2014-around the time sushi obsessives were dreaming of Jiro and his omakase-Lui was nixing fish from his menu entirely. It took him and his team a year to develop an all-vegan sushi menu. "A fish you can filet in less than a minute," he says. "With vegetables, 90 percent is in the preparation-how long it's going to be marinated, how long it's going to be smoked."
But Lui had long wanted to return to Honolulu, where he was raised, and bring vegan sushi with him. "I had doubt because we're all about poke and meat in Hawai'i," he says. He tried anyway, debuting Tane, which means "seed" in Japanese, in 2019. In the izakaya format, small dishes and sushi showcase the produce in a variety of preparations, from the pickled mango nigiri belted with a strip of nori and dotted with a citrus avocado puree to the maki rolls swaddled in paper-thin slices of smoked beets. The vegan ramen noodles float in a savory broth deepened with mushrooms and flowers. Buoyed by the popularity of Tane among vegetarians and carnivores alike, another location has since opened in Berkeley, California. "My personal dream," Lui says, "is to have a Tane in every single city."
