To find British Columbia’s pioneering, ocean-friendly sushi spot, look not to the culinary hub of Vancouver but some 750 kilometers (460 miles) north as the crow flies.
In the north coast port town of Prince Rupert, squirreled away in the back of a gift shop near the cruise terminal, sits sushi restaurant Fukasaku. It is unassuming and compact, consisting of just 29 seats. But this humble spot is the province’s first sushi restaurant to be 100 percent certified by the Vancouver Aquarium’s Ocean Wise program — a certification system that signifies to consumers that the seafood bearing its stamp has been caught with the health of the world’s oceans in mind.
Tokyo-born Chef Dai Fukasaku opened his eponymous restaurant in 2013 and immediately committed to using only BC seafood, in addition to adhering to the Ocean Wise program guidelines. In fact, Fukasaku gets 75 percent of his seafood — a bounty of sablefish, salmon, sea urchins, shrimp, crab and more — from local fishers working right off the coast of Prince Rupert.
There’s more: Fukasaku sources other ingredients like seaweed, mushrooms and, when possible, produce like cucumber, radish and bitter greens from local sources. His kitchen buys wasabi grown in Nanaimo and grates it just before it’s served to ensure peak freshness and spice.
On the drinks side, selections from Prince Rupert’s excellent Wheelhouse Brewery — practically across the street from Fukasaku — make up the beer list, as do other brews from the province. The wine list is limited to British Columbia wines that include a BC VQA designation, a quality assurance that includes, among other qualifiers, that the wine is made from 100 percent BC-grown grapes. Naturally, the sake is province-sourced, too; it hails from Granville Island’s Artisan Sake Maker, which is the first sake distillery in Canada. The company recently began producing sake using entirely BC-grown rice.
The restaurant’s very tables and chairs are local, too, created by BC furniture maker Lonnie Kaechele using province-sourced yellow cedar. These functional art pieces were created using joinery techniques that use no nails in the construction.
The restaurant’s windows look out over Cow Bay, surrounded by deep green mountains ringed with fog and just a few steps away from a harbor of sailboats and yachts. In the evenings, fishing vessels return with the day’s catches — perhaps the very fish that will be served tomorrow at Fukasaku.
