I’m Korean, so when I sense something pickled, I automatically assume it’s a condiment, like kimchee. At the sushi bar, my natural instinct is to pick up that entire pile of pale pink pickled ginger (that’s some alliteration), place it atop my sushi, and eat it altogether.
Very bad.
At the sushi bar, the little pile of ginger called “gari” in Japanese isn’t quite a condiment to be eaten. It really should be used to cleanse your palate *ooh la la* between pieces of sushi. You can also pick up a slice of gari with your chopsticks, dip it in the soy sauce, and use it to “paint” a little bit of soysauce onto the fish on your nigiri sushi, since we all know by now that you really shouldn’t be dipping that sushi into the shoyu, unless you flip that baby over fish side down.
Gari should be it’s natural color – a light beige. If the gari is nuclear Barbie bubble gum pink, it’s been dyed, and you should just go ahead and rub your disposable chopticks together, dunk your sushi rice-side-down in a giant pool of soy sauce muddled with instant wasabi paste.
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