Invited to join the inaugural tasting were Japan's Consul General Hidetoshi Ukawa, Japanese businessmen and New York reporters. Flown in to do the honors was Sakae Hata, the dean of Japanese fugu chefs. Kuraoka prepared a feast for a select 30. We'll probably be asking the husbands' permission before we let their wives order it.'Īlthough banned by the FDA since 1980, several boxes of tiger fugu passed customs last September. Like many of his countrymen, Kuraoka missed his fugu and spent five years attempting to get the Japanese fugu syndicate and the Japanese government to permit tiger fugu to be exported to him.Įlated when that came through, he could hardly wait to get it on his menu, explaining to people that there is no poison on the skin, meat or testicles of the tiger fugu, and joking: 'Through my experience it is a strong aphrodisiac. Triggering the current fuss is Nobuyoshi Kuraoka, owner of the Nippon, a highly praised New York restaurant on East 52nd Street that is considered the grandfather of the New York sushi restaurants. Garry Trudeau, comic strip creator of 'Doonesbury,' recently wrote about the zombie state of Duke, ascribing his condition to the poison of a puffer fish mystery writer James Melville used fugu toxin for a bizarre murder Ian Fleming's hero James Bond beat the odds and survived after a near-fatal dose of fugu toxin: 'It comes from the Japanese globefish,' a neurologist tells Bond's boss. This is not an issue that is going to touch many lives, but there is enough legend, poetry and mystique about the poisonous puffers to keep the subject surfacing in news stories and in our pop culture. Now there is a ballooning fuss over fugu that is reverberating from an island in Japan, to a restaurant in New York, through law offices in New York and Washington, the Brooklyn laboratory of a Chinese toxin expert for the State University of New York (SUNY), and into the bureaucracy at the Food and Drug Administration in Washington.

In the presence of danger they can gulp air or water into a sac in the belly and balloon up to three times their size to discourage predators. Species of the puffer are found all over the globe and known also as blowfish, porcupine fish or globefish. They contain tetrodotoxin, a lightning-fast poison 275 times more deadly than cyanide, and there is no antidote. You get a work of art and a rush of danger from knowing that the ovaries and liver of the fugu are deadly poisonous. A member of the family of puffer fishes, its silky white flesh is a prized delicacy - and each bite is a thrill.Ī fugu dinner in Japan can cost $200 per person, but you get more than a fish dinner. The ultimate edible for wealthy Japanese is a funny-looking fish, the tiger fugu.

Fugu north port