The Hump was singularly well located, overlooking the runway at the Santa Monica Airport, a great place to watch rattling vintage planes and featherweight experimental aircraft take off and land. It served things few others could or would: blowfish, which contains a deadly toxin and can be fatal if improperly prepared; keiji, superfatty salmon babies which, before they are sexually mature, follow the adult fish to the rivers, where they are harvested. (One in ten thousand salmon caught is keiji, and the price can be as high as $150 a pound.) A sign on the door read “Warning! This sushi bar does prepare live sea food in full view, at the counter.” It was routine to see a chef take out a live eel and drive a spike through its brain, and serve it seconds later. Live lobster was cut in half and presented with the tail meat draped over the carapace, and the head, still moving, beside it on a bed of ice. Eddie Lin, who writes an adventure-eating blog called Deep End Dining and frequented The Hump, said, “The effect of it is the animal is watching you eat it.”
Brian Vidor, the restaurant’s owner, is tall, with bushy white hair and the warm but slightly furtive manner of someone who has spent too much time in camp. In the seventies, he worked as a guide in the safari park at Great Adventure in New Jersey. Then Chipperfield’s, a British circus-and-carnival company, hired him to go to the Sudan to capture white rhino calves, elephants, hartebeests, and topi for a zoo in Prague. They scouted for the animals from the air, in a small plane called a Piper Super Cub, and rounded them up with trucks, darting the mothers with tranquilizers so they would not stampede when the hunters took their young.
After that, Vidor took a job with a company called International Animal Exchange building a safari park—baboons, giraffes, rhinos, elephants, tigers—in Miyazaki, Japan. For the next fifteen or so years, he traveled all over Asia, building zoos. In Taipei, he drank snake blood in Snake Alley and tried his first insect: a Jerusalem cricket, fried with garlic and red pepper, served with beer. In Singapore, he had scorpions on toast. By the early nineties, he had become a flight instructor. Landing at the Santa Monica Airport, he noticed a “For Lease” sign, and decided to become a restaurateur, re-creating his favorite Asian street foods at a restaurant called Typhoon, where part of the menu was devoted to edible insects. Several years later, he opened The Hump upstairs for the customers who had graduated to a more morally complex and expensive confrontation with omnivorousness.
• • •
Whale consumption occupies a special place in the Japanese conscience. In Tsukiji, a book about the Tokyo fish market, Theodore Bestor, a professor of anthropology and Japanese studies at Harvard, writes that whales are the object of “ritual concern,” mourned in special Buddhist services called kuyo. Etymologically considered fish—kujira, the word in Japanese, means “major fish”—whales were exempt from Buddhist prohibitions against eating meat. (Catholics, historically, saw the issue similarly, and allowed whale on Fridays.) After the war, when there were food shortages, it became an important source of protein; General MacArthur encouraged fishermen to convert their boats to whalers. Canned whale, mostly less-desirable sperm whale, became the Spam of mid-century Japan, remembered fondly by some aging Japanese, reviled by others as something they ate only in desperation.
But subsistence whaling, a limited, coastal phenomenon, has little in common with Japanese whaling today, which takes place on both the coast and the open seas, including in an area of the Southern Ocean designated a sanctuary by the International Whaling Commission in 1994. Under a research exemption from the moratorium, the Japanese take about a thousand whales a year, including sei whales, which have been listed as endangered since the seventies. To outsiders, their reasons can appear tenuous. Originally, government scientists justified the hunt by saying it was unavoidable: in order to collect the tissue necessary for DNA analysis—a tool for understanding stock structure—the whales had to be killed. Now that it is possible to biopsy living whales, they say that they need to examine their stomach contents for proper ecosystem management. The hunt, which is accomplished by firing an exploding harpoon at the whale, is considered by many to be inherently inhumane. In any case, U.S. scientists have a hard time finding anything useful in the Japanese data, because the whalers go only where they know the whales to be, and they do not carry scientific observers aboard.
Japanese pro-whaling politicians and organizations insist that whale stocks are healthy, and characterize the opposition as “culinary imperialism.” The government spends copiously to support the hunt—reportedly some $45 million in 2011, including funds intended for tsunami relief—though it struggles to find a market for the meat, which, according to the terms of the research exemption, it is obligated not to waste. In 2008, the government sold ten tons of whale at a discount to schools in Yokohama for Traditional School Lunch Week. Homey, old-fashioned, and not particularly prestigious, the meat nonetheless commands a high price at specialty all-whale restaurants, where everything from tongues to testicles are served. The tastier tail and belly cuts of the rarer baleen whales are sometimes available at fancy sushi bars. But a poll conducted by the International Fund for Animal Welfare in early 2013 showed that only 10 percent of Japanese had eaten whale in the previous year.
How to explain a circular, propped-up, ecologically dubious, economically precarious industry—other than to say that’s what happens when governments get too involved with the food business? Subterfuge. “The whale industry has nothing to do with whales,” Casson Trenor, a former Sea Shepherd activist who in 2008 started what he believes to have been the world’s first sustainable sushi bar, Tataki, in San Francisco. (Now you can eat sustainable sushi in Boise.) “It has to do with drawing a line in the sand about national sovereignty and resource management,” he said. “The idea of other countries being able to determine what can and can’t be taken from the ocean is anathema to the Japanese.” To this way of thinking, Japan has created a baffle to distract Western conservation groups from the fishery it truly wants to shield from interference: bluefin.
• • •
When they got to the restaurant, Galbraith chose a seat facing away from the bar and placed the purse with the camera in it on the table. On the chair next to her, she put her friend’s purse, which had a gallon-size ziplock bag inside it. They ordered omakase, chef’s choice. After they had been eating for a few hours, her friend asked the waitress, in Japanese, for whale: kujira. According to Galbraith, it came to the table, sliced very thin, on a glass plate, with special soy sauce, accompanied by several pieces of dark reddish-brown sashimi that the waitress identified as horse, which has been illegal to serve to people in California for more than a decade. Galbraith’s friend, who was seated facing the bar, had her leg pressed against Galbraith’s; she moved it away whenever the chefs were watching. The women tasted both kinds of sashimi, while the chefs studied their reactions intently. As soon as the chefs turned away, Galbraith’s friend touched her leg again, and Galbraith secreted two pieces of each kind of meat in a napkin, which she slipped into the ziplock. They left with a handwritten receipt, which included the words whale and horse, in English. The price for that course alone was $85.
Hambleton took the meat, froze it, and the following morning sent it by courier to Dr. Scott Baker, the associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, and an expert in cetacean molecular genetics. Baker, who recently established a database of whale, dolphin, and porpoise DNA, and has sampled cetacean meat sold in markets throughout Japan and Korea, identified the meat as sei, the fourth-largest of the baleen whales, behind blues, fins, and rights. Fast, sleek, and elusive, sei whales live far offshore and can travel at speeds up to thirty-five miles an hour. Baker called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, which enforces the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
A few months later, federal investigators asked Galbraith to return to The Hump to collect more samples. Her Chinese friend had refused to go back, afraid that the yakuza were involved and might come after her, so Ga
lbraith brought another friend, Heather Rally, a petite, part Asian woman in her early twenties. Hambleton tricked out the Guess purse with a better camera, from a top designer of surveillance equipment in New York, who helped with The Cove and, Hambleton told me, works with Israeli intelligence. “A lot of the cameras we get before the military does,” he said.
Again the women ordered omakase, and when they asked specifically for whale they were allegedly served a plate of it. While they ate, Psyihoyos, who was in town getting ready for the Academy Awards, sat with Hambleton in an SUV in the parking lot, monitoring the audio feed. The filmmakers were as excited as they were appalled. “You could hear the live fish flapping at the table next to them!” Psihoyos told me. “The idea of taking apart a live animal for culinary enjoyment—now we’re out of the food world and into the world of snuff films.”
Meanwhile, a pair of agents from NOAA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had set up a base of operations at the Beverly Hills estate of an animal-loving former rock-and-roll manager. Leaving the restaurant with more samples, Galbraith and Rally headed to Beverly Hills. The house, vast and contemporary, with a waterfall, a room with a piano and eight guitars, and an extensive art collection, was also home to six rescue dogs. The agents turned a guest bathroom into a lab and tried to ignore the fact that the owner of the house, who had a serious medical condition, was walking around with a joint. “The look on their faces was great, like, ‘Keep that away from us,’” Hambleton said.
In the bathroom, the agents worked late into the night debriefing Galbraith and Rally and preparing the samples. Hambleton secretly kept a little meat for himself; he didn’t trust the feds to resist political pressure if someone decided it would be inconvenient for U.S.-Japan relations to find sei whale for sale in the United States. But he didn’t have cause to use it: the NOAA lab the meat was sent to identified it as sei, too.
In early March 2010, the investigators asked Galbraith and Rally to make a final trip to The Hump. This time, the agents checked their purses before they went in and planted three of their own—from NOAA, Fish and Wildlife, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection—at the sushi bar. From the parking lot, Hambleton and Psihoyos listened to Galbraith and Rally and relayed information to them and to an agent stationed in the parking lot.
“They are ordering blowfish,” Psihoyos texted one of the agents at the bar. The agents replied that there was only one chef in America licensed to prepare it, and he was based in New York. Then, “They were just served horse.” Several minutes later, Psihoyos wrote again. “Just served the blowfish. What could possibly go wrong?”
After mackerel, toro, sea urchin, kobe beef, and sweet shrimp, Galbraith and Rally requested kujira by name. According to the affidavit, as the chef left to go outside, the Fish and Wildlife agent followed him and watched from a stairwell while he appeared to walk away from an old white Mercedes in the parking lot, carrying a hunk of meat wrapped in clear plastic.
“Nice,” the agent in the parking lot texted Psihoyos.
“Bingo!” he responded.
Trailing the chef back inside, the agent who had been in the stairwell said he saw the chef slap it on the sushi bar in front of an underling, who cut it into small strips. Then, the agent said, he and his colleagues instigated speculation among the other patrons at the bar as to what kind of meat it was. Finally, the chef slicing it muttered “whale,” at which point it was delivered to Galbraith and Rally.
Of all the things she ate in the name of saving animals, Galbraith found the alleged horse meat most disturbing. “Everything else was so good,” she said. “I feel guilty saying it.” Whale had the strange but not unpleasant flavor of “fishy beef,” but horse she found altogether unpalatable. “It was pungent and gamey, really disgusting.” she told me. To eat it, she had to fool herself back into a pre‒Skinny Bitch mentality. Self-deception, as it happened, was not the only trickery at work on Galbraith’s visits to The Hump. So committed was the restaurant to serving the outrageous and off-limits and hard-to-source that it resorted to a little subterfuge of its own. When Scott Baker’s DNA tests came back, the horse that had assaulted her palate with its strangeness was revealed to have been beef.
• • •
A few days after The Cove won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, The Hump’s chef, Kiyoshiro Yamamoto, and Typhoon Restaurant, Inc., Vidor’s company, were charged with violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act. People were shocked. “Short of putting human body parts on the menu, there isn’t anything worse than serving whale to restaurant customers,” Mark Gold wrote on his blog, Spouting Off. The invocation of cannibalism got my attention. It smelled of unexamined xenophobia: only a sub-human monster would eat another person. More important, it confused the nature of the issue, which is a problem of quantity not kind. Jonathan Gold, for his part, didn’t take his brother’s bait. He merely linked to his piece about eating whale in Korea.
An apology posted on The Hump’s website doubled as a defense of culinary relativism. “The charge against the restaurant is true,” it said. “The Hump served whale meat to customers looking to eat what in Japan is widely served as a delicacy.” The message also said that The Hump would close, donate to conservation organizations, and pay whatever fine the court might deem appropriate (usually $100,000 for individuals and $200,000 for businesses). But then the charges against the restaurant and Yamamoto were abruptly dropped. Vidor, when I asked him about it in 2011, said he couldn’t discuss the case. Prosecutors filed a separate charge—a misdemeanor—against the supplier, from whom, they claimed, Yamamoto had been getting whale for years. Using genetic information, Baker was able to trace the whale served at The Hump definitively to the Japanese scientific hunt.
At the end of 2012, a friend of mine told me that Yamamoto had opened Yamakase, a secret sushi bar with an unlisted phone number and address, accessible, according to its website, by invitation only. My friend had often entertained Japanese clients at The Hump. He told me stories of staying late, after all the other customers left, when the chefs locked the door and pulled out the strange stuff—tiny bright green turtles, rattlesnake moonshine—from coolers underneath the bar. He knew Yamamoto well enough to get us in. He also knew to bring enough sake to share with him. When we arrived, Yamamoto was standing outside, smoking a cigarette on an otherwise empty street. The restaurant, a onetime gelateria next to a place advertising itself as “Home of the Pregnant Burrito” had papered-over windows; behind them, a row of traditional narrow-necked bottles showed in silhouette, like a Morandi. The sign on the door said “Closed.” It was the seafood equivalent of Totoraku, the invitation-only beef restaurant where I’d gone with the Hedonists, and in fact Yamamoto and the beef chef, Kaz Oyama, are great friends: the white Mercedes from which Yamamoto allegedly took the whale was registered to Oyama.
Inside: nine seats before a sushi bar, a glowing pink lump of Himalayan salt, and a gigantic, bristling Hokkaido crab with the face of an Irish brawler. Yamamoto had opened specially for us, and we were the only customers. He went behind the bar and sliced a piece of Japanese wagyu into sheets, grated a little salt on them, and seared them lightly. The ban on importing Japanese wagyu had just been lifted. “Only two weeks it’s been available,” he said when he looked up. “It’s not on the open market yet.” He offered to get us some to have at home.
We ate the beef, we ate the crab, we ate gumball-size baby peaches, olive-green and tasting like a 1940s perfume. There was slippery jellyfish in sesame-oil vinaigrette, and a raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts, meant to be slurped together in one viscous spoonful. That dish—quiver on quiver on quiver—epitomized the convergence of the disgusting and the sublime typical of so much foodie food. It was almost impossible to swallow it, thinking ruined it, and submission to its alien texture rewarded you with a bracing, briny, primal rush.
“Damn good!” Yamamoto, a solid, gruff guy with bushy eyebrows, said, and took a
nother swig of sake.
The restaurant was authentic and obscure, and demanded special willingness and stamina on the part of the eater. One influential blogger, who posted about eating twenty-six courses there with the French chef Ludo Lefebvre, wrote, “I think Yamakase’s going to be the next big thing on the Japanese scene here in LA. I’m already thinking about my return trip—it’s that good. Seriously though, if you care at all about Japanese dining, you owe it to yourself to give this place a try, if you can get in of course.”
But in early 2013, Susumo Ueda and Yamamoto were indicted, along with Typhoon Restaurant, Inc., on charges that they conspired to smuggle and sell whale meat; Yamamoto was also charged with interfering with the investigation. This time the penalties were potentially severe: up to sixty-seven years in prison for Yamamoto and ten for Ueda, and a fine of $1.2 million for Typhoon Restaurant, Inc.
On the day of Ueda’s arraignment, I went downtown to the Federal Building. In the hallway outside the courtroom, I noticed a young Japanese woman with a long black ponytail, shushing a baby. It was Ueda’s wife, Yukiko; I went over to introduce myself. She said that her husband now had a job working at a sushi bar in Beverly Hills. “It’s more conventional,” she said. “Not so interesting as at The Hump. But you can call in advance. If he knows you’re coming he will order something special for you.”
Ueda, a kind-looking man with a graying buzz cut and a short goatee, used a Japanese interpreter to enter a plea of not guilty. Sei’s status as an endangered animal was a legitimate source of outrage, but it wasn’t the legal matter at issue; the law the chefs and the restaurant were charged with violating covers all cetaceans, endangered and not. In a sense, they were accused of not understanding that in America whales and their relatives are considered too smart—too human-like—to eat.
Brian Vidor built his businesses around the thrill of eating the forbidden: tiny insects downstairs, massive endangered species upstairs. One place represented rapacious, selfish, greedy devouring of all the world’s creatures, the other broad-minded, virtuous, global humanism; one was theoretically sustainable, one likely not; both challenged notions of what is appropriate food. Vidor’s lawyer entered a not-guilty plea for Typhoon Restaurant, Inc., too. After leaving the courtroom, he summed up his client’s position and, as far as I could tell, the attitudes of the adventurous foodies who ate there and distanced themselves when the dark side of their thrill-seeking was exposed. “He owned the restaurant, but he’s a Caucasian, he’s a fun-loving guy—he wasn’t involved day to day.”
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