Once upon a time, Pakistanis scorned raw fish. Now sushi is everywhere from Ramadan meals to wedding buffets – and it all started with one man and a dream
When the 17-storey Avari Towers opened in Karachi in April 1985, it was the tallest hotel in the city. “It felt otherworldly,” said one chef who worked there as a teenager. “It was there that I saw a swimming pool for the first time,” he remembered, “and swimsuits.” By December 1986, this $32m building had another novelty to offer – Fujiyama, a Japanese restaurant at its summit. There had been no advertisements for Fujiyama, and for its first six weeks, the only way to get in was with an invitation; these began to land in the homes and offices of the city’s bankers, businessmen, doctors and other members of Karachi’s elite. By the new year, the restaurant was so busy it had waiting lists. There were now two kinds of people in the city of 6 million: those who had tried sushi and those who had not.
In the late 80s, a Japanese restaurant like Fujiyama was an expensive proposition: foreign chefs had to be hired, staff trained, and ingredients, from wasabi to rice, constantly imported. Sushi – raw fish – in a country where daal roti is a staple and vegetables are often cooked down until they lose their crunch: who would take such a risk? And yet, somehow, it paid off. Fujiyama was the first place to serve Japanese cuisine in Pakistan, and it was where many Pakistanis encountered sushi for the first time.
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