![]() The fish arrived processed without their heads or entrails, the parts with the highest concentrations of poisonous tetrodotoxin. The owners and the buyer at Fortune Fish did not know how many times exactly, but the restaurant had bought three or four of the fish every week for about a month, Yoshikawa said. Tsuki, according to its owners and a buyer for its Bensenville importer, Fortune Fish Co., had been receiving some of its fugu directly from Japan. There, it is inspected to make sure it has been certified by the Department of Health of Shimonoseki, Japan, the seaport where most fugu is processed. The problem, according to an FDA spokeswoman, is that torafugu must be shipped from Japan already processed and prepared to Kennedy International Airport. The fish first flopped onto American restaurant plates in New York in 1989, after the FDA approved its regulated importation the previous year.įugu had appeared on menus in a very limited area, mostly in New York and California, until Tsuki began offering it. Tsuki's owners, who are siblings, said that when they opened their restaurant 19 months ago they began investigating if they could serve fugu, which they presented either raw, in a pot with vegetables, fried or boiled. When the restaurant announced its famed and feared addition to the menu in late October, it joined a number of sushi restaurants in Chicago that have tried gimmicks-including serving sushi on a woman's body-to attract customers. "Agnes Yoshikawa, the owner of Tsuki, would like to apologize for any inconvenience that the fugu information has caused." "They just found out there is a possibility their fugu distributor may have been selling this to them illegally," John McCartney, a publicist for the restaurant wrote in an e-mail to the Tribune. Tsuki's owners released statements Thursday evening saying the restaurant would no longer serve fugu. "We've talked to the FDA, and we and they both agree that the best thing to do now is to embargo the product." "Based upon the information the Tribune has provided us, we contacted our counterparts at the FDA and informed them that we are going to the restaurant immediately to place embargo tags on the product in question," Tim Hadac, a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Public Health, said Thursday evening after the Tribune contacted the city about the legality of how Tsuki acquired the fish. Food and Drug Administration rules require that all imported torafugu first stop in New York City, where FDA inspectors make sure it has been certified in Japan as not poisonous. ![]() Fullerton Ave., had bought the torafugu, as that variety of blowfish is known, for about a month from a supplier who admits sometimes having the fish shipped directly to Chicago from Japan. ![]() Tsuki Japanese Restaurant and Lounge, 1441 W. The battle of extreme Japanese cuisine hit a snag Thursday when a Japanese restaurant in Lincoln Park that had for nearly a month been serving a variety of fugu-a blowfish that if not properly prepared can be deadly to eat-learned its unique menu item violated federal regulations. ![]()
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