Lily Chang, a huge lover of Japanese food, has canceled a reservation at a famous Japanese restaurant in Taipei offering Kaiseki cuisine, a traditional multi-course Japanese dinner.
Chang usually eats at Japanese restaurants at least twice a month, preferring seafood from Japan. However, she is considering changing her eating habits because of worries about potential radioactive contamination following the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.
“Ingredients from Japan, such as scallops and oysters, used to be the freshest seafood, but now I prefer not to eat them,” Chang told the Taipei Times.
Photo: AFP
Although several Japanese restaurants have said they are using seafood from other countries as substitutes, Chang said she did not want to eat in them.
“Since the restaurant would have saved money by not obtaining their supplies from Japan, I am not willing to spend so much money eating in them,” Chang said.
There may be others thinking the same way, but Mitsui Food and Beverage Enterprise Group (三井餐飲事業集團), a 20-year-old business owning seven Japanese restaurants in Taipei, said their establishments have not been affected.
“Customers eating at our restaurants are mainly regulars. They believe in the quality of Mitsui’s food and ingredients,” a Mitsui Food spokesman said by telephone on Saturday.
Ingredients from Japan formerly accounted for 50 percent of Mitsui’s imports, but the group has stopped importing seafood from Japan’s disaster-stricken regions, he said.
The group is now obtaining oysters and abalone from Canada and some European countries, he said.
Japanese restaurants catering to customers on a budget also remained confident that their businesses would not be affected by fears of radioactive contamination, as they do not import seafood from Japan anyway.
Sushi Express Co Ltd (爭鮮迴轉壽司) said their sashimi ingredients have always been imported from Norway, so customers need have no fears about possible contamination.
Ching Yang, a Sushi Express regular, said she is not worried about the quality of the ingredients for the restaurant’s sashimi and had assumed that ingredients in a NT$30 sashimi dish would not come from Japan.
Currently, the government is checking levels of radioactivity in fresh food, fruit and alcohol imported from Japan, following the country’s nuclear crisis.
Lu Tsai-yih (呂財益), deputy director of the Directorate General of Customs, last week said goods from Japan would only be allowed into the country if they passed Department of Health spot checks and obtained safety certificates.
For imported goods already on the market, the Atomic Energy Council has been testing 20 products a day to check their levels of radioactivity, and it might increase the sampling number if necessary, Lu said.
Also, the National Treasury Agency on Thursday announced checks on alcohol imports from Japan’s disaster-stricken areas.
Su Gui-yang (蘇癸陽), vice president of Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corp (TTL, 台灣菸酒公司), the state-owned alcohol manufacturer and distributor, said the government’s actions would not influence Taiwan’s alcohol market, as imports from Japan only account for a single-digit percentage of the market.
Drink, Wine & Spirits Ltd (橡木桶), a major local alcohol distributor, said the company’s supply of Japanese sake is sufficient for three months.
“If the nuclear crisis gets more serious, we might decide to stop importing alcohol from Japan, but it only accounts for 5 percent of our imports,” said Crystin Chiang (江敏惠), the firm’s general manager.
Wine imports by Mitsui Food to supply its restaurants all come from Japan’s Niigata Prefecture, which has not been affected by the earthquake or nuclear fears, a company official said.
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