Innovative Dining Group Serves Up Critically Endangered Bluefin Tuna

Any sustainable foodie can tell you, consumers should lay off the bluefin tuna. Though they're still served at a startling frequency, bluefin tuna are extremely overfished, edging toward the brink of extinction at a breakneck speed. The remaining stocks of this majestic, warm-blooded fish have plummeted by more than 80 percent in recent years. In fact, Greenpeace recently likened eating the fish to eating an endangered tiger.The BP Gulf oil spill further threatened the species when gallons of oil contaminated one of the fish's most important spawning grounds.

As if the fish's precarious survival wasn't incentive enough for folks to stop eating bluefin, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, consuming the fish is also extremely unhealthy: Bluefin tuna boast seriously high levels of mercury and PCBs.

But not everyone gets the message, apparently. Bluefin still pop up on sushi menus all over the place.  Famous sushi joint Nobu gives diners a ridiculous disclaimer on the menu, but still serves the fish despite the fact that more than 31,000 Change.org members have petitioned the restaurant to drop the struggling species from the menu.

Innovative Dining Group (IDG) is an even worse offender: The high-end restaurant group owns numerous eateries that serve bluefin tuna, and they don't even offer disclaimers on the menus. The bottom line here is obvious: If bluefin tuna still grace the menus at the swankiest sushi joints in L.A. and Las Vegas, people will continue to overfish the species until it's completely extinct (which won't take too long, judging by the current fishing rates).

Part of the issue for the fish-eating consumer is the difficulty of keeping abreast of sustainable seafood. As is the case with many kinds of fish, bluefin is called by many names, like toro and han maguro when used in sushi. It's also sometimes called horse mackerel,  kuromaguro, and atun de aleta azul. Restaurant owners, however, know what they are buying and serving.

Some chefs are getting the picture.  The Center for Biological Diversity is asking sushi chefs to take bluefin off the menu through its Bluefin Brigade campaign, and you can help the bluefin by arming yourself with the facts from Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch Program.

But of course, some restauranteurs are turning a blind eye to the plight of the bluefin. IDG owns high-end eateries in California, Las Vegas, and Arizona. Two of their restaurants, Sushi Roku and Katana (pdf), serve bluefin in more than one type of dish. There are five Sushi Roku locations, so IDG owns six highly visible restaurants with bluefin on their menus. The only way to save this species is to get it off the menu in all restaurants, from hip sushi spots to little dive joints.

IDG should be ashamed of itself for putting a critically endangered species on its menus. The bluefin's time is running out, so we've got to get restaurant groups like IDG to start using only sustainably sourced seafood. Sign our petition, and tell Innovative Dining Group that you want bluefin off the menu at Katana and all five Sushi Roku restaurants!

Photo credit: David Ooms via Flickr