… After the Age of Bling CULINARY TRACTS

If you serve sushi for a living, says Honga Im, you have to be deeply concerned about “the end of the line.” The end of the world’s fisheries, that is, as a recent film titled The End of the Line prophesied, if we don’t change our habits. You can’t eat Blue Fin tuna or unagi – precisely because these fish are so delicious that they are being devoured to extinction. The trick, says Im, who saw The End of the Line at Telluride’s own Mountainfilm festival in May, is to focus our attention on what we can eat, not on what we can’t eat. Thankfully, as a recent visit to Honga’s Lotus Petal proved incontrovertibly, there’s plenty of it, even sushi grade, and it’s no sacrifice at all.

So, too, if you run a restaurant in Telluride, you can’t ignore the Great Recession. The management team at Honga’s – led by Honga herself and General Manager Sara Ward – have thought hard about that problem, too, and have reconfigured the restaurant’s historic building, the old Roma Bar (a recycled building), on main street in Telluride. Upstairs is as it was, with the relocation of the sushi bar where the bar formerly was, and the bar relocated downstairs where the sushi bar was.

But downstairs is now a lounge, or a retreat, a food and spirits and music sanctuary with a lower-priced menu, where you and your parents and your children will all feel comfortable and all of you will find something on the menu that you will love to eat.

The keyword at the new Honga’s is sustainability, a word that in Telluride has become whatever you want it to mean – no growth, planned growth, more growth, your growth and nobody else’s, whatever. But the root of the word “sustainability” is “sustenance,” which is, after all, a synonym for food, literally the basis of life itself. A thoughtful restaurant might just be the perfect place to restore the concept of sustainability to some real meaning. And so at Honga’s sustainable is not only what you eat, but how and where you eat it, too. Practicing sustainability is, hopefully, how a restaurant business survives in a tough economy, how a ski community survives a real estate bust, and how the world’s endangered fisheries survive. Or so Honga envisions it.

The fish at Honga’s is all from U.S. waters, she explains, because the United States has the most carefully managed fisheries in the world. Serving only fish that is harvested in season in a sustainable fashion is a lot of work, but a true sushi chef, Honga says, must be mindful of the health of the oceans, the source of all the fish he carves into delicious dishes. In the same spirit, Honga’s is provisioning beef and chicken from local farmers.

“We all need to learn to work within boundaries,” Honga said one day last week. “But within boundaries, people can have a wonderful experience.”

One of those boundaries is the awareness that money is tight. To wit, a nightly special of a $10 noodle bowl, as an example of affordability. The night we were there, it consisted of udon noodles and cubes of marlin and bok choy tempura in a savory broth based on tentsuyu, a traditional Japanese tempura dipping sauce. A couple could enjoy a bowl of noodles each, a glass of wine or a mojito and get away for under $40.

Lounging with Honga, or at Honga’s, can be an education in balance. I asked Honga to order some food that she especially loves, and that in some particular way exemplifies the guiding philosophy. The Dynamo Roll ($20) is made from Big Eye tuna (not Blue Fin) and topped with kabayaki, the sauce people may miss because it is traditionally served with unagi, which is no longer on the menu.

“We took a lot of flak when we removed unagi from the menu last year,” Honga lamented. “But even though eel is farm-raised, the baby eels are harvested from the wild and the population is plummeting. I think part of what people miss is the kabayaki, so we use it in other ways.”

I can assure any sushi fan that they will not be thinking about Blue Fin or unagi when they savor the Dynamo Roll.

And they might not even miss fish at all if they order the Wellness Roll ($8), a vegan roll full of all sorts of flavors and textures from spinach, cucumber, matcha (green tea) aioli, ume (pickled Asian plum) and locally provisioned sprouted sunflower seeds.

A self-described “little hippie girl” who, 21 years ago, started her business by peddling brown-rice sushi rolls and couscous and edamame salads from a cart on Telluride’s main street, Honga has now, on the twentieth anniversary of operating a restaurant contained by four walls (although in three different spaces), clearly achieved a high degree of refinement. A passionate world traveler, “I always had the ability to come home and recreate what I had eaten on my travels,” she recalls. Honga’s is thus a pioneering pan- Asian restaurant, ranging from Thailand (Pad Thai) to Indonesia (Gado Gado) and of course Japan (sushi) and Korea (kimchee). The kimchee (pickled cabbage) is made from her mother’s traditional recipe, Honga said, and is not fiery hot, as kimchee can be. In Korea, kimchee evolved as a means of preserving essential vitamins for surviving the long bitter winters, yet another example of sustainability, or a humble yet delicious food with a thoroughly practical basis. At Honga’s it is cooked, along with scallion and shitake, into an appetizer of Bean De Dok ($9), a crunchy vegan pancake based on low-fat, high-protein mung beans, served with a soy-based dipping sauce. As Honga writes in her wonderful cookbook (which is about to go into its second printing), her mother made them for her when she was a child.

Eating Korean-style, which is to share all the dishes, Honga told us (“Dig in!”), sitting on one of the comfortable sofas in the cozy lounge, listening to world music programmed by a disc jockey named Sunday (on Wednesday nights), I found myself thinking about how a satisfying restaurant experience is first an experience. And while the food is a cornerstone of that experience, it’s not the entire thing. A talented restaurateur pulls it all together, and in step with the moment in time and a sense of place. We were definitively in Telluride at the end of 2009, and could not have been anywhere else at any other time.

We talked about the age of Obama, and whether we were hopeful about it, and climate change, and the specific immediate challenges facing the Telluride community, and about being parents, and the Raven’s Raves section of the menu, named after Honga’s daughter Raven, because there is no community without nurturing our children.

“The best fries in town,” Honga avowed. Earlier, to start our evening, we had devoured a plate of Honga’s spicy Chinese green beans ($8), which seemed like a healthy adult substitute for fries to us. But we took up the challenge and sampled the chicken tempura with hand-cut fries from Raven’s menu. Yes, even chicken strips can be sustainable. Organic, locally provisioned chicken breast. Light tempura, not breaded. Hand-cut fries. And for only $11. Who says it’s just for kids?