nobu

This weekend Nobu Matsuhisa, the eponymous chef behind the celebrity-favourite restaurant Nobu, will be in London. For a mere £260 you could enjoy a unique dining experience, apparently. I wonder what’s on the menu. Delicious black rhino, perhaps? Or tasty Amur tiger? Maybe some melt-in-the-mouth mountain gorilla?

Having made a startling movie which has changed the way people think about what’s on their dinner plate, Charles Clover and the End of the Line team have now turned their attentions to restaurants which are still serving endangered fish.

A survey of more than 100 top restaurants conducted for their new guide, fish2fork.com, found that nearly 9 out of 10 were serving at least one 'fish to avoid' from over-exploited stocks. And some of the most critically-acclaimed eateries are among the worst offenders - 7 out of 25 Michelin-starred restaurants visited served species officially listed as endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List.

*Bluefin sushi will only be available for a limited period because bluefin will soon be extinct. © Ultimate Holding Company / Greenpeace

Bluefin tuna is an endangered species, and it's the oceanic equivalent of a tiger, rhino, or panda - yet it is still being served up as expensive sushi in restaurants. In London alone, there are dozens of venues serving up bluefin, although the celebrity hang-out Nobu is probably the most high-profile culprit.

Our politicians have failed on bluefin tuna, they ignore the scientific warnings, and continue to set quotas that are then ignored by the fishermen.

If we want to stop bluefin from becoming extinct in just a few years then we need to take action now.

Young diners at Nobu get the bluefin message

The newspapers and blog sites have been full of Nobu's bluefin shame over the past week or so. And quite right too. The spotlight of the imminent release of The End Of The Line which features the plight of endangered bluefin, is putting the celebrity-favourite restaurant under increasing pressure.

On Friday Greenpeace ran a full page advert in the London Evening Standard, and the story of celebrities' bluefin backlash has been reported from Hello! to the New York Post. So today seemed an ideal time to pay Nobu's London restaurants a visit too. And that's just what we did.

A detail from today's Evening Standard advert

Update: we visited Nobu London last night to ask why bluefin is still on their menu

The advert above appeared in today’s London Evening Standard, and does so amidst increasing pressure on the swanky Nobu sushi restaurant chain. The issue of course is that Nobu continue to serve bluefin tuna, which is officially listed as an endangered species by the IUCN. That makes it equivalent to serving up gorilla, tiger or rhino on a plate.

Bluefin tuna are as endangered as rhinos and tigers

The celeb-favourite sushi restaurant Nobu is back in the media spotlight this week, but with column inches devoted to bluefin tuna rather than A-list diners.