A 10,000-Shekel Fish: Inside Tel Aviv’s Luxury Seafood World

At &Moshik, Moshik Roth’s Tel Aviv restaurant, chef Adi Ashkenazi showcases a high-end seafood menu built around rare, expensive fish and meticulous Japanese techniques. He says the restaurant is not meant to please everyone: “Not every person who comes here enjoys it. We aim for something very high and precise.” Ashkenazi describes a near-obsessive search for rare ingredients, with fishermen sometimes calling him to say a special catch has arrived.

The centerpiece is a 50-kilogram Israeli bluefin tuna, which Ashkenazi breaks down with a long knife in a procedure he compares to surgery. In Japan, he says, much larger tuna of 300 to 400 kilograms are cut with real swords. He estimates this tuna cost about 200 shekels per kilo, or roughly 10,000 shekels for the fish, and notes that storing such a large fish is almost as difficult as buying it. He also points out that a 800-kilogram tuna sold in Japan last year for millions.

He then prepares a five-kilogram flounder, called turbot in Hebrew, which cost 540 shekels. Using the Japanese sukibiki method, he peels off skin and scales in one clean motion, then cleans the fish and sends it for aging in a special refrigerator, saying aging changes both flavor and texture. A local trout from the Dan stream, identified as rainbow trout, weighs three kilograms and costs 330 shekels. Ashkenazi fillets it carefully and removes the bones one by one with tweezers, calling trout the fish he would eat every day because it is fatty, juicy, and needs only salt and grill.

The most unusual fish is the turbot, imported personally from Europe, which weighs about five kilograms and costs around 1,500 shekels. Ashkenazi says it is served in three-Michelin-star restaurants and is unforgiving if overcooked. Later he plans to sear it in butter using basting, repeatedly spooning hot butter over the fish for precise control. He says all the techniques came from Michelin kitchens abroad, and that the point is not just eating, but entering a world of perfection-obsessed luxury, rare fish, and expensive craftsmanship that many readers may mock online without ever tasting.