Tuna Tartare on Wonton Crisps

Only use sushi-grade tuna from a trusted fishmonger. Keep the tuna very cold until serving. Cut the tuna into uniform small dice for the best texture. The wasabi mayo can be omitted for those who don't like heat. Sriracha mayo is a popular alternative.

The wonton crisp beneath this tuna tartare deserves its own line in the history. Wonton wrappers — thin sheets of wheat flour dough folded around fillings and associated with Chinese dim sum and Cantonese cooking — arrived in California with Chinese immigrants in the 19th century. When fried flat into golden crisps rather than folded into filled parcels, they became a vehicle for modern appetisers in the California restaurant kitchens of the 1980s, where a generation of chefs were freely combining Asian and European techniques. It was in exactly this environment that tuna tartare itself was created. In 1984, Japanese chef Shigefumi Tachibe, working at Chaya Brasserie in Los Angeles, invented tuna tartare as a last-minute substitute when a group of diners asked for something lighter than the beef tartare on the prix-fixe menu. Tachibe noticed that the deep red ahi tuna in his kitchen bore a visual resemblance to raw beef, swapped it in, and the customers loved it. The knife he used that night is now held by the Smithsonian Institution. Wolfgang Puck adopted tuna tartare as one of the signature dishes at Spago, and by the late 1990s it had become a fixture on upscale American menus coast to coast. The dish's name connects it to the older French steak tartare tradition — Auguste Escoffier published an early recipe in 1921 and the name first appeared in his 1903 Le Guide Culinaire. Serving the tartare on wonton crisps completes the Pacific Rim story: Chinese culinary technique, Japanese raw-fish tradition, and French presentation discipline, all assembled in California.