For a while, Tuna Fight Club was not only one of the most gruesome meals in London, but one of the most exclusive. Then influencers broke the unspoken rule.
The type of food served at Fight Club can be found on high-end tasting menus throughout the city. But what’s on offer here is a show, with a side of dinner. The star is a Harley-size female bluefin tuna, killed the day before at a fish farm off the coast of Spain. Its carcass lies prone on a stainless steel slab as chefs carve it into pieces throughout the evening, then serve up the fish as sashimi and nigiri.
From the start, the spectacle was conceived as an insiders-only pop-up to be publicized by word of mouth among West London types who could afford a few hundred pounds for a Wednesday night sushi dinner. The owner, Chris D’Sylva, started the tuna cuttings at the local fishmonger he co-owns in the early days of the pandemic lockdowns. They received little press coverage, save for a 2020 article in the Financial Times that gave Tuna Fight Club its name.
But toward the end of last year, the event quickly took on the tone of TikTok, after flashy food influencers made video after fawning video. Reservations are now sold out through July.
The new attention could be the downfall of the experience.
The pop-up became “more entertainment than immersion,” Mr. D’Sylva said. Instead, he said, he wants to mostly cater to sushi lovers and locals — and steer Fight Club back toward an “if you know, you know” experience. “We’ve got people coming for social currency — who don’t even eat fish.”
That would be a tough dietary restriction for Tuna Fight Club, an unusually boisterous example of “bromakase,” a manosphere subversion of the tranquil omakase culinary tradition. “They’re not our customers,” Mr. D’Sylva said of the TikTok crowd. “And the customers that support our entire business? There are no tickets left for them.”
He’s brainstorming ways to better manage the guest list, to make sure people come for “the right reasons” — for both the bragging rights and the sushi. There are plans to expand the menu, increase the price from £195 to £250 (about $330), introduce a lottery system for out-of-towners and add a night specifically for regulars and V.I.P.s. Mr. D’Sylva has a track record of zealous gatekeeping: At Dorian, the bistro he co-owns, he recently shocked locals by announcing that he records customers’ behavior and ranks them in a behind-the-scenes system that determines how they’re treated.
“We keep wondering how much this is like ‘The White Lotus’ or ‘The Menu,’” said Cecilia Stein, a 39-year-old first-time participant in Tuna Fight Club. “Is this the greatest celebration of food in its purest form, or is this kind of an elitist trap?”
It all starts outside Supermarket of Dreams, a Notting Hill grocery store in Mr. D’Sylva’s small empire, which transforms every Wednesday evening into Tuna Fight Club. About 40 diners settle at a communal table — wood planks fitted over waist-high central refrigerators — with hot sake and delicate lobster miso.
Then Act 1 begins.
Mr. D’Sylva, a tanned Australian with a booming voice who played host on a recent evening, summoned his diners out to the street. They buttoned their jackets, picked up their drinks and filed onto the sidewalk. There, in a van, the tuna for that evening lay in an icy coffin, waiting for her finale.
Their neck tendons straining, the chefs eased the 640-pound headless carcass onto a rolling metal table. Diners stood on tiptoe, phones at the ready. It was like the Mona Lisa room at the Louvre — if the Mona Lisa were a fish trapped in the middle of London traffic.
“I wonder if they ever drop it,” Sophie Groves, 32, whispered to her husband, Sam Groves, 35.
One delivery guy climbed a pole to look over their heads. A grocery truck driver, ignoring the honking behind him, reached across his passenger seat to take a picture. “Yuck!” a woman cried, before pushing through to get a photo, too.
Act 2 started when the chefs wheeled the gurney-like table through to the open kitchen.
Then they began to carve, turning the animal into sashimi. One chef mounted the fish, a swordlike knife in hand, pressing his thigh into its back for leverage as he started to slice through its skin.
Mr. D’Sylva became a teacher. See how red the muscle is? he asked his guests. It needs all that blood for speed. See those drips? That’s fat, rendering in the air.
One woman shuddered, then sipped her martini. Another diner, Sadi Ablyatifov, 25, raised his pistachio-green Instax camera for a picture.
“How these guys cut it up is unbelievable,” said Mark Heappey, 62. “You pay your fee to watch that.”
This sort of ingredients-origin-story shtick is deployed in a lot of fine dining. But Tuna Fight Club stands out even from the rococo tableside theatrics that have swept restaurants since the pandemic.
“There’s definitely a frisson there that you don’t get from someone making you fresh guacamole,” said Ajesh Patalay, the food columnist at the Financial Times, who coined the pop-up’s name.
The tuna is the key.
The bluefin population has had a resurgence in recent years, after careful conservation helped it bounce back after years of overfishing. The Atlantic bluefin was moved from “endangered” to “least concerned” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list of threatened species in 2021.
In the process, it has become a luxury ingredient in London restaurants. Tuna carvings are part of the hype: Chefs butcher the fish in front of diners in New York, Miami, Chicago, Berlin and even elsewhere in London. There are similar events in Japan, too, where a single tuna sold for more than $3 million in 2019.
Fight Club wants to be the sexiest of the lot. That’s a job for Act 3.
At the end of Mr. D’Sylva’s presentation, the diners got into a line for a series of tuna-by-tuna comparisons. A chef scraped meat straight from the ribs, serving it in a curling heap inside a taco-shaped pocket of seaweed.
“It goes into the center of the nori,” Mr. D’Sylva explained. “Kind of like rolling a doobie.”
Alexandra Fischer, 23, tried it. Then she moved on to the next bite: the same cut, aged nine days, with a thwack of caviar. When Rob Huckle, the manager, finished the pot, he gave her the spoon. She licked it clean.
“Everything is a performance,” she said. “The whole thing is a show.”
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Amelia Nierenberg is a breaking news reporter for The Times in London, covering international news.
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