Sashimi prices are still uncertain as the new year approaches

Depending on the grade, a pound of ahi was running from $14.95 to $39.95 at Tamashiro Market on Thursday — but everything can change when the next boats arrive early this morning and their catch begins hitting stores over the next few days.

Asked what ahi prices will be like for New Year’s sashimi, Guy Tamashiro could only say, “Today’s price is today’s price.”

So it’s still too soon to say what kind of prices customers will face as demand for sashimi rises with the arrival of the New Year.

“How’s it going to be this year?” asked Brooks Takenaka of the United Fishing Agency auction house. “I just don’t know. It’s going to be over the next few days when much of the purchases are done.”

For New Year’s Eve, customers at Tamashiro in Kalihi typically focus on the highest and lowest ends of the price spectrum.

“For ahi, what sells first are the high end and the least expensive,” Tamashiro said.

Customer Kelsey Lee, 25, knew she wanted the best.

She asked for a 1-pound belly cut of Tamashiro’s premium-grade blue fin toro ahi No. 1 at a Thursday price of $39.95 a pound.

Lee, who is from Hawaii but now lives in the Westchester section of Los Angeles, is the seafood manager of a Japanese izakaya. She knows her seafood.

Each year, before getting back on a plane for Los Angeles, she stops at Tamashiro for some prime ahi.

“It’s for New Year,” she said. “I know what I’m getting and I know that it’s good.”

Unlike the salmon-colored belly cut that Lee bought, Tamashiro also offered eight other grades of less expensive ahi Thursday, including some that ran red.

“People like the red, the deep red,” Tamashiro said.

But others, such as Lee, know that dark color does not always mean the highest quality of ahi.

“It’s like the marbling of a good piece of beef,” Tamashiro said.

Tamashiro, who buys the ahi for his family’s market, likely won’t have much trouble selling higher-quality cuts of ahi as New Year’s approaches.

But for customers who want to buy less expensive cuts of ahi, market forces at work at the auction house will determine the eventual retail price at the seafood counter up through New Year’s Eve.

“The trick is how much the lower end is going to be,” Tamashiro said. “It all depends on how much we have to pay for it.”