The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice

by Trevor Corson

  Crisp nori is a hallmark of a good sushi roll—at least, in Japan. Traditional sushi rolls—the ones with nori wrapped around a thin filling of rice and cucumber or tuna—should be eaten right away, while the nori is still dry and crackly. If a customer is sitting at a table in a restaurant, there’s no point in ordering a traditional sushi roll. By the time the waiter delivers it, the nori on the outside will be damp from touching the rice. Traditional thin rolls are supposed to be eaten at the sushi bar, within seconds of leaving the chef’s hands. But with inside-out rolls, the nori is on the inside, where it goes instantly soggy anyway.

  Zoran jotted the number 1 next to the spicy tuna and California rolls on his list. Next he pointed to the “big roll,” or futo-maki.

  “The second thing you want to make is your futo-maki. They don’t have to be super crispy.” The diameter of a big roll is nearly twice that of standard inside-out rolls, so it must be sliced thin enough for the customer to eat each piece in one mouthful. The filling dominates, so the crispness of the nori is less crucial. Zoran wrote a number 2 next to the futo-maki.

  “Now, your kappa-maki should be the most crispy, so you want to make those last.” Zoran scribbled a number 3 next to the cucumber rolls, and a number 4 next to the nigiri. Nigiri were quick to make, and saving them for last ensured that the fish toppings would be as fresh as possible.

  “You must choose your own plates to display your sushi,” he added. “Remember, in Japanese presentation, use no more than seventy percent of the plate.” He glanced at the clock. “Commence! You have twenty minutes.”

  Kate stared at the block of fish on her cutting board. Twenty minutes! This was crazy.

  “If you make it in the wrong order,” Zoran yelled, “you’re doing the dishes!”

  Right out of the gate, Kate screwed up. She panicked and started cutting her block of fish first simply because the fish was sitting right in front of her. It was a bad move, because now her slices of fish would sit exposed to the air while she made the rest of her sushi.

  Zoran, having started a race, appeared set on winning it. Kate glanced at him and her mouth fell open. He was making three rolls at the same time. His hands flew around the cutting board in a blur, tossing ingredients onto different pads of rice and nori as though he were dealing a hand of cards. In under five minutes he’d completed all five of the rolls in his list. After that he started making extra rolls. It wasn’t clear how fifty sushi rolls and forty nigiri were going to be eaten by one vegetable deliveryman.

  The entire history of sushi has been a quest for speed. More than a thousand years ago, when people made sushi they had to wait for a year before they could eat it. In the 1600s, they shortened the fermentation time to a month. After the invention of vinegar, they pressed sushi under stones for just a couple of days. With the invention of hand-squeezed sushi in the 1800s, it could be eaten immediately. Sushi had evolved into a meal of instant gratification.

  But chefs in America have taken the speed of sushi to a new level. In 2000, a Japanese essayist named Toyoo Tamamura visited sushi restaurants around L.A., including Hama Hermosa, which at the time was called California Beach Sushi. He was startled to see that sushi restaurants in the United States were larger and had more tables than the small sushi bars he was used to in Japan.

  When he sat down to eat, he was also startled to see people ordering as many as six nigiri all topped with the same kind of fish. To an American, it makes perfect sense to choose only his favorite items on the menu, as he would in any other restaurant. In Japan, Tamamura was accustomed to asking the chef for a series of small surprises, one or two nigiri at a time, each topped with a different item.

  But Tamamura was most surprised by the volume of rolls that Americans ordered. Rolls are far more labor-intensive than nigiri. The chefs worked as if they were under siege, squeezing out roll after roll for table orders at a furious pace, their hands never at rest. Tamamura wrote that “there are even tough guys who make three or four rolls at once.” He decided that sushi chefs back in Japan had it easy.

  Zoran’s cutting board was now piled with rolls. One by one the students completed their sushi plates. One of the women in the class had plated her slices of roll in blocks that formed an asymmetric sunburst around her four nigiri. It was precisely the sort of display Zoran was looking for. He nodded his approval.

  But he steamed around the table declaring the other presentations dismal failures. He rearranged the sushi on most of the plates.

  Kate had struggled through the exercise. Her nigiri looked terrible, and her roll slices were still popping open.

  Zoran arrived at Kate’s station. For once, he didn’t ignore her, nor did he criticize her in front of the whole class.

  “Here, I’m going to show you something,” Zoran said, his voice quiet. His hands whirred and assembled the foundation of an inside-out roll. He stacked an impossibly high pile of cucumber and avocado on the nori. “Watch this.”

  Zoran arched his hands and lifted the edge of the rice and nori pad. His thumbs and fingers gathered the pad up and hauled it over the filling like a pair of industrious spiders.

  “You want to curl the near edge up, over, and down, and tuck it in.” With the tips of his fingers he pressed the curled edge of the pad down into the cavity of filling, then held the position and looked at Kate. “You’ve got to really tuck it in, tuck it tight.” He squeezed. “Like this.”

  Kate watched. Something in her head clicked. She nodded.

  Perhaps it was just as well that the vegetable deliveryman hadn’t arrived. Zoran told the students to pack up their sushi and take it home.

  “Thank you, everybody, for a good day today,” he said. He turned to go. “I think we learned something.”

  14

  AMERICAN STYLE

  The next day Zoran taught the students another style of Japanese cooking that sushi chefs used in omakase—simmering in broth. Near the end of class, Toshi appeared and reviewed the results. He was horrified. The students had used small appetizer bowls, but they’d filled them to the brim. It was so American.

  “Small portions!” Toshi yelled. Everything a sushi chef served at the sushi bar ought to be tiny, Toshi explained—lots of little courses, each one beautifully arranged. “You gotta eat with your eyes,” Toshi said. Kate liked that. She was glad to have Toshi back in the classroom, if only for a few minutes. Toshi showed the students how to arrange a miniscule serving into an elegant pyramid. He chuckled. “Like little Mount Fuji!”

  As the students cleaned up around noon, Jay, the coordinator for student affairs, slipped through the classroom carrying takeout containers of Chinese dim sum. He’d found a fabulous hole-in-the-wall in a nearby mall. Jay had been eating too much raw fish and rice lately, and he was looking forward to a lunch of steaming-hot pork dumplings.

  He carried the dim sum into one of the private dining rooms. Hama Hermosa only served dinner, so the place was deserted. He arranged five or six containers of fragrant food on the table.

  Today Jay had invited a man named Jeffrey Nitta to lunch. Like Jay, Jeff was a Japanese American and a restaurant consultant who worked in the sushi business. Jay had come to his serious interest in sushi about five years ago, but Jeff had been analyzing Japanese food trends in the United States for decades.

  Jeff arrived, and the two men oohed and aahed over the dumplings. Right away, they started talking about the early days of American sushi, when sushi was first catching on in L.A.

  “I remember hearing about the headaches,” Jeff said, laughing. “Restaurant owners were saying, ‘Sushi chefs are worse than regular chefs!’ The Japanese chefs were stubborn, and they thought Americans were too stupid to understand sushi.”

  Jeff had been raised in Los Angeles. At school, most of his friends were white. But at home, he lived in a world that was partly Japanese. His father had come to the United States from Japan as an adult; his mother had grown up in America but was in many ways a traditional Japanese woman. Jeff had s
pent his childhood with a foot in both cultures.

  As a young adult, Jeff had eaten in sushi restaurants frequently during the period when sushi first took root in the United States. It was an exciting time. Freed from tradition, Japanese chefs innovated, adapting the cuisine to American tastes and experience. Ambitious chefs like Nobu Matsuhisa—championed by Robert De Niro—invented a new hybrid cuisine for the Western palate. But Jeff also saw Japanese chefs dumbing sushi down for Americans. It frustrated him that the chefs didn’t make the effort to educate their customers.

  Toshi had been an exception. Jeff remembered visiting Hama Venice and thinking that Toshi’s approach was brilliant. Toshi didn’t try to adhere to tradition or even to explain anything to his customers. He acted like a crazy American. But he stocked high-quality fish and authentic Japanese ingredients, and he used his charisma to challenge his customers to try real sushi.

  Jeff recounted a meeting of members of the Japanese food industry back in the 1980s. “I said, ‘Americans are ready if you educate them. It may take some time. But they will know what good fish is, if you educate them. You’re not educating them, you’re just writing them off.’”

  At the time, Jeff would sit down at a sushi bar in L.A., and sometimes a real Japanese customer—from Japan—would be there. The Japanese chef would serve the Japanese customer authentic sushi, Japanese style. The Americans at the bar would look up from their American-style rolls and peer over at what the Japanese was eating. ‘Wow,’ they’d say, ‘I want to eat that!’ The Japanese chef would say, ‘No, you don’t want to eat that. You can’t eat that.’” Jeff looked at Jay and threw up his hands. “That’s what they said!”

  It was easier just to serve the Americans inside-out rolls full of mayonnaise and chili pepper. The chefs were guaranteed to make money that way. They built big restaurants. The restaurants had lots of tables and they had menus, with lists of American-style rolls. They were sushi-roll factories.

  As more and more sushi chefs jumped on the bandwagon, they competed with each other to appeal to American tastes. Non-Japanese joined the fray, too—Koreans, Chinese, Latinos, and others. Restaurants undercut each other with cheaper prices.

  “You’re seeing them in a rut now,” Jeff said. “The all-you-can-eat places started coming in, and now the customers are like, ‘I’m not going back to my old sushi place because it’s half price across the street.’ And so the Japanese sushi chefs are saying, ‘Well, we’re going to do that, too.’ They start joining in with the fifty percent–off specials, and they’ve shot themselves in the foot. They didn’t educate.” Jeff shook his head. “They were greedy with the economics. And that’s what’s sad. Now you’re jeopardizing your Japanese culture, you’re selling out, you’re commercializing your product that was, you know, your history.”

  As Japanese Americans, Jeff and Jay wondered how best to preserve Japanese culture in the United States. Jay’s father, an architect, had designed the restaurant Tokyo Kaikan, where the California roll had been invented. Tokyo Kaikan had been a showcase for traditional Japanese architecture. But the building had since been torn down to make room for a parking lot.

  “The purists are still holding on,” Jeff said. He was thinking of the minority of Japanese chefs who still made authentic Japanese sushi. There were some in L.A. There were a good number in New York City. “But it’s only the high-level American customers who understand that, people who already know about Japanese culture.”

  As a result, many of the purist chefs had jacked their prices up so high that an average American would never set foot in the door just to try it out, especially in New York. In Manhattan, the chef Masayoshi Takayama—popularly known simply as Masa—wouldn’t even consider serving you lunch or dinner unless you handed him $350. Thanks to him, America’s most expensive restaurant is, astonishingly, a sushi bar.

  To Jeff, Masa and his prices were as much an affront to Japanese sushi as were inside-out rolls loaded with mayonnaise and chile—maybe worse. In Japan, the sushi experience was a matter of getting to know the chef at your neighborhood sushi bar, visiting frequently, and letting him choose what he thought you would like from the freshest ingredients that day.

  Jay nodded. People were always asking him for the inside scoop on where to get the best sushi. He’d shrug and tell them to find a neighborhood place where they liked the chef.

  Jeff smiled. “When my father introduced me to sushi, the sushi bar he took me to was in a bowling alley.”

  “Holiday Bowl,” Jay said, nodding.

  “Right,” Jeff said, “Holiday Bowl. And I remember as a little kid, he put me up on a stool, and we’d sit around eating sushi. The Japanese chefs were very traditional. They knew my dad. They knew that he liked his beer in a small glass instead of a big mug. My dad would never even have to order. He would just sit down and they’d make him sushi. It was omakase, automatically, you know?”

  Jeff wanted most American sushi diners to be able to have a similar experience.

  Toshi had done what he could. But times had changed. With competition from low-end sushi everywhere, even Toshi couldn’t draw the crowds any longer.

  15

  SHOW TIME

  Thursday evening, the back sushi bar at Hama Hermosa opened up to customers along with the front bar. Zoran and the gorgeous Dane, Fie, set up for business. Takumi helped out. He would be on hand in case things got busy.

  The hostess cranked up disco music in the back room and set out stools and place settings around the classroom table, converting it into extra dining space—again, just in case it got busy.

  But the back room languished for two hours. Zoran disappeared.

  Finally, around 7:30 p.m. the manager ushered in a Caucasian couple and sat them at the back bar. Fie greeted them and offered to make them something.

  “We’re here for Zoran,” they said.

  “Ah, for Zoran.” Fie dipped her head and retreated.

  Seconds later Zoran appeared in his chef’s whites.

  “Hey!” Zoran bellowed, all smiles. “How’ve you been?” He sat in a chair next to the couple and chatted. The man slapped Zoran on the back. They laughed.

  Zoran excused himself and disappeared into the kitchen. As soon as he was out of sight he dashed madly from one refrigerator to another, grabbing the special ingredients, garnishes, and sauces that underpinned his omakase arsenal. Every sushi chef who practiced omakase had secret weapons, and now Zoran installed himself behind the back sushi bar armed with his.

  The couple had been coming to Hama Hermosa for Zoran’s omakase nearly every Thursday for the past year and a half. Zoran adored them. But every week, as Thursday rolled around, Zoran would feel anxious. Omakase customers always expect the sushi chef to surprise them. That meant Zoran had to come up with new ideas for eight to ten little dishes every week.

  Jay, the academy’s coordinator for student affairs, wandered into the dining room, fresh from his lunchtime conversation with Jeff earlier in the day. Seeing Zoran about to serve omakase, Jay strolled over to an unobtrusive corner of the bar and sat down to watch.

  Zoran delivered his opening shot right away—little blocks of egg tofu in small bowls. That bought him a few minutes to engage the couple in conversation, and he used the opportunity to probe their current preferences. The trick for Zoran was to expand their horizons in a way they’d enjoy. He spooned something out of a Tupperware container. The man peered at it.

  “Oh, man, green stuff,” the man said.

  Zoran smiled.

  The man frowned. “What is that?”

  Zoran kept smiling. “If I told you, you wouldn’t want to eat it!”

  Jay sipped on a soda, amused. Part of the difficulty in encouraging Americans to appreciate the sushi experience was getting them to relinquish control. In America, you were considered a sophisticated eater if you insisted on having things a certain way. To really experience sushi, you had to let the chef decide what was best for you. It was hard for Americans to do. That was
why the most uncompromising Japanese sushi chef in L.A.—a man named Kazunori Nozawa, more popularly known as “the sushi Nazi”—had a big sign hanging over his sushi bar. It said, “Today’s Special: Trust Me.”

  Jay glanced at Takumi, who was standing behind the sushi bar watching Zoran work. By now it was clear to Jay that Takumi had talent in the kitchen. Judging from the food he made, he was a creative spirit, respectful of Japanese tradition but not constrained by it. He was capable of thinking outside the box without dumbing the food down. Yet Takumi was so shy and reserved that it was difficult to imagine him ever being the sort of sociable sushi chef that Zoran was tonight.

  Zoran enjoyed displaying himself in front of customers while he worked. He used his charisma to enliven their meal and convince them to try new things. Kitchen skills were important, but a sushi chef needed more than kitchen skills. He had to be a performer.

  Takumi caught Jay’s eye and ambled over to say hello. They chatted quietly across the bar, Takumi speaking slowly in his broken English. Takumi pointed at the empty space in front of Jay.

  “You don’t want to eat?” he asked.

  Jay chuckled. “I’ve eaten too much sushi lately.” He sighed. “I keep thinking about that fantastic bolognese sauce you made.”

  Takumi’s eyebrows shot up. The previous week he’d cooked spaghetti for the staff. Jay had been raving about it ever since. Now Jay drew an imaginary fence around his seat at the bar, marking it off from the rest of the restaurant. “Italian section!” he laughed.

  Takumi laughed, too, as he headed to the kitchen.

  Zoran was handing his customers a pair of rectangular plates, each with three small bowls indented in the surface. Each bowl contained a small pyramid of something mysterious. Zoran proudly described the contents to the couple; squid marinated in rice vinegar and sesame oil, seaweed sprouts marinated the same way and sprinkled with sesame seeds, and strips of scallop and tiny rice noodles marinated in sweetened sake. The seaweed sprouts were the “green stuff.”