The Story of Sushi (5 page)

Zoran dove in and snatched the net from Takumi’s hands.

“Come on, don’t worry about it!” Zoran barked. Zoran tossed the net in the sink. Takumi glanced at the clock. There was other work to be done.

He washed the second batch of rice while the first batch cooled. If he added the vinegar too soon after cooking, the rice wouldn’t soak it up. But if he let the rice sit too long, it would start to harden and wouldn’t absorb the vinegar, either. At the right moment, he returned and poured Hama Hermosa’s recipe of sushi vinegar over the cooling rice. In a tiny office off the kitchen, the recipe was taped to the wall: seven parts rice vinegar, five parts sugar, one part salt.

In the 1600s, in the area around Kyoto, the recipe for “quick sushi” came to include not just vinegar in the rice but sugar as well. It tasted good, and along with the vinegar, the sugar helped prevent the rice from spoiling for a few days. Sugar molecules love water. When water is in short supply, they suck it right out of the bodies of bacteria and the bacteria die. That’s why fruit jellied with lots of sugar is called “preserves.”

In Japan, the sweetness of sushi rice has varied by region and era. When sushi spread to what is now Tokyo in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the people there preferred their sushi rice tart and tangy.

After years of wartime deprivation during and after World War II, most Japanese developed more of a sweet tooth, and even Tokyo sushi became sweeter. But as prosperity returned, so did the preference for tart sushi. Nowadays, as you travel from Tokyo toward Kyoto, the sushi is sweeter and sweeter. When you reach Kyoto, the sushi rice is about three times sweeter than it is back in Tokyo.

One of the most venerated Tokyo sushi chefs today, Jir
Ono, ads almost no sugar to his sushi rice. The sugar, he says, makes people feel full too quickly, before they’ve had a chance to sample
a sufficient variety of fish. Too much sugar can also overwhelm the delicate flavors of some of the best fish for sushi.

In general, Tokyo sushi chefs take tartness seriously. Like a martial-arts dojo or a school of tea ceremony, each sushi bar follows techniques handed down from the founding masters of the lineage to which it belongs. The most closely guarded secret is usually the ratio of vinegar to salt in the sushi rice. It’s said that a master chef can tell the lineage of a sushi bar simply by tasting its rice.

In the United States, sushi has Kyoto-style sweetness. Sushi chefs have noticed that when they add more sugar they get extra compliments. In a sense, the fundamental taste of sushi is no different from the fundamental taste of America’s other favorite Asian food. Chinese restaurants serve sweet-and-sour pork; sushi restaurants essentially serve sweet-and-sour rice.

Takumi folded the sweet vinegar mix into the rice with a bamboo paddle. Zoran swooped in again.

“Okay, okay,” Zoran said, “now,
shari-kiri!
” Literally, it meant “cutting the Buddha’s bones.” Zoran motioned with his hand.

Takumi nodded and sliced through the rice with the edge of the paddle, breaking up clumps. When he stopped to let the rice cool further, Zoran snatched up the paddle. He arched his body around the tub, grasping the edge with his free hand, and flipped patches of the cooling rice upside down with brisk twists of his wrist, circling the tub as he worked. That way the underside of the rice could cool and release excess moisture as well.

Takumi wandered about the kitchen, a quizzical expression on his face. He couldn’t find the maroon can of magic white powder. He turned to Zoran.

“Do you know where,” he asked in his broken English, “is Miora?”

“You should have put it back where it belonged!” Zoran yelled, his back hunched over his work. “Get some sleep!”

Zoran himself rarely slept more than four hours a night. He flew to a shelf and grabbed the can. “Is this what you were looking for?”

Takumi half-nodded, half-bowed. “Thank you.”

Takumi readied the second batch of rice for cooking and checked the clock. He packed the first batch of sushi rice into a couple of insulated canisters, laid damp kitchen towels over the rice, tightened the heavy lids, and lugged them to the front sushi bar. The second batch of rice would be used at the longer sushi bar in the back room. Most nights, Toshi opened only the sushi bar in the front dining room for business. On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, he opened up the back sushi bar as well.

When the second batch of rice had cooked, Takumi repeated the seasoning procedure, racing the clock. By the time he’d finished and washed the wooden tub, a wad of discarded rice had accumulated in the basket drain under the row of sinks. Takumi didn’t want to think about how many divinities lay there dying. He pulled on his chef jacket and hurried to the front dining room.

The entire restaurant staff had convened for the daily staff meeting. Several of the chefs were Japanese. There was a Korean trainee. Next to Zoran stood a young white woman. Her name was Fie Kruse.

Fie was a Danish supermodel and movie star. Or rather, Fie was
not
a Danish supermodel and movie star. She had cut short her film career and turned down offers from modeling agencies, and had come to L.A. to pursue her dream of becoming a sushi chef. She had graduated from the California Sushi Academy in March and was now a chef in training.

After the chefs had reviewed the night’s specials, Toshi took over.

“All right!” he bellowed in Japanese, his face stern. “You’re all going to work hard tonight!” He looked around the room. “Got it?”

There were nods, a few sharp utterances of
“Hai!”

The restaurant manager shouted out the universal welcome.
“Irasshaimase!”

The staff yelled back in unison,
“Irasshaimase!”

The chefs and waitresses dispersed, and the manager propped the front door open for business.

For two decades, Toshi’s restaurant in Venice Beach had been packed every night of the week. Movie stars had stopped in for dinner all the time, and they treated him like a buddy. Now, in Hermosa Beach, Toshi’s fortunes had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Every day there seemed to be fewer customers, and the restaurant was hemorrhaging money.

Toshi stared out the open door, his face impassive.

T
he first Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles opened about 1855, in the neighborhood that would become Little Tokyo. By the early 1900s, Little Tokyo bustled with shoppers, who patronized a number of Japanese food establishments.

But few of America’s Japanese immigrants ate in Japanese restaurants. By 1910, more than 40,000 Japanese migrant laborers were toiling on American farms, along with another 10,000 on railroads and several thousand more in canneries. The farm workers often survived by drinking the water in the irrigation ditches and eating the grapes and strawberries in the fields, perhaps supplemented by a dinner of flour dumplings in salt soup if they were lucky. The closest the railroad workers got to fine dining was a monthly visit to town to buy a bottle of bourbon, a can of salmon, and some rice. Nostalgic for home, they’d squeeze together what they considered “extravagant” rice balls and cover them with slices of fish.

By 1940, Japanese immigrant farmers were growing 95 percent of California’s snap beans and celery, nearly 70 percent of its tomatoes, and around 40 percent of its onions and green peas. They owned many of the produce stalls in L.A.’s city market.

But discrimination against the Japanese made it difficult for them to enter other businesses. One option was importing Japanese foodstuffs and selling them to other Japanese in the United
States. People called this the “homesickness trade.” In L.A., a group of these importers formed an organization called the Mutual Trading Company.

Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor interrupted the homesickness trade. The U.S. government locked up Japanese Americans in internment camps. A group of Catholic nuns in downtown L.A. protected the Mutual Trading Company’s warehouse stock until the end of the war.

After the war, a man named Noritoshi Kanai joined Mutual Trading and decided that to survive as a business, the company would have to sell products that average Americans would buy.

In the early 1960s, Kanai traveled back and forth between Japan and America in search of products to sell to Americans. He tried importing canned snake meat, chocolate-covered ants, and a type of biscuit. The last went over well, but was immediately imitated. On one of his trips to Japan, Kanai took along an American business partner named Harry Wolf. After an unsuccessful day of scouting, Kanai was hungry for a meal at a traditional sushi bar. Wolf tagged along.

Wolf told Kanai he’d never experienced anything so delicious. Every day for the next week, Wolf returned to the same sushi bar. For Kanai, it was an epiphany. He decided to make “the East Asian food that most disgusted white people,” as he put it later, the core of his new business.

Back in L.A., Kanai did everything in his power to launch proper, Tokyo-style
nigiri
sushi in the United States. He partnered with a Japanese restaurant in Little Tokyo called Kawafuku and brought an authentic sushi chef and his wife from Japan to America. They opened a sushi bar inside Kawafuku in 1966.

Acquiring the fresh seafood specific to sushi was a problem. At the time, the idea of flying in fish packed in ice on airplanes was considered ludicrous because the cost was so exorbitant. But Kanai ordered fresh seafood from Tokyo anyway. Hearing that fishmongers in Boston were throwing away the fatty belly meat of tuna, he boarded a plane for the East Coast and arranged to buy the bellies. When he learned that good sea urchins lived in the waters near L.A., he hired a diver to harvest them.

The sushi bar at Kawafuku prospered. Another sushi bar opened
in Little Tokyo in a restaurant called Eigiku. Yet another opened down the street in a fancy restaurant called Tokyo Kaikan, which had been built in the style of a traditional Japanese inn.

But the customers at the new sushi bars were Japanese—mostly businessmen and expatriates. Kanai had succeeded in launching sushi, but he had failed to sell it to Americans.

Then two things happened.

The Japanese businessmen introduced their American colleagues to the sushi bar. Eating sushi quickly became an exciting novelty and a badge of courage for these Americans.

And, after a few years, the first sushi chef at Kawafuku returned to Japan and opened a lavish sushi bar in the Ginza in Tokyo. Word spread that he’d made a fortune in L.A. Young sushi chefs frustrated by long apprenticeships and rigid hierarchies in Japan had a new option—America.

But in L.A., sushi was still confined to Little Tokyo. The first sushi bar outside Little Tokyo opened in 1970, in L.A.’s Century City near Beverly Hills. Its target wasn’t ordinary Americans. It was Hollywood stars.

The sushi bar was called Osho, and it was located next to the Twentieth Century Fox movie studio. The actor Yul Brynner became a lunchtime regular, and the transformation of sushi into an American meal began in earnest.

Over the next few years Hollywood embraced sushi. It was an exotic meal. Sushi’s new customers had a lot to learn. Many of them were surprised to discover that tuna meat was red, not white, as it came in the can.

Sushi arrived in New York City and Chicago, too. In New York, a Japanese restaurant called Nippon began serving raw fish; and in 1975, the city’s first full-fledged sushi restaurant, Takezushi, opened for business. In Chicago, a restaurant called Kamehachi opened in 1967 and began serving sushi. The restaurant was across the street from The Second City comedy club, and a performer named John Belushi was a regular customer. A few years later Belushi was in New York, playing a Japanese samurai deli chef on
Saturday Night Live.

In response to the new interest in sushi, a wave of Japanese men arrived in Los Angeles and opened so many sushi bars that
Wilshire Boulevard in West L.A. earned the nickname “Sushi Row.” Kanai’s vision had become reality. His Mutual Trading Company finally prospered as it became the primary sushi restaurant supplier in the United States.

The timing was fortuitous. In 1977, the U.S. Senate issued a report called
Dietary Goals for the United States,
that blamed fatty, high-cholesterol foods for the increasing incidence of disease. The report recommended greater consumption of fish and grains. Around the same time, health experts also began to promote the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, abundant in fish. Many Americans discovered sushi as a healthful alternative.

In L.A., some of the Japanese men who arrived to open sushi restaurants were trained sushi chefs. Many were not. One of the untrained was the future executive chef of Hama Hermosa restaurant and CEO of the California Sushi Academy, Toshi Sugiura.

Toshi had grown up in Japan in the seaside town of Hayama, just south of Tokyo, where fresh fish were abundant. His mother owned a small restaurant, but Toshi had shown no interest in the family business. By the age of 15, all he could think about was leaving Japan and traveling to Europe and America. When he failed the college entrance exams, he found his excuse.

In the mid-1970s, Toshi hitchhiked throughout Europe for three years, sometimes living on water and bananas. He was good with his hands, and he earned money practicing the art of
kirie
—elaborate paper cutout pictures. He’d walk door to door around dinnertime selling his cutouts. Often he’d receive a free bowl of food. In medieval Japan, it would have been the lifestyle of a wandering Buddhist monk. In Europe in the 1970s, Toshi called it the lifestyle of a hippie.

In 1978, he borrowed $400 for a ticket to Los Angeles. When he arrived, he asked an acquaintance what was trendy in L.A. His friend said sushi. Toshi figured since he was good with his hands, he could make sushi, even though he’d hardly ever eaten the stuff. Running a restaurant would be easy—if his mother had done it, so could he.

Most of the new sushi bars in L.A. were traditional in style. But Toshi found a Jewish doctor who had just installed a sushi bar in his non-Japanese restaurant in Malibu. The first sushi chef to work there had quit. Toshi talked his way behind the sushi bar. He had no idea what he was doing. The restaurant was called Something’s Fishy.

Toshi quickly taught himself the bare basics: he mixed sweet vinegar with rice, squeezed it into rectangles, and topped it with slices of fish. Whenever he could get away, Toshi visited the sushi bar of a traditionally trained Japanese chef in L.A. named Katsu Michite. Katsu was becoming one of the most respected sushi chefs on the West Coast. Toshi would sit at Katsu’s sushi bar, order food, and memorize every move the elder chef made. Soon Toshi was spending a third of his salary on sushi at Katsu’s bar. Everything he saw Katsu do, he would return to Something’s Fishy and imitate.

What Toshi lacked in experience he made up for with charisma. Malibu in 1978 was crazy. Americans would sit at Toshi’s bar, and he would joke and drink with them while he served them sushi, and pretty soon the sushi bar turned into a wild party. Toshi laughed, screamed, and got hammered right along with his customers.

Toshi had no idea who these people were. He just knew they were fun. He gradually learned their names. There was one pretty customer named Olivia Newton-John. There was a guy named Robin Williams, one named Neil Diamond, and some lady named Linda Ronstadt. One night Toshi was serving Barbra Streisand sushi. She asked Toshi if he knew who she was. ‘No idea!’ he yelled, moving on to the next customer. He’d been hitchhiking across Europe making paper cutouts and eating bananas, and before that he’d been a kid in Japan. Hollywood might as well have been on another planet.

After a year, Toshi was hired away from Something’s Fishy to run a place in Venice Beach called Hama Venice—the word
hama
means “beach” in Japanese. Venice Beach was an edgy town, full of artists, hippies, and film and music industry types who wanted something gritty and authentic. And like Malibu, it was wild.

At Hama Venice, Toshi was able to define the style of the restaurant from the start. Most Japanese chefs filled their restaurants
with shoji screens and quiet shamisen music. Toshi blared rock ’n’ roll and acted crazy behind the sushi bar. Customers loved it. The priesthood of Japanese sushi chefs in L.A. hated it.

But Toshi wasn’t simply a rebel. From watching Katsu, Toshi had learned to be a stickler for cleanliness and quality. At his new restaurant, he insisted on strict hygiene and high-quality ingredients and fish.

More important, Toshi served traditional Japanese sushi, but not in a traditional style. He had no problem serving his customers bland, American-style sushi: rolls filled with salmon and cream cheese, “burrito” rolls, and the like. But he also made them weird, exotic, Japanese sushi, whether they ordered it or not.

First, he would serve them what they’d ordered; then, he’d start handing them
nigiri
topped with bizarre fish and the sex organs of sea urchins. He’d pour them more beer or sake and yell at them—‘Just eat it!’—until they swallowed the stuff. If they liked it, he’d give them more. If they didn’t, he’d try something else on them. ‘Just eat it!’ He was like a Nike commercial, for sushi.

Toshi’s restaurant was both wildly exotic and utterly approachable. It was a formula for success. The restaurant was packed every night. Celebrities came—old friends from Something’s Fishy, then Tom Hanks, Brooke Shields, and others. Hama Venice became one of the go-to sushi spots in L.A.

In 1980, NBC aired a TV miniseries based on James Clavell’s novel
Sh
gun.
Richard Chamberlain played a British ship captain who arrives in Japan around 1600 and learns the ways of the samurai.
Sh
gun
was one of the highest-rated programs in NBC’s history. It sparked a nationwide interest in all things Japanese, including sushi.

The owner of Hama Venice retired in 1983 and sold the restaurant to Toshi. He acquired other restaurants. In 1989, Toshi married a Japanese woman who was a fashion consultant to Japanese celebrities. They had a daughter and then a son. They bought a BMW, a Mercedes, and a condo with a view of Marina del Rey.

The world of sushi was changing. By the 1990s, sushi restaurants were everywhere. At Hama Venice, most of the celebrities stopped coming. Still, Toshi’s business continued at a brisk pace and he never ceased his antics behind the bar, carousing with his
customers. Many mornings he woke with a hangover. Some nights he stumbled home and fell asleep on the carpet. His wife worried about him.