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

by Trevor Corson

  Afterwards, Kate’s mother was beaming. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I think you’ll be good at sushi. You’re good at visual design.’

  Kate smiled and nodded. It was like Toshi had said: “You gotta eat with your eyes.”

  Unlike the catering job at Paramount, today Kate had a chance to get to know her customers. When they got up to leave, she was sad to see them go.

  Kate was feeling great until Zoran made an announcement. In a few days, Toshi would be giving the students their first big test of the semester. It would be on rolls.

  The day before the roll test, Zoran had a surprise for the students. He taught them how to cook fried eggs—special fried eggs for sushi. In Japanese, the dish was called tamago yaki, and it was a standard sushi topping. Kate was thrilled. After her popping-open rolls, her crooked nigiri, and her bloody fish, she was glad for something that felt familiar.

  Tamago yaki is both sweet and savory; in English, it’s usually called “sweet egg omelet.” Each student mixed ten eggs with some dashi—the kelp and bonito broth—plus some of the sweet rice liquor called mirin, along with a little sugar, soy sauce, and salt. Zoran demonstrated the tricky cooking technique. The special square pan had to be hot, but not so hot that it would brown the egg. He poured a thin layer of the egg mixture into the pan and folded the layer into a rectangular omelet. Then he poured in another thin layer of egg and lifted the first layer so the new egg would flow under it. He flipped that several times, wrapping the egg around the rectangle and building on it. He repeated the procedure over and over. As the rectangle of egg grew in size, the flips Zoran executed became more difficult and dramatic.

  The skills required to fry tamago yaki call for long practice, so they were traditionally considered a barometer of the chef’s general mastery. When trying out a new sushi shop, a customer would order a nigiri topped with sweet egg omelet. If he didn’t find it up to par, it was considered acceptable for him to leave without ordering anything else. Today, most sushi restaurants buy pre-made tamago yaki.

  When Zoran finished, he had created a solid block of thin compressed layers of egg. He sliced a small rectangle off the end. It was four fingers long and two fingers wide, perfect for the top of a nigiri.

  Kate spent the rest of the class in the kitchen. Frying eggs was fun, and she was pretty good at it. None of her efforts produced a perfect block of egg, but she came close.

  As the day of the test approached, one of the other two women in the class dropped out—the Japanese-American girl. Her sushi had been better than Kate’s, but she’d become discouraged and quit.

  Kate had come a long way since the first two weeks of school, when every day she’d contemplated quitting. She had stuck with it. She’d been eating better, too. She’d gained 10 pounds.

  But she couldn’t shake the feeling that her classmates still saw her as a flake, and judging by some of the sushi she’d been making, she was worried they might be right. She didn’t feel ready for the test.

  On the morning of the test, Zoran scribbled on the whiteboard, jotting down a list of rolls. The students would make two American-style inside-out rolls: one California roll, one spicy tuna roll. In addition, they would make two Japanese-style thin rolls: one cucumber, one tuna.

  “Ohaiy!” Toshi strode into the classroom wearing his chef jacket, shorts, and a pair of oversized basketball sneakers. There was a bounce in his step. Seeing his students gave him energy.

  The students rushed to their stations. Toshi read off the list of rolls on the whiteboard, then turned to the students.

  “Before we start, the most important thing—let’s make a nice square.” It wasn’t clear what he meant. He glared down the table. “This is very important!” He paused. “Six minutes, all rolls! If under six minutes, plus three points. If over seven minutes, minus five points. Six to seven minutes, no change. And after you finish I want to see whether your station is dirty or clean. So make sure it’s all under control now.”

  The students scrambled to pick up stray bits of food from the floor. They washed their hands again. Toshi issued final instructions.

  “When you finish, place everything on your cutting board. Clean. Then move back.” He paused again and shouted. “Clean!”

  Zoran stood at Toshi’s side, gripping a digital track-and-field stopwatch. Toshi’s eyes narrowed. “Ready?”

  In unison, the students bellowed their response. “Hai!”

  “Go!”

  Zoran clicked on the stopwatch. The students threw open the lids of the metal nori boxes. Their fingers flew into the dishes of water. They clapped the excess water off their hands and reached into their canisters for rice. After thirty seconds of silence, Toshi turned to Zoran and chuckled.

  “Ooh, everyone’s so serious now.”

  The numbers on the stopwatch flew by. The students were still on their first roll. Zoran looked at the time.

  “Two minutes thirty!” he yelled.

  Kate squeezed closed her first roll. By three minutes she had started on her second. She had wanted to impress Toshi, but she was way behind. But so was everyone else.

  “Four minutes!”

  No one had completed the second roll. Toshi scowled. He turned to the whiteboard and erased the “6” from “6 minutes” and scrawled in an “8.”

  “Six minutes!” Zoran called. No one had even begun a third roll.

  “I changed it to eight minutes,” Toshi announced. “C’mon, let’s go!”

  The students were frantic now. Kate was one of the first to complete the third roll. One more to go.

  “Eight minutes!”

  The students kept working. Kate and Takumi started slicing. Then Marcos began to slice. One of the other students straggled far behind. At nine minutes, he was still pressing rice onto nori for his third roll.

  “Ten minutes!”

  Kate started plating her slices. As did Takumi.

  Finally, at twelve minutes—double the original time limit—Kate finished. She was in first place!

  She arranged her tray of sushi on her cutting board and stepped back from the table. One by one the others pulled in behind her. The last student to finish clocked in at 15:50. Zoran clicked off the stopwatch.

  Toshi sighed. He strode around the table carrying a clipboard with scoring sheets. He examined each student’s sushi, checked the floor, then scribbled on the clipboard. Kate’s inside-out rolls looked good. But her slices of cucumber roll were popping open. Toshi returned to the head of the table, his expression severe.

  “Every single roll should be two minutes, max,” he growled. “That’s your target. Even two minutes is too long. It’s easy—thirty seconds.”

  The students stared at their cutting boards.

  “We’ve got to be more serious,” Toshi said. He glanced around at the trays. His eyes passed over Kate’s tray. “Some of your rolls are exploding!”

  Toshi demonstrated a cucumber roll. With two quick squeezes he created a boxy shaft, long and narrow with right angles. It wasn’t a roll at all, it was a block. It seemed as if his hands had hardly moved.

  “Square!” he yelled. He sliced the roll and turned the slices on end. The nori framed a perfect white square of rice, and the block of green cucumber sat smack in the middle. “Centered!” he yelled. Toshi looked up at the students, then he raised his voice to a shout. “Just make it!”

  He paused to let his words sink in, then changed the subject.

  “Next Friday,” he said, “test on special roll. Everyone come up with a nice signature roll. Something special. Think about it.”

  After class Kate ran into Jay. He knew she was struggling.

  “How’d you do today?” he asked.

  “Good!” Kate said. Then her face fell. “My kappa broke.”

  Jay smiled. “Keep practicing.”

  Week 6

  20

  SUSHI NATION

  The following Monday the students set up for their second student lunch counter. Marcos wiped down the
back sushi bar and dumped tubs full of ice into the neta cases. A stream of ice cubes flew across the top of the fish case and clattered onto the bar. Zoran closed his eyes.

  “That was me!” Marcos yelled. “And I am sorry.”

  The spilled ice began to melt. Water soaked into seat cushions. Pools formed on the tile floor. Marcos jammed perforated steel plates into the cases on top of the ice. He finally fit them in but they sat at odd angles. One of his classmates walked through the seating area and slipped in a puddle.

  Just then Jay’s friend Jeff, the restaurant consultant, strode into the room. As part of his consulting work, Jeff matched up sushi chefs with restaurants, all over the United States. From time to time, he would stop by the academy and check out the latest batch of students. He’d ask Jay and Zoran for their assessments. Jeff might recommend the promising students for jobs when they graduated.

  Jeff stood in the doorway and watched the students work. He’d just missed Marcos’s antics with the ice. Zoran walked over and stood next to Jeff.

  “My phone has been ringing off the hook,” Jeff told Zoran, shaking his head. “It’s unbelievable.”

  Every week this summer, Jeff had been getting more calls asking for sushi chefs. He’d never seen it like this before. What surprised him in particular was where the calls were coming from: Kansas City, Milwaukee, Des Moines, and Boise. Even Stillwater, Oklahoma.

  “It’s exploding!” Jeff said. It reminded him of L.A. in the 1970s and early 1980s. But now a lot of the calls were coming from white restaurant owners, opening sushi bars in the American heartland. It looked like a whole new wave, the second front in the sushi invasion. A few days ago, Jeff had talked about it with Jay. “I give these people so much credit, to have the guts to do it,” Jeff had said. “True pioneers. To open sushi in Stillwater, Oklahoma?! Wow.” Jay had been getting calls, too, asking about the academy. ‘Do you have a school in Chicago?’‘Do you have a school in Texas?’

  The numbers were astonishing. The restaurant owners who’d already opened one sushi bar in the Midwest now wanted to open three more, and the profit figures they cited to Jeff were way above what restaurants made in L.A.

  When Howard Dean was running for president in 2004, a conservative political group attacked him in the Iowa primary by referring to his campaign as a “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Hollywood-loving…freak show.” The funny thing was, Starbucks Coffee and Blockbuster Video were opening locations one after another in Iowa, and sushi bars were popping up, too. At least four restaurants now serve sushi in Des Moines and another seven sell sushi in Iowa City and the town of Waterloo, where teenagers order so many rolls that the chefs can’t keep up. When a columnist for the Des Moines Register recently defended Sioux City from the disparagements of a snobby New Yorker, she cited the existence of good sushi as one of Sioux City’s selling points.

  Across the Midwest, restaurants serving sushi have been opening in every major city. By mid-2006, there were twenty-five of them in St. Louis, twenty-three in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, twenty-two in Indianapolis, twenty-two in Cincinnati, twenty in Cleveland, sixteen in Columbus, thirteen in Kansas City, eleven in Oklahoma City, eleven in Milwaukee, ten in Wichita, and six in Omaha, Nebraska—and that was just the restaurants that had formally incorporated in each state. Most had opened since the year 2000. Even Peoria, Illinois, now has at least three restaurants serving sushi.

  In Indianapolis, home of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and a mecca on the NASCAR circuit, people aren’t shy about their sushi. “I firmly believe,” one writer declared in the Indianapolis Star, “that inside every red-blooded, beef-devouring American beats the heart of a sushi lover.”

  Chicago, America’s meat-packing capital, has become a city of raw fish. Even a cursory search of Chicago and its suburbs turns up 150 restaurants serving sushi, sixty-nine of them having opened since 2000. Chicago shopping malls have sushi in the food courts. Fans of the Chicago Bears can buy sushi while watching football at Soldier Field Stadium. Wealthy residents of Chicago can pay $500 to eat sushi off naked women.

  Vying for dominance with Chicago is Texas. The Dallas/Forth Worth area boasts at least 100 restaurants with sushi on the menu. “It’s not a trend anymore,” a food critic recently said of Dallas sushi, “it’s a near onslaught.”

  In the Dallas suburb of Plano, the local Wal-Mart has installed a sushi counter. The Wal-Mart sushi comes courtesy of a company called Advanced Fresh Concepts (AFC), which plans to franchise 200 more sushi counters in Wal-Mart stores around the country.

  AFC started out in 1986 with a takeout sushi counter in a Vons supermarket in L.A. The company expanded rapidly into other grocery stores under the brand name Southern Tsunami. In 1991, it opened its first supermarket sushi counter outside California—in San Antonio, Texas. By 1996, AFC had 300 takeout sushi counters in American supermarkets. Now it has at least 1,900, including locations in Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, and Kansas. In addition to Wal-Mart, AFC sushi counters can be found in Vons, Safeway, and Harris Teeter, as well as in university dining facilities, hotels, and casinos. AFC even supplies sushi to the U.S. military.

  Smaller takeout sushi franchisers have sprung up in AFC’s footsteps, such as Philadelphia-based Genji Express, which supplies Whole Foods Market grocery stores, and a new operation called Sushi Avenue, based in Minnesota.

  A publication called Japanese Restaurant News estimates that the total number of Japanese restaurants in the United States has roughly doubled in the past decade, to more than 9,000. Some of those restaurants don’t serve sushi, but many non-Japanese restaurants do, at recently installed sushi bars. The chefs come from all over. Sometimes they’re Japanese, but just as often they’re Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, Thai, Mexican, and Caucasian. A 2001 survey in Chicago found that nearly a third of the sushi chefs working in the restaurants surveyed were Latino.

  In addition to the more than 9,000 restaurants, Japanese Restaurant News estimates that some 3,000 retail outlets serve takeout sushi in the United States, including sushi counters in grocery stores. These outlets have become so ubiquitous that many Americans, particularly in the Midwest, now get their first introduction to sushi in their local supermarket rather than in a restaurant.

  To Jeff, the vast new sushi market opening in the Midwest held promise, but also great danger. Americans in the heartland had the potential to become more sophisticated sushi eaters than their predecessors. Right now, compared with the coasts, the Midwest was a blank slate. But it wouldn’t be for long. Jeff wondered if there was a way to stop the history of American sushi from repeating itself.

  Jeff watched the students. It would take a new kind of chef to educate customers and spread the Japanese approach to sushi in America—a chef who had mastered Japanese tradition but who could act and think like an American. A chef like Toshi could yell and scream in the anything-goes atmosphere of Hollywood, but now, with middle America in the mix, things were different.

  The stakes were high because Jeff saw another trend, too. Back in Japan, the younger generations were becoming Westernized. Japanese traditions were in danger of dying out. Eating habits had changed dramatically. A Westernized version of curry rice, imported via Britain and usually made with beef and potatoes, had become one of the most popular meals in Japan, along with McDonald’s hamburgers, pizza, and spaghetti.

  It was possible that if the authentic sushi experience were to survive anywhere, it would be in the United States. If Americans learned to appreciate the sushi tradition, they might be saving it not just for themselves but for Japan as well.

  21

  MANHOOD OF SHRIMP

  While Jeff was talking with Zoran, back in the kitchen Marcos was inserting bamboo skewers through curled-up shrimp to straighten them. The shrimp were to lie flat on top of the nigiri. He stuck the skewer into the tail, just under the swimmerets, and worked it through to the head. It wasn’t as bad as the task Zoran had given them a few days ago. Zoran had set a bo
x of large live shrimp on the table and made the students rip their tails off while the animals were still wriggling.

  The muscles of shrimp, prawns, and lobsters are full of enzymes, and are prone to digesting themselves into mush as soon as the animal dies. That’s why retailers keep lobsters alive in their stores, and why sushi chefs keep high-quality shrimp alive until the last minute.

  Shrimp didn’t join the elite ranks of sushi toppings until after World War II. Raw shrimp had long been a popular dish in western Japan. When Tokyo-style sushi spread to the rest of the country after the war, chefs in western Japan began topping nigiri with the raw tails of freshly killed shrimp. Some chefs also cooked “mantis shrimp,” which are not actually shrimp but a different crustacean with a strange, elongated tail.

  Today, most sushi bars serve two types of shrimp: raw, fresh tails, which are glistening, transparent, and sticky; and smaller, cooked tails with meat that is firm and white with pink highlights. Sushi bars in America usually list the former as ama-ebi, or “sweet shrimp.” In Japan people call them ama-ebi or botan-ebi. They are relatively expensive. The smaller cooked shrimp usually go by the name kuruma-ebi, or just ebi, and are cheaper.

  The smaller, cooked shrimp are generally of the black tiger or Mexican white varieties. Environmentalists decry the methods that produce these animals. Fishermen catch them with trawl nets that also snag nontargeted sea life, including baby fish and endangered sea turtles, although U.S. fishermen have taken steps to minimize such by-catch. Overseas farming operations have destroyed millions of acres of mangrove habitat to grow these shrimp.