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Sushi Chefs
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Rising demand opens sushi to non-traditional chefs
Method :
In Japan, sushi-making is an art, a science and a secret society. It requires years of training, hours of drudgery and, most important, the serendipity of being male and Japanese.
Andy F. Matsuda trained under that system, apprenticing for five years in Japan. As a neophyte, he wasn't allowed to touch raw fish or make his own rolls.
'All I did was make rice . . . for five years,' he said.
Matsuda has respect for the old ways, but he's not convinced they are the only way. As an instructor at the California Sushi Academy in Los Angeles' Venice district, he's helping orchestrate a quiet revolution in sushi-making.
Here, it takes six months - not five years - to train a sushi chef. His students include Latinos, whites and other Asians. There are tattoos and pierced eyebrows. There are women.
Slowly, and often grudgingly, the art of sushi-making is opening to outsiders.
This is, as Matsuda points out, a necessity. The American taste for sushi continues to deepen, and there aren't enough trained Japanese chefs to go around. Lured by high salaries, many non-Japanese people are being trained on the job, or they attend the academy, founded three years ago by restaurant owner Toshi Suguira to address the demand.
'All around the country, people would ask, `Where do we find them?' The answer is you have to train them,' said Phillip Yi, director of the academy.
'That opens up the art to people who never had the opportunity. You never used to see women; you never used to see blond hair.'
This does not sit well with traditionalists, who see the inclusion of outsiders - and the 'Americanization' of sushi - as antithetical to the ancient Japanese cuisine.
'It's still a chauvinist, close-knit community,' Yi said. 'Purists don't even call us sushi chefs. But everyone else does.'
One glance at the corkboard outside the academy's kitchen shows why the school's sessions are always full, purists aside. Index cards advertise positions that pay $3,000 a month with flexible hours. Yi said most jobs pay more for experienced chefs.
The academy's job placement rate is nearly 100 percent, and it isn't uncommon for students to get jobs before they are even finished.
It may seem puzzling why some people would care so much about the schooling of a sushi chef. Considering that most sushi isn't cooked, per se, how much training does one need?
Quite a bit, Yi said. Sushi has evolved from a 15 th-century method of preserving fish by salt and fermentation. It takes skill and experience to correctly apply vinegar to both the rice and fish (for flavoring and to draw out the salt) and then prepare them in a perfect roll.
Americans may scoff at Matsuda's five-year apprenticeship, for instance, but it has paid off, Yi said. When Matsuda prepares rice, it is easily distinguished from the rice of his students.
'I can instantly taste the difference,' Yi said. 'Theirs is crumbly and clumped. His is sticky, but separate. It's an art.'
Sushi is also a great untapped market.
According to the National Restaurant Association, there are 5,000 Japanese restaurants in the United States, 80 percent of which serve sushi - and that figure is expected to grow considerably in the next decade.
A 1999 restaurant association report says 79 percent of Americans are aware of sushi, but only 32 percent have tried it. 'We've gotten calls from Kentucky, Mississippi . . . they're just getting started,' Yi said.
All of which means sushi will change to tailor itself to American tastes, Yi said.
That has already happened, to a certain extent. There's the famous California roll, which was invented about 25 years ago in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, though its exact inspiration is shrouded in history. The California roll has cucumber and avocado and imitation crab meat and is considered more palatable for Americans. It also has rice on the outside, rather than the seaweed wrap most Japanese rolls have.
Speaking of rolls, Japanese restaurants stick mostly to sashimi, slices of raw fish, or nigiri, pieces of seafood served on a bed of rice, not rolls of maki. They often serve sushi in a bowl, chirashi, not on a board.
Still, these changes are minor compared with what American restaurants have done to Mexican, French or Chinese cuisine. The sushi served in most U.S. sushi bars is exactly what you'd get across the Pacific.
That's starting to change, Yi says. 'Now every restaurant has its own roll.' And they're served with jalapenos, cream cheese or Cajun spices.
Somewhere, a group of Japanese sushi chefs just shuddered.
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