The place Are America’s Feminine Sushi Cooks?

“When somebody is available in and sees a feminine sushi chef, I really feel like their expectations are low, like, ‘Oh boy, what’s this going to be like?’” explains Morgan Adamson, the 30-year-old chef behind Hōseki, a lunchtime omakase restaurant in New York Metropolis. Impressed by Japan’s subterranean departo-style eating, the six-seat counter is positioned on the basement ground of the Saks Fifth Avenue within the Diamond District.

For Adamson, a blond-haired Michigan native, apprehension is par for the course. On the earlier restaurant she labored at, Decrease Manhattan’s Kissaki, visitors would take one have a look at her, then request to be seated in entrance of a unique — and ideally, male — chef.

Throughout her apprenticeship, Adamson struggled to attach with the all-male, largely Asian back-of-house employees, in a kitchen the place data was a scarce, valuable commodity that wanted to be “earned.” “‘Do you need to be right here?’ ‘Who did you practice below? For a way lengthy?’ These are the varieties of questions I might get typically,” recounts Adamson, matter-of-factly and with out a hint of resentment.  

However why? Was it her age, her gender, or non-Japanese background that startled others? “There are such a lot of elements that made me completely different from everybody else on the road, so it’s onerous to inform. I couldn’t change any of the issues they didn’t like about me,” she displays. “They thought that somebody [like me] can be disrespectful or naive,” she says. So, she educated herself. “Slightly than pondering they only hate ladies or one thing, I advised myself, ‘I’m not from this tradition and I must be taught extra about it.”  

The feminine sushi chef in America, who helms, and even owns her personal restaurant, is a rarity, a determine who’s been diminished to considerably of a fantasy. The west coast sushi mecca Los Angeles is residence to legendary omakase eating places together with Nobu, the notorious celeb hang-out as soon as name-checked by Future; Nozawa Bar, Sugarfish’s upscale older brother; and Michelin-starred newcomers like Morihiro and Sushi Kaneyoshi. 

In the meantime, in a serene, all-white house on Pico Boulevard, Mori Nozomi gives a brand new kind of expertise. Open since March 2024, Japanese-born chef Nozomi Mori’s namesake restaurant conveys a sure degree of refined magnificence and class, lifting its aesthetics from chado, or the artwork of the Japanese tea ceremony, of which Mori is formally educated in. “The ideas of the tea ceremony — concord (和), respect (敬), purity (清), and tranquility (寂) — deeply inform how we create the eating expertise,” shares Mori, who carried out the interview via an interpreter, Megumi Yagihashi. “Like an orchestra conductor, I compose the omakase programs fastidiously, paying shut consideration to rhythm and movement.”  

At her facet is Mori Nozomi’s all-female employees, led by the restaurant’s sous chef, Yuko Ikeda, who comes from Eleven Madison Park’s pastry group. Was this deliberate? No, reviews Mori, who employed certified candidates, no matter gender. But, she admits, “I’ve seen a rising assist amongst ladies in California. I continuously serve feminine prospects who particularly point out desirous to assist ladies within the trade. Some nights, [the entire restaurant] is all ladies.”  

In 2011, throughout an interview with the Wall Road Journal, Yoshikazu Ono (the son of Jiro Ono, the “most well-known sushi chef in Tokyo” and topic of the Netflix documentary, Jiro Desires of Sushi) weighed in on why, precisely, there have been so few feminine sushi cooks in Japan. “As a result of ladies menstruate,” he stated. “To be knowledgeable means to have a gentle style in your meals, however due to the menstrual cycle ladies have an imbalance of their style, and that’s why ladies can’t be sushi cooks.”

Ono will need to have missed the variety of research that discovered “no affiliation detected” between the menstrual cycle and style notion. He additionally appears to have missed analysis that means weight and age are the 2 most important contributors relating to a common lower in style sensitivity and style perform, each of which decline at 60, then sharply once more at age 70. A disgrace, since, on the time of the interview, Ono’s then-86-year-old father was nonetheless working the restaurant. 

Oh, and the myths don’t cease there. Different widespread “causes” males level to, as to why ladies can’t develop into sushi cooks, embody: ladies are unable to deal with the calls for of sushi-making. Feminine arms are too small to form nigiri. Girls’s arms are too heat and break the rice.  

These have all been debunked.  

“You’d assume that in 2024, we’d see extra feminine sushi cooks. Nevertheless it’s not that widespread,” remarks Kate Koo, a sushi chef with over 24 years of expertise and the proprietor of Zilla Sake, an omakase restaurant in Oregon. However even in a bastion of tolerance like Portland, Koo has confronted gender discrimination. “A pal of mine advised me that the top sushi chef got here as much as him and stated, ‘I can’t consider I employed a lady,” Koo remembers, reflecting on the beginning of her profession. “I at all times inform folks I’ve a number of strikes in opposition to me: I’m Korean-born, American-raised, and a lady sushi chef.”  

And but, she’s remained resolute, unfazed by the “roadblocks” set in entrance of her. In January 2016, Koo bought Zilla Sake from the restaurant’s authentic homeowners. “My recommendation to younger ladies who’re enthusiastic about sushi is: be disciplined. You’ll face challenges. That’s okay,” she urges. “Present the world you’re ok to do that, as a result of nobody ought to inform you in any other case.”