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 flooring 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 special — 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 information was a scarce, valuable commodity that wanted to be “earned.” “‘Do you should be right here?’ ‘Who did you prepare underneath? For a way lengthy?’ These are the kinds of questions I’d get usually,” recounts Adamson, matter-of-factly and and not using 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 components that made me totally different from everybody else on the road, so it’s laborious to inform. I couldn’t change any of the issues they didn’t like about me,” she displays. “They thought that somebody [like me] could be disrespectful or naive,” she says. So, she educated herself. “Fairly than pondering they simply hate girls or one thing, I informed myself, ‘I’m not from this tradition and I must study 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 lowered to considerably of a delusion. 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 area on Pico Boulevard, Mori Nozomi gives a brand new sort of expertise. Open since March 2024, Japanese-born chef Nozomi Mori’s namesake restaurant conveys a sure stage of delicate magnificence and magnificence, lifting its aesthetics from chado, or the artwork of the Japanese tea ceremony, of which Mori is formally skilled in. “The rules 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 by way of an interpreter, Megumi Yagihashi. “Like an orchestra conductor, I compose the omakase programs fastidiously, paying shut consideration to rhythm and circulate.”  

At her aspect 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 girls in California. I ceaselessly serve feminine prospects who particularly point out eager to assist girls within the trade. Some nights, [the entire restaurant] is all girls.”  

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 girls menstruate,” he mentioned. “To be an expert means to have a gradual style in your meals, however due to the menstrual cycle girls have an imbalance of their style, and that’s why girls can’t be sushi cooks.”

Ono should 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 normal lower in style sensitivity and style operate, 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 frequent “causes” males level to, as to why girls can’t turn out to be sushi cooks, embody: girls are unable to deal with the calls for of sushi-making. Feminine palms are too small to form nigiri. Girls’s palms are too heat and destroy the rice.  

These have all been debunked.  

“You’ll assume that in 2024, we might see extra feminine sushi cooks. But it surely’s not that frequent,” 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 good friend of mine informed me that the top sushi chef got here as much as him and mentioned, ‘I can not 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 towards 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 unique house owners. “My recommendation to younger girls who’re excited 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 let you know in any other case.”