I Am Not a Sushi Chef
A guest asked me once, halfway through shaping her second piece of nigiri: “Are you a sushi chef?” It’s one of the most common questions I get, sometimes stated more bluntly — “Have you worked in restaurants?” I have a standard answer by now, and I give it the same way every time: no, I haven’t. Here’s what I have done instead.
I say it plainly because the honest version of my story is more interesting than a fabricated one, and because, somewhat to my own surprise, it almost never turns into the problem I once worried it would be.
Here is the honest version. I spent years in an accounting career, and somewhere in my late twenties, on weekends I couldn’t quite justify to myself, I enrolled in a cooking course because I wanted to open a café. I got far enough to understand the business math, and not far enough to make it work, so I let it go. Around the same time, I started hosting guests through Airbnb — cooking with them, sharing meals — and somewhere in those years, I became convinced that a hands-on cooking class for travelers would work, if I ever built one. Eventually I left the accounting firm to become an independent tour guide, and almost immediately, the pandemic arrived and canceled every tour I had booked. I was left with something I hadn’t had in years: empty time. I spent that year training at the Tokyo Sushi Academy, and, in the same stretch, working as a food photographer — shooting for something like 300 different restaurants that needed photos and, like me, had nothing but time. I launched my sushi class in February 2023, the same month Japan’s borders reopened. I have never worked a single shift in a sushi restaurant.
So when a guest asks whether I’m a sushi chef, the honest answer is no — and I’ve learned that this is rarely where the conversation ends up staying. Guests, especially Americans in my experience, tend not to press further. What surprised me is what some of them say instead: “I like your entrepreneurship.” The pivot from accounting to photography and guiding, the pandemic-era decision to learn sushi from scratch, the decision to build something new out of a canceled career — this, to a certain kind of guest, reads not as a shortfall of credentials but as a story worth admiring. I don’t think they leave my class thinking they learned from a master craftsman. I think, on a good day, they leave feeling they learned from someone who built this out of nothing, and I’ve come to believe that’s its own kind of qualification.
Still, I know exactly how far my own training falls short of the real thing, which is why, for the past year, I’ve been paying a master sushi chef with roughly forty years of experience to come to my own kitchen studio and let me watch him work. Maybe because I’m a paying student rather than an apprentice, he’s never once been sharp with me. But he also isn’t a teacher, not in any formal sense — most career sushi chefs aren’t. He shows me the movement of his hands and says only the essential words aloud, and the rest is on me: watch closely, and ask when I don’t understand, because that’s the entire method. A few weeks ago, standing at my own counter, he showed me how to process a whole horsehair crab — set it shell-down to steam, use a deba knife to remove the legs, cut further in to split them open and draw the meat out. I watched every motion as if I might not get to see it again.
That contrast — his silence, my need to translate everything into words the moment I turn around and face a guest — is, I think, the real difference between a sushi chef and whatever I am. A chef who has spent decades at this can usually only speak about sushi, and speak about it better than almost anyone alive. I came to this by a much stranger route, which means I can talk about it from several directions at once. My accounting background lets me explain this business the way I’d explain any business — margins, positioning, why a single premium offering can work when a tiered one wouldn’t. My photography background means I know exactly how to help a guest get a beautiful shot of the piece they just made, which matters more than most sushi chefs would ever admit in the age of Instagram. My years as a guide gave me the history and trivia that turn a mysterious craft into a legible one for someone encountering it for the first time. I don’t run my class off a single script. I improvise, guest by guest, question by question, because no single narrative covers what people actually want to know.
There’s one thing I do, near the end of the market portion of my tour, that — as far as I’ve been able to find — no other sushi experience in this city does. Namiyoke Shrine, near the market, has a small monument called Ebizuka — a shrimp mound, a piece of Shinto reverence for the living things we take in order to survive. Right beside it stands another called Sushizuka, raised to honor the nameless generations of craftsmen who built the culture of sushi itself. I bring my guests there and pay my respects, plainly, the same way I would at a family grave. Then we go back to the studio, make the piece of nigiri with our own hands, eat it, and photograph it on a phone before it disappears. History, presence, and record, in that order, in under an hour. More than one guest has told me, afterward, that this was the highlight of their trip.
I don’t think that happened because I make better sushi than a forty-year veteran. I know exactly how far I still have to go, which is why I keep inviting him back to watch. It happened, I think, because nobody else was going to stand at that shrine, in front of a stranger from another country, and try to explain why it mattered. A chef spends a lifetime getting one thing exactly right. I’ve spent mine collecting enough different rooms — a ledger, a camera, a market street, a shrine — to explain why that one thing was worth getting right in the first place. I’m not a sushi chef. I’ve made my peace with being something else.