How NP fell in love with sushi
Ten years ago you’d struggle to find a piece of sushi in New Plymouth. Now it’s everywhere. Stephanie Mitchell reports on the town that fell in love with sushi.
Takasago don’t see the dozen other sushi stores in New Plymouth as competition. In fact they think there’s room for more.
‘‘We can’t keep up with demand,’’ co-owner Graham Mann says.
That there is such demand for the Japanese-inspired rice morsels seems unlikely.
Fifteen years ago you couldn’t get it anywhere in Taranaki. Then in 2016 there were five sellers offering it and fears that was too many, that New Plymouth was experiencing a sushi bubble. One or more would have to close, one operator said.
But now there are 11 sushi stores in New Plymouth and one each in Inglewood, Stratford and Ha¯ wera. A lunch of sushi is as easy to find as a pie or a filled roll. Perhaps even easier.
Takasago are the new kids on the block. Mann opened the shop with his wife Ikue one year ago and it’s gone by in a blur.
Their tiny New Plymouth sushi store is open from 11am to 4pm each day, unless they sell out. Which they regularly do.
Mann, a chef who ran a sushi shop in Auckland eight years ago, came to New Plymouth to take up a job as a funeral director. But sushi soon pulled him back.
‘‘Every night when I walked home I always walked past this old run-down bar with a ‘for lease’ sign on the window. I always thought ‘I could do something there’,’’ he said.
‘‘Our biggest seller here is always chicken. Kiwi people love chicken. But in Auckland there’s a huge Asian population so it was a lot of squid and stuff like that.’’
What comes through chatting to the owners of some of the city’s busiest sushi spots, is it’s not something they’ve got into for the hell of it. They do it for the love of it.
‘‘There’s a lot of work involved. You’ll make money but you’ve got to work for it,’’ Mann says.
But for many that work is the fulfilment of a long-held ambition.
Tucked away in the New Plymouth suburb of Vogeltown, nestled beside a bakery and a fish and chip shop, Haejung Sung and Osamu Honjo at Yum Yum Sushi are living out their sushi-making dream.
Sung is from South Korea and has been in New Zealand for eight years. Honjo came to New Zealand from Japan 22 years ago.
‘‘I used to work at a pharmacy for seven years and my husband was first a graphic designer, then a painter, and now chef,’’ Sung says.
‘‘It’s been my husband’s dream for over 10 years. He’s just kept thinking about it for a very long time, just kept dreaming.’’
The couple, who are currently expecting a child, opened Yum Yum Sushi in August 2017.
Its suburban location seems an unlikely spot for sushi success. It’s well away from the usual lunchrush crowd but that hasn’t stopped the customers from coming.
On any given day a mixture of everyone from tradies to school teachers can be seen popping into the tiny store for their sushi. It’s as busy, and sometimes can be busier, than the bakery next door.
At Yum Yum their best selling sushi is a deep-fried tofu pocket stuffed with rice and topped with salmon.
‘‘My husband uses the head of the salmon, others don’t do that. They just use the fillets,’’ Sung says proudly.
The variety and number of sushi options is a totally different situation from the one Sophie and Ken Kurota found when they moved to New Plymouth and opened Sushi Ninja in 2003.
‘‘We used to work in Auckland and we wanted to move out of Auckland and then we heard about
The Last Samurai movie being filmed here,’’ co-owner Sophie Kurota says.
So they chucked in their jobs, bought a food caravan and joined Tom Cruise in Taranaki to serve sushi to the actors, staff, and locals.
‘‘The locals we fell in love with and they fell in love with us and my husband loves surfing so we thought ‘this is the place for us’.’’
Sixteen years later they have a location on Devon St East and the region’s only sushi train in Centre City shopping centre.
Although Taranaki people love sushi now, the Kurotas say it took some convincing for residents to experiment with their palate.
‘‘When we first started it was hard to get people to try it. Everyone has that first conception of ‘Is it raw?’ or ‘Is it seafood?’ when it isn’t the case.
‘‘Some things we do traditional but we haven’t got the market for it here just yet, so we have to adjust. People are more into chicken rolls. Our top seller is karaage chicken, which isn’t even a sushi roll,’’ says Sophie.
She said it was both good and bad sharing the market with so many other sushi sellers. Though it increased competition, it also meant more people were eating sushi and getting used to the flavours.
New Plymouth hospitality legend Terry Parkes has been introducing new tastes to the city for more than 30 years. When he tried to introduce sushi in the early 1990s, people weren’t interested.
‘‘We gave it a go but it wasn’t very popular. We didn’t quite have the ingredients but we just used to do a roll with rice and salmon and ginger. It was too different at the time,’’ Parkes says.
Since then, international travel had become more common and people were more likely to give something new, like sushi, a go because they had seen or tasted it elsewhere, he said.
‘‘It’s taken a long time to become open-minded to things. Initially people hate change and anything that is away from the norm, people are reluctant.’’
Parkes says the tastes of people in New Plymouth had definitely expanded since he first tried to introduce sushi and says we are lucky for the food scene the city now has.
‘‘Taranaki people are now very, very quick to experiment. They’re very open-minded in everything – not just in food and wine but in attitude. That’s why I’m still in New Plymouth.’’