City Informer

If a Vancouver chef really invented the California roll, why the American name?

Why do i introduce myself at every party as the inventor of Gogurt, the portable, snackable yogurt tubes ideal for cool teens on the go and kids who hate spoons? Because there’s pretty much no way to prove when or how a ubiquitous menu item was created. (Also I crave attention, as you probably know if you’ve read this column before.)

Which is why it remains unclear if Vancouver chef Hidekazu Tojo—of the acclaimed and enduring Tojo’s— actually did create the California roll in 1974. Not that I’m calling Chef Tojo a liar at all, no no no, I would never disrespect the honour of a man with such a distinguished reputation and the city’s sharpest knife collection! Nothing of the sort! There are just a lot of other people out there who also think they invented the California roll. But as we know from all the times I’ve booked a karaoke room and thought, “I’ll just sit back and let other people sing tonight,” what we believe and what is true are two different things.

Chalk it up to parallel reasoning: great minds think alike. Did you know that another guy invented the steam engine, too, but he was up in the mountains and by the time he came down to the Big City to tell people, everyone was like, “Sorry dude, Greg has been steaming engines for, like, months now; where have you been, it’s actually kind of overdone and I’m more into collecting vintage covered wagons now?!” (I am not paraphrasing.)

Tojo shares the title of California (Roll) King with two duelling L.A. sushi chefs who both claim that the idea was theirs. On the one hand, Ichiro Mashita has Encyclopedia Britannica in his corner, but on the other hand, there’s Noritoshi Kanai, whose name indicates that he

Tojo has gone so far as to try to copyright the roll. If that tenacity isn’t cold hard proof, I don’t know what is.