PLANT-BASED SUSHI TREND BOOMING IN CALIFORNIA
Two new restaurants dedicated to the vegan dish opened in Los Angeles this year, adding to others that are showcasing this side of Japanese cuisine
Growing up in Saitama, Japan, Yoko Hasebe did not dream of sushi. From the age of seven, she studied ballet and later jazz dance at the Nihon University College of Art in Tokyo.
Fate took her to California and a series of jobs at Japanese restaurants, where she found her way into the kitchen, making maki – rice and seaweed rolls – alongside sushi chefs like Kimiyasu Enya, of Californian sushi chain Enya, and Morihiro Onodera, of Los Angeles sushi restaurant Morihiro.
“I loved being in the kitchen. At first I didn’t think I would be able to do both – being a dancer and a chef – but I tried anyway,” Hasebe, 29, says.
Between auditions, she learned to make rolls and how to cut fish and prepare nigiri sushi – the hand-shaped style of sushi that is composed of seasoned rice topped with raw or preserved seafood – for omakase menus.
In 2018, when more customers began asking for vegetarian options, Hasebe was asked to design vegan sushi. The requests planted the seed for her future.
“People were asking for it so much,” she says. “We had a couple of vegan rolls and they were popular.” So she traded mackerel for mushrooms, tuna belly for tomatoes, octopus for okra.
Hasebe was at the forefront of a trend. Since the beginning of this year, two vegan sushi restaurants have opened in Los Angeles.
In January, Kusaki opened as Los Angeles’ first vegan omakase sushi restaurant.
Niku Nashi opened in February inside APB, a cocktail bar on Los Angeles’ exclusive Melrose Avenue, with options like spicy “no tuna” hand rolls and dragon rolls with cream cheese, asparagus, seared “no eel” and avocado.
Extensive selections of vegan sushi are also served at Ichijiku Sushi in the city’s Highland Park neighbourhood, Fiish in nearby Culver City, Vegan Castle in Long Beach and Ma-Kin in Agoura Hills.
Hasebe is the vegan sushi chef behind Plant Sushi Yoko, which she quietly launched as a delivery and pickup service in 2020 after losing her restaurant job at the start of the pandemic.
For Hasebe, it’s less about a trend and more about chisanchisho, a local-food approach that started as a grass-roots movement in Japan in the 1990s in response to agricultural globalisation.
The phrase means “produced locally, consumed locally”, but the concept also emphasises environmental stewardship and community identity.
“We have so many great vegetables. I want to use the ingredients that are from here instead of having fish shipped from Japan, which is amazing that we can do that, but I think vegetables speak of California,” Hasebe says.
Plant-based sushi in Los Angeles has its roots in the Little Tokyo neighbourhood, where restaurant Shojin has served a macrobiotic menu, including vegan sushi, since 2008.
Some accounts say the history of vegetarian maki (and all maki sushi) goes back to Buddhist monks in 13th-century Kyoto, who devised a technique for rolling their food in dried seaweed.
Hasebe is standing in her kitchen, gently shaping an ingot of sushi rice for nigiri in the palm of her right hand. On the counter is an array of ingredients and prepared neta, or toppings.
Slivers of Japanese Fuji apple flank slices of tofu that Hasebe has smoked over apple wood. Coins cut from the stems of king trumpet mushrooms are butterflied.
Corn, sheared from the sides of a cob so that the kernels remain attached to one another in fillets, are battered and fried. She bundles asparagus that are thinner than pencils on top of rice, bound by a slender belt of seaweed.
“I used to put a lot of stuff on top of sushi. Yuba – tofu skin – with cheese and avocado. Or mango with daikon and chilli, truffle oil – things like that. But it has to be more simple,” she says.
“But I wanted to focus on the flavour of the vegetable, appreciate the raw ingredient for what it is.”
No one would call it traditional, either. “When I started out, I asked, ‘How can I evolve sushi that’s made by a female chef?’ I wanted to make a statement.
Naoko Takei, author and owner of Japanese cookware store Toiro, has worked with Hasebe during cooking shows.
“She understands the sensitivity of each ingredient and how to pull out the flavours instead of adding the flavours,” Takei says. “She doesn’t try to mimic anything, she presents them as original. Now I tell my friends, ‘I know a dancer who makes the best vegan sushi in LA.’”
For Hasebe, it’s also deeply personal, as she “became obsessed with eating and cooking because of body image issues”. But sushi became a passion the moment she handed her first nigiri to a customer.
“To make something in your hands, give it to someone and see them eat it right in front of you, that’s a connection,” she says.
Now it’s spring, she’s looking forward to using takenoko, the young sprout that grows from bamboo’s underground stem. “And okra, it’s the perfect texture right now for sushi,” she says, “It’s not too crunchy and stiff, perfect with the rice when you chew it.”
Vegetables have more variety and more texture than seafood, Hasebe says, and most vegetables go well with sushi rice.
“I don’t think I’ve come across a vegetable that I don’t like with sushi rice,” she says. “That’s what I love about it, and I think that’s what people love about it too.”
I don’t think I’ve come across a vegetable that I don’t like with sushi rice
YOKO HASEBE, VEGAN SUSHI CHEF