TOKYO – Tomokazu Suzuki wants to open a sushi restaurant in Hawaii with his father, a sushi chef. “That has always been my father’s dream,” Suzuki said. “It’s mine now, too.”
This wasn’t his initial plan. After graduating from a vocational college, he started cooking for a Chinese restaurant chain. Suzuki had been put off a career in sushi early in life, when his father was running his own restaurant. Things did not always go well, and Suzuki’s father could take his frustrations home with him.
“But working in the same restaurant industry has made me realise why my father was acting like that,” Suzuki said. “And I realised I had always felt somewhere in my heart an admiration for my father’s work. That’s why I decided to jump ship.”
Suzuki, now 23, hopes to open a restaurant in Hawaii when he’s in his 30s. In the world of sushi, this can be considered a moonshot. Like so much of Japanese society, the sushi industry still sticks to a seniority system, one that is especially strict.
It is said that a new chef at a high-end sushi restaurant spends his or her first year only cleaning up and doing other odd jobs. The second year is spent chopping vegetables, the third year is devoted to prepping fish. The sixth year is for cooking rice. Not until the eighth year is the chef allowed to do nigiri, make sushi. Finally, in the 10th year, he or she is allowed to serve customers.
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