Chefs Are Putting New Accents on Sushi

At Sushi-Ko, Aki Nakamura, 37, the Japanese-born assistant to the head chef, said he has learned to adapt his speaking style when training Central Americans.

"We Japanese are very indirect," he said. "In Japan, you would never say, 'You must do this.' You would say, 'It will be better if you could do this.' "

But with the cultural disconnect and the broken English that is the restaurant's lingua franca, he said, "when I put it indirectly, there are lots of misunderstandings."

Among Nakamura's most avid students is Napoleon Mejia, 35, a farmer's son who came to Washington from his native Honduras when he was 16. A few years later, Mejia got his first taste of sushi when he took a job in the kitchen of Perrys restaurant in Adams Morgan.

"I had never tried anything like it -- never even imagined anything like it," Mejia said in Spanish. "But I loved it right away. The flavors are so fresh. And it's like an art form."

Intrigued, he persuaded the sushi chefs there to begin teaching him on the side. Within a year and a half, he had picked up enough skills to land a job behind the counter, then a gig making sushi for Whole Foods and, ultimately, the job at Sushi-Ko.

For Jose Calderon, 26, a Mexican-born chef who works at Tako Grill, sushi was more of an acquired taste.

"At first, I only liked California rolls. It took me a while to get used to the raw fish," said Calderon, who got his start washing dishes in a Mongolian restaurant at age 16.

Now, Tako Grill's owner, Segawa, considers Calderon so promising that he is planning to send him to Japan for a month of advanced training.

Kunio Yasutake, owner of Matuba in Arlington County, is even more unorthodox. Two years ago, he hired the daughter of a sushi bar owner in Japan to man his counter.

Female sushi chefs remain a rarity in Japan, where popular myth holds that a woman's hands are too warm to mold rice correctly.

"She said it was so hard for her in Japan," Yasutake said of the woman, who has since returned to Japan. "But here, she was our star."

Not all restaurateurs share Yasutake's confidence in non-traditional chefs.

One D.C. sushi bar popular with visiting Japanese businessmen has a special code that waitresses can write on the order ticket to ensure that dishes for Japanese customers are prepared by a Japanese chef rather than one of the restaurant's six Central American chefs.

"Our non-Japanese chefs are okay," said the manager, who asked that his restaurant not be named for fear of offending American customers, "for the United States."