For years, Aki Watanabe enjoyed good reviews and a steady following at his popular West L.A. Japanese restaurant, Asakuma. But after a dozen years in business, Asakuma’s growth was flattening.
To build it up, Watanabe on Feb. 16 opened a satellite operation a few blocks away from Asakuma. The new location is devoted strictly to take-out and delivery orders. It features a sushi-preparation area and take-out counter, but no dining area.
Watanabe spoke to the Business Journal’s Lauren Hollingsworth about how his new sushi delivery service is going.
When people think of having food delivered, they think of pizza, number one, and Chinese, number two. Nobody delivers sushi. We think a lot of customers want delivery. So many people would come to our restaurant to place an order for take-out, so we decided to start delivering sushi to an upscale residential area near the restaurant. Pizza, Chinese and now sushi. Nobody had done it so far and we wanted to be the first.
This is a challenging business. Nicely arranged sushi, individually put in a container, is a problem. We train our drivers no sudden breaks or U-turns. From the beginning, they cared about delivering the food quickly, but by the time they got to the customer’s house, it was screwed up. It moves. It ends up with everything on one side of the container and it doesn’t look good. That happened a number of times.
We know how to keep control of the quality. We get fish from Los Angeles Fish Co., a fish dealer downtown. They have all kinds of fish from Hawaii, Boston and local seafood. Some frozen items from Japan. Every day we go there.
The same chefs prepare the food for the restaurant as for the delivery service. We have good customers and, fortunately, we have good chefs. We are not delivering pre-packaged, supermarket sushi.
We want to serve top-quality sushi, the same quality we serve in the restaurant. So we were also concerned about the heat from the delivery truck. We have a special container we put the sushi in. It is an ideal-temperature cooler. Still, we are asking the customers to eat as soon as possible, as soon as we deliver.
Most sushi restaurants are too small to make the investment. They have an owner who is also the chef. They’re not able to hire a delivery person and have a bigger refrigerator. We had to have more sushi chefs. At lunch we have three.
As soon as we have established a delivery system, we are hoping to open one in Beverly Hills. We want to be expanding with more restaurants in L.A.
We started our delivery service two weeks ago and we already have regular customers. Every time the drivers bring the food, they tell us that the people are very happy. They say, “It’s a big surprise! Oh, this is great!” They can relax, smoke a cigarette and enjoy sushi in their own dining room. The customers are very happy.
