Sushi Rolls Served With Raw Speed

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Brentwood restaurateur Jeremy Umland can make a sushi roll in less than a minute – thanks to a machine.

And he’s making sushi quickly at his new fast-casual restaurant U-sushi, which opened in Beverly Hills on Dec. 28. Umland opened a second in San Francisco last week.

“Automation is crucial for this model to work, where speed is a big element,” Umland said. “Freshness is the paramount ingredient to a good sushi roll.”

U-sushi’s model is comparable to Chipotle, a chain of Mexican food eateries where customers are ushered down an assembly line of sorts in which different employees build the meal to a customer’s specifications.

At U-sushi, the rice is washed, cooked and mixed by machines behind the scenes. Then comes the machine that’s key to the whole operation: a rice sheeter. An employee pushes a button on the machine and out drops a sculpted square of rice. This step is completed in only a few seconds – much less than a sushi chef would take. But human hands take over from there as fish, vegetables, sauces and seeds are added according to a customer’s preference. The final machine in the process cuts each roll in two or eight pieces.

All the machines Umland uses at U-sushi were made by Tokyo-based Suzumo Machinery Co. But while these machines have been in Japan and the United States for years, they have been used mostly behind the scenes and for large catering orders.

Umland went to Japan in 1979 to play college baseball and stayed for 14 years, learning the sushi business. After his return to the states, he started San Francisco-based Ozumo Concepts International LLC, which has operated upscale sushi restaurants up and down the California coast for more than a decade.

If the U-sushi stores succeed, Umland said he hopes to expand nationally in a combination of company-owned and franchised stores.

“We’re one of the very first sushi roll concepts to rely heavily on the sheeter in order to be able to create the speed we need to serve our customers’ needs,” Umland said.

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