Clearly Cut Out for This Work

Like many another young Mexican, Jose Renteria journeyed to California to be a dishwasher. What the great culture-mixing machine Los Angeles made of him, however, is anything but typical.

He was 15 when his father died, leaving his small auto body shop in Mexico to Jose and his brother Jesus, a year older. They couldn’t keep the business going, so they left the country to support their mother and three younger sisters.

Jesus found a job washing dishes at a Los Angeles restaurant. Later, he found a dishwashing job for Jose in Hollywood, warning his little brother that the food served there was a little strange.

As he made his way north to the United States in 1991 to begin work at Sushi on Sunset, Jose thought: “This must be a crazy country, where people eat raw fish. What else am I going to see in this country?”

What he was destined to see a decade later was an unimaginable version of himself: Jose Renteria of Jerez, Zacatecas, Mexico -- sushi man, and featured attraction at a thriving L.A. restaurant.

At Iroha Sushi of Tokyo in Studio City, the 30-year-old Renteria, a small, energetic man, can be found at the front of the bar. He is the only non-Japanese among the three or four sushi chefs typically on duty at the popular restaurant.

Chatting up customers while keeping in his head orders from the eight to 10 bar seats he serves, he works smoothly and nonstop. A menu board above him includes the “Renteria Roll,” and the “J.R. [for Jose Renteria] Roll,” two of the four dishes he has created for the restaurant.

Renteria is far from the only non-Japanese sushi chef in Southern California. Demand for sushi long since outstripped the supply of Japanese chefs. No one keeps count of them, but Mexicans, Thais, Koreans, Chinese and even a few whites are known to be preparing toro and Spanish mackerel sashimi and spicy tuna cut rolls here.

David Kudo, secretary of the Japanese Restaurant Assn. of Southern California, speculates that as many as half of all local sushi chefs are non-Japanese who learned from Japanese chefs.

Kudo estimates that of 1,500 Japanese restaurants in this region, only about 600 are Japanese-owned. Most of the latter restaurants still have Japanese sushi chefs, he said, “but their numbers are decreasing, because many Asians, Latinos and others have learned to make sushi.”

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Jose Renteria’s climb to sushi man was hard earned.

For a year and a half at Sushi on Sunset, he washed plates and learned the hierarchy there: dishwashers at the bottom; then busboys; then kitchen cooks, who prepared such hot fare as tempura and teriyaki. And at the top, Japanese sushi men.

Renteria earned a reputation as a hard worker and eager learner, and when two kitchen cooks got fired, one of their jobs was given to him. For a time, he pulled five day shifts a week as a cook, and three night shifts a week as a busboy. During breaks, he helped scale fish.

The restaurant’s head chef, a Japanese named Sam Tomy, took a liking to him. “You’re like my little brother,” Tomy would say. Gradually he taught Renteria the secrets of making the vinegary rice from which sushi gets it name, and of selecting, carving and slicing raw fish to maximize its tenderness and taste.

Along with Renteria’s acquisition of those skills came the slow accumulation of an equally valuable asset, language. He picked up English quickly, and, from the sushi men, enough Japanese to participate in the ordinary affairs of the restaurant and banter with the occasional Japanese customer. Sometimes when he was talking on the telephone to his mother in Jerez, she’d tell him, “Say something to me in Japanese.”

Working the bar in the same kind of hat and tunic as his Japanese colleagues, but often more amiable and a better speaker of English than they, he soon became a favorite of customers.

A few years later, one of the owners of the restaurant opened Iroha Sushi on Ventura Boulevard and installed Renteria at the front of the bar.

Iroha master chef Tsutomu Kanome, who was classically trained in Kyoto, the capital of traditional Japanese cuisine, praised Renteria’s bar-side personality.

“Ultimately, customers are going to say his sushi is better because he communicates so well with them,” Kanome said through an interpreter. “A lot of the Japanese sushi men don’t say much. Some can’t say much. But since we’re doing business in America, we have to do things a different way, and Jose’s way attracts more customers. I need to learn some of that customer service from Jose.”

But, Kanome says, Renteria suffers from not having been trained in the basics of Japanese cuisine -- raw fish, after all, is only one of the 10 courses in the traditional Japanese restaurant meal. “He doesn’t understand why this becomes that, why A becomes B, “ Kanome said.

Renteria’s preparation of the slabs of fish from which sushi is sliced, for example, would improve, Kanome said, if he paid closer attention to how his Japanese colleagues do it.

It is difficult to know if the non-Japanese are as good at the work as the Japanese, said Kudo of the Japanese Restaurant Assn.

“We’re curious about that too, because many want to start in the business immediately,” he said. “In Japan they spend three to five years to become a professional chef, and they can’t even touch the sushi rice until they’ve been in the restaurant for two years.

“But here, of course, they don’t spend so much time and it looks easy, but it is not, because you have to have only fresh fish and it’s very delicate,” Kudo said. “If you cannot handle it correctly, it falls apart.”

Any attempt to blend cultures inevitably produces some lumps, and some Japanese chefs doubt that non-Japanese can ever prepare sushi quite as well those born to the tradition.

Toshiaki Toyoshima, owner of Sushi Gen in Little Tokyo, for example, said he had never tasted sushi prepared by non-Japanese, “and I don’t want to.”

He employs six Japanese and three Latino chefs, but the latter are permitted to make nigiri sushi -- slices of fish atop oblongs of vinegary rice -- only for staff, not for customers.

If there is Japanese pride, however, there is also Mexican pride, and Renteria bristles at any suggestion that his work is inferior to that of his Japanese colleagues.

“I’ve seen very many Japanese sushi men, and I’ve seen that they make many mistakes,” he said. “I think I’m not only as good, but maybe sometimes a little better.”

Renteria’s goal is to one day open a sushi place of his own, and his dedication appears beyond question. He commutes more than two hours from and to the one-bedroom house he rents in South L.A., and often works from 10 a.m. to 1 a.m., five days a week, pulling in on a good day $150 in wages and tips.

Sushi has long since become his favorite food, he said, “and I think every day I love it more.”

At least once a week, he and his wife, Norma, take their 7-year-old daughter, Jairy, out for sushi, “and she eats everything, even salmon eggs and sea urchin, which are exotic things for most people. Now she’s a very expensive girl.”

Not long ago, Norma awoke in the middle of the night to find her husband asleep with his arm raised, his wrist cocked and his fingertips bunched together, just as when he’s about to dab a blot of wasabi paste onto a customer’s plate.

“You see?” she told him. “You even make sushi in your dreams.”

How, he wondered, could anyone be more of a sushi man than that?