Latino Chefs Are Breaking into the Sushi Business.

Wearing a samurai-style headband, Jose Luis Alejandre arranged pieces of pearl-colored yellow tail, cilantro, jalapenos and spicy mayonnaise sauce on a sheet of vinegary rice and dried seaweed. His wrists moved swiftly as he rolled the concoction with a square bamboo mat. The result: a Mexican maki roll.

On a recent Saturday evening, the 33-year-old native of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, worked steadily behind the sushi bar at Morida, a restaurant at 903 W. Armitage Ave. in Lincoin Park. He used both English and Spanish as he spoke with diners from different countries.

"You've got to like this job," said Alejandre, who has worked as a sushi chef in Chicago since 1986. Four of his six brothers are sushi chefs and also work in Chicago-area restaurants.

Latino sushi chefs are a quietly growing phenomenon in Chicago's restaurant industry. For Latino immigrants, the sushi market represents a windfall, offering well-paying, highly visible jobs in a business once dominated by the Japanese.

Still, the job brings both opportunities and challenges. Many Latino sushi chefs started as dishwashers and said they struggled to overcome language barriers while learning specialized skills. But once they reach the status of chef, they enjoy the role, entertaining their customers as they add Latino flair to an intricate Japanese art.

In Chicago, Hispanic chefs are playing a significant role in the Americanization of a distinctive cuisine, shows a survey of 36 sushi restaurants by The Chicago Reporter. While most chefs at those restaurants still come from Japan and other Asian countries, 30 percent are Latino.

Among the 139 sushi chefs, 41 are of Japanese descent, 31 Korean, 22 Chinese and three are of other Asian ethnicities. Among Latinos, 25 are Mexican and 17 are Ecuadorian.

In May and June, the Reporter contacted the owners or managers of Chicago restaurants with stand-alone sushi bars where chefs work in front of their customers. The restaurants were culled from lists provided by the Japanese Chamber of Commerce & Industry of Chicago, an organization of Japanese businesses, and the Japan Information Center, part of the office of Chicago's Consulate General of Japan.

Mary Tracy, media coordinator for the information center, said that, personally, she was surprised by the findings and described the phenomenon as "internationalism in the food world."

"It struck me that sushi was a quintessential Japanese food, so I find it interesting," she said. "I think it is a good thing that it is diversifying."

Hard Work

For Latino immigrants with limited formal education and few skills, the restaurant industry is one place to make a decent living, said Juan McKinney, an English professor and internship coordinator in the culinary program at St. Augustine College, 1333-45 W. Argyle St. in Uptown.

The school's intensive, nine-month culinary program is 17 years old, and most of its students have been Mexican immigrants, McKinney said. The program includes an English-as-a-second-language course, a graduate certificate and job placement assistance.

"It is not that [Latinos] want to cook," said McKinney, who is African American. "They want to do well in this country. They want to work. This is an area in which very little skills are needed at entry level."

While some Latinos with few skills "still go and start off as a dishwasher, the traditional route," more restaurants now rely on cooking schools to recruit employees, he said.

But sushi chef positions aren't always open to Latinos.

Kee Chan, a Chinese-American and the proprietor of Heat, a Japanese restaurant at 1507 N. Sedgwick St. on the Near North Side, said he cannot hire non-Asians to make sushi for his catering business. He must send his Japanese and Chinese sushi chefs to major hotels because those clients prefer an "oriental face," he said.

"It is very hard to get business if you don't have oriental chefs. When people want a big nice event, they want the real thing," Chan said.

Sushi, however, is a Japanese cuisine, not native to either Korea or China, said Theodore C. Bestor, professor of anthropology and an expert on Japan at Harvard University.

Most of the sushi restaurants the Reporter surveyed are owned by Japanese, Chinese or Korean immigrants.

Until the late 1 990s, many young Japanese chefs migrated to the United States, seeking jobs as sushi chefs, looking for higher salaries and better lives. But "those days are over. ... Life in the United States is tougher than lots of Japanese would have thought initially," Bestor said.

Chan, who employs one Japanese and four Chinese sushi chefs, said it is costly to bring chefs from Japan. They must apply for work visas, and the immigration procedures are long and often complicated. Also, Japanese restaurants typically pay for the chefs' living expenses during their stay in the United States, he added.

So as the pool of Japanese chefs shrank, restaurant owners looked for talent elsewhere. They found it in the Latino workers already in the kitchen.

In 1985, Alejandre, then 17, moved with his family to Chicago. Like many other immigrants, he discovered that life in a new country wasn't easy. He worked in a factory during the week and washed dishes on weekends at Tokyo Marina, a Japanese restaurant at 5058 N. Clark St. in Edgewater, where his older brother Roy worked as a sushi chef.

After two weeks in the kitchen, Alejandre's enthusiasm and exuberant personality won him a chance to learn sushi making, he said.

"I was a guy who always tried to do my best," he said. "I learned right away. I cooked, and when the sushi bar was busy, I helped."

When the owner of Tokyo Marina asked him to work full time, Alejandre gave up the factory job in favor of the restaurant, where he could make more money and "stay in one place."

In 1990, a Mexican friend who worked as a sushi chef at Matsuya, 3469 N. Clark St. in Lakeview, encouraged Alejandre to get a job there. He wasted no time seizing the opportunity to polish his skills at one of the city's most popular traditional Japanese restaurants.

At first, Alejandre's boss used Japanese sushi terminology that he didn't understand. He had to take notes, he recalled. To cope, he learned visually -- carefully watching his instructor's movements. "Everything was very hard," said Alejandre. "Everything was new for me."

Today, he is one of at least six Latinos In Chicago who serve as head sushi chefs, the survey found. Alejandre became an American citizen last December and lives with his wife and three children in Little Village, a predominantly Mexican community on the Southwest Side.

"I enjoy my job," said Alejandre, who replaced a Japanese chef when he moved on to the sushi bar at Morida. "I really enjoy taking care of the customers."

Sandy Yu, a Chinese immigrant whose family owns Morida, said she relies on Alejandre to handle everything in the kitchen, from inventory to food evaluation.

"I trust him," she said. "I think you should hire quality people, quality chefs. That is more important" than ethnicity, Yu said.

Still, when people from different ethnic groups work together, communication can be difficult.

And precise communication is important in sushi making because it is a specialized skill and the dangers of contamination are great, said Yoshi Katsumura, a native of Japan and the chef and proprietor of Yoshi's Cafe, 3257 N. Haisted St.

But if there are language obstacles, they do not appear to translate into problems with food preparation. In the last 18 months, the Chicago Department of Public Health has received no complaints of food-borne illnesses connected to raw fish, said Communications Director Alissa Strauss.

Taking Advantage

Alejandre said when he started at Matsuya he worked with many other aspiring Latino sushi chefs who had little or no experience in Japanese cooking. They often quit after getting their first paycheck because of the busy, long hours and difficulties in learning the cuisine, he said.

Initially, he worked 10 hours every weekday and 14 hours on weekend days, earning just over $1,000 a month. He stayed on, he said, because sushi malting fascinated him, and by the time he left Matsuya in 1996, he was earning $3,000 a month. As the head chef at Morida, Alejandre now works nine hours a day and earns about $3,500 a month, he said.

Mamoru Yokomori, the Japanese owner of Matsuya, acknowledged his Latino workers struggle with the language barrier, but added that all his employees are paid by the hour and get overtime.

"Everybody uses a punch card," he said. "We do nothing that violates the labor law."

McKlnney of St. Augustine said the long hours typical of restaurant work are not signs of exploitation, but instead "a mutual, beneficial arrangement" for restaurant owners and workers.

Others argue that many undocumented workers get lower wages because they have minimal education, English skills and experience in the U.S. labor market.

"Many of them get paid above minimum wage, but they get paid lower wages than people who are more proficient in English," said Barry R. Chiswick, research professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Some undocumented restaurant workers are harassed by restaurateurs who are "driven by the greed of the business," said Ricardo Mufioz, alderman of the 22nd Ward on Chicago's Southwest Side.

Murioz, a native of Monterrey, Mexico, is working with U.S. Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez of the 4th Congressional District to pass federal legislation that would allow illegal immigrants to apply for legal resident status.

"These people are here to he said. "They are not here causing problems. They are here to provide for the family."

In 2000, two Chicago policy research groups, the Center for Impact Research and the Center for Labor and Community Research, released the study, "Sweatshops in Chicago." Researchers selected 89 Chicago-area restaurant workers from immigrant and low-in come communities and interviewed them about their working conditions. They found that nearly half-42--were working in "sweatshop" conditions, defined as a workplace that violates at least two state or federal labor laws.

Rebekah Levin, executive director of the Center for Impact Research, said the restaurant workers were concerned about "not getting paid the hours they had worked, or working for extremely low wages, much lower than minimum wage.

"They could not refuse to work seven days a week, twelve hours a day," said Levin. "If they did, they'd lose their jobs."

Back Home

Most of the 17 Ecuadorian sushi chefs identified in the Reporter's survey are from Cuenca, a city in a mountainous region of central Ecuador.

They include Albany Park resident Patricio Cardenas.

The 27-year-old followed his older brother to Chicago at the age of 19, after he abandoned plans to study archaeology. He sought to make enough money to help support his parents, who grow bananas. "You can't find a good job there," he sald. Every month he sends money home.

A friend in Chicago helped Cardenas get a cooking job at Shilla, a Korean restaurant in Albany Park. A year later, he moved to the restaurant's sushi bar. "It was fun. It was easier to learn more English and talk to people from all over the world," he said.

Shilla closed in 1998, and Cardenas moved on to one of the city's oldest Japanese restaurants, Kamehachi of Tokyo, at 1400 N. Wells St. To see him is to see someone who loves the work and has learned it well. At the lively sushi bar, Cardenas whipped at the cutting board with a sword-like knife. He wasted no time squeezing a ball of rice and placing a slice of crimson-colored tuna on top.

At times, Cardenas said, a customer will begin speaking to him in Japanese. With a gentle smile, the goateed chef responds, "I don't know how to speak Japanese, so I am sorry."

He takes English and computer classes at Truman College, 1145 W. Wilson Ave. in Uptown, so he can earn a degree in computer science before he returns to his family in Ecuador. He has not seen his parents in seven years.

Sushi Club

At least nine new restaurants with sushi bars have opened in the city in the last two-and-a-half years, most in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods like Wicker Park and affluent areas such as Lincoln Park, the Reporter's survey shows.

Chicago's suburbs have also welcomed more than a dozen sushi restaurants in the last two years, and most are owned by Korean immigrants, according to Shigeki Takimoto, the store manager of Mitsuwa, a large Japanese grocery store and food court in northwest suburban Arlington Heights.

Evanston resident Elizabeth Flores, who co-founded the Chicago Sushi Club in 1997, said every month, six to 10 sushi lovers from diverse backgrounds get together and go out to eat.

She wasn't surprised by the Reporter's findings. When she goes to sushi bars, she usually doesn't pay attention to the nationality of the chefs.

"Partially as an American, I feel that [nationality] shouldn't matter" if the food is prepared correctly, she said. But "maybe there is some extra value to having a chef who has been trained in a traditional way."

In Japan, restaurants often require specialized training and certification, said Bestor of Harvard, who lived in Japan for eight years and has studied its food and culture. "In a very well-run traditional Japanese sushi restaurant, it could indeed take six or seven years from starting out boiling rice to being in charge of the counter and serving customers independently," he said.

Still, the ranks of sushi chefs in America will continue to diversify since more Americans are enrolling in sushi training programs, said Philip Yi, vice president of the California Sushi Academy, based in Venice, Calif. It is the nation's first Japanese culinary school to specialize in training sushi chefs, according to Yi.

Twenty-nine of its 35 students are from the United States: Ten are white, and the rest are Asian or Latino. And 12 are women, significant in a field long dominated by men, Yi said.

In the last six months, the academy has received about 200 requests from restaurants and hotels across the nation and abroad, Yi said. "They are looking for younger, more energetic people that can converse and communicate."

Ethnic cuisine has become more popular as the nation has become more diverse, said Michael Mount, public relations manager for the Washington, D.C.-based National Restaurant Association. While Americans have long considered Chinese and Mexican food mainstream, sushi is also becoming more accessible, appearing in more restaurants and grocery stores at lower prices, Mount said.

The latest census data show that Hispanics and Asians are the most rapidly growing groups in the nation. Between 1990 and 2000, the Hispanic population increased by 58 percent nationwide and 38 percent in Chicago, and Asians by 48 percent nationwide and 22 percent in Chicago.

Spicy Sweet

At Matsuya, Alejandre meticulously observed his American customers and noticed they crave sweet and spicy foods.

So he designed new maki rolls that challenge sushi tradition. Old-fashioned maki rolls tend to be simple, containing only one type of fish or vegetable. But Alejandre's Mexican maki is bursting with exotic ingredients. He recalled that a Japanese chef at Matsuya objected to his inventions so much that he declined to help make them.

But Alejandre's customers responded to his special rolls, like his Dragon maki, which he stuffed with eel and crunchy tempura and covered with avocado and a sweet sauce.

"Everybody liked it," he said. "They would come and order special maki."

SUSHI

When he isn't at work, Alejandre's life centers around home and family. "My dad told us to be responsible for the family," he said. In addition to his brothers, he has two sisters, all live in Little Village. When they gather on the holidays, their table is a celebration of ethnic cuisines.

Hector Alejandre, 28, Alejandre's younger brother, was trained in sushi making by his brothers and his Japanese co-workers, and is the head chef at Jia's, 2 E. Delaware Place on the Near North Side.

"On Thanksgiving Day, we make sushi, my mama makes tamales and my sisters cook turkey," he said, grinning.

Joyce C. Armour, Anita Bryant, Micah Holmquist, Vince Kong, Eric Luchman and Rupa Shenoy helped research this article.

Sushi Chefs: Who Are They?
Nearly one-third of the chefs who work at Chicago's sushi bars
are Lation.
Filipino     1.4%
Ecuadorlan  12.2%
Mexican     17.9%
Chinese     15.8%
Japanese    29.4%
Korean      22.3%
Note: Sushi restaurants are defined as those with stand alone
sushi bars where chefs work in front of their Customer
Source: Based on a survey of Chicago restaurants by The
Chicago Reporter.
Note: Table made from pie chart