Learning how to be a sushi chef sounds like an intimidating process. Sushi used to be a treat that you could only find in high-end Japanese neighborhoods in big American cities, if you could even find it outside of Japan.
These days, you can get it at any convenience store. Like Chinese food, people just say, “I could go for sushi right now,” when they’re thinking of a restaurant. ”.
Despite its ubiquity, sushi still isn’t something most people would list as among their go-to home-cooked meals. The skills you need to become a sushi chef look easy (like cutting the fish perfectly), but they are almost impossible to get right. Chef Kaz and Chef Edison, two well-known sushi chefs, were asked by Cozymeal what everyone should know about how to make sushi, what inspires them, and how many times they almost got fired.
To make sushi perfectly for restaurants, caterers, hotels, and other places, sushi chefs need to learn special techniques and skills. You will be judged on your technical skills, knowledge of food safety, work ethic, attention to detail, and ability to handle high-pressure situations if you are interviewing to be a sushi chef.
Thorough preparation is key to landing the sushi chef job of your dreams Let’s explore some of the most common sushi chef interview questions along with examples of strong responses
What Do You Look for When Assessing the Quality of Fish for Sushi?
Sushi chefs must have deep knowledge of fish and ability to identify fresh, high-quality seafood Discuss checking for indicators like
- Clear, bright eyes
- Moist, shiny flesh
- Little to no fishy odor
- Firm, elastic texture when touched
- Bright red gills
Also highlight asking trusted suppliers about catch dates, storage practices and sourcing standards. Knowing how to scrutinize fish quality and source responsibly ensures you consistently deliver fresh, delicious sushi.
What Knives and Tools Do You Find Most Essential for Sushi Preparation?
Share must-have sushi knives like
- Yanagiba – long, thin blade ideal for slicing fish fillets
- Deba – thicker, heavier blade for cutting through bones
- Makiri – all-purpose knife for slicing vegetables, rolling maki, etc.
Also discuss useful tools like a bamboo rolling mat, grater for fresh wasabi, and specialized molds for nigiri and sashimi. Emphasize keeping knives razor sharp with frequent sharpening and honing. Your knowledge of the best sushi-making tools conveys your experience and commitment to excellence.
How Do You Handle a Situation Where a Customer is Unhappy With a Sushi Dish You Prepared?
Customer satisfaction is paramount. Share you would:
- Apologize sincerely and listen to understand their concerns
- Offer to remake the dish to their preferences
- Thank them for the feedback and use it to improve
- Notify the manager if a major issue like illness from spoiled fish
Interviewers will be impressed if you show that you take feedback seriously and try to make every guest happy.
How Do You Stay Organized and Cope With Large, Complex Orders on Busy Days?
Highlight tactics like:
- Carefully review orders and prep needed ingredients/tools in advance
- Create a timeline and checklist to stay on track
- Label sushi rolls clearly for easy distribution
- Ask coworkers for help restocking ingredients if needed
- Communicate with servers to stagger food delivery
Stress the importance of staying calm under pressure, being able to do more than one thing at once, and taking care of any problems before they happen. Advanced skills in organizing and managing your time will show interviewers that you can handle busy shifts with ease.
What Food Safety Practices Do You Implement When Preparing Sushi?
Foodborne illnesses can severely harm a restaurant’s reputation, so sushi chefs must demonstrate diligent safety practices including:
- Carefully cleaning/sanitizing station, tools, hands
- Following time/temperature controls for fish
- Avoiding cross-contamination
- Safely preparing items with raw fish like sashimi
- Monitoring fish quality for freshness
- Labeling prepared dishes with expiration dates
Highlight any food safety training and your vigilance in upholding health standards at all times. This will provide key assurance to interviewers.
How Do You Ensure Consistency in the Taste and Presentation of Your Sushi Dishes?
Discuss tactics like:
- Standardize recipes so rolls/dishes have consistent flavors
- Take photos of beautifully plated dishes as presentation examples
- Monitor product quality – taste fish before use
- Sharpen knives frequently for clean, thin slices
- Check seasoning, rice vinegar, etc. for correct balances
- Refresh garnishes/condiments regularly for freshness
Your commitment to consistency conveys respect for the cuisine and will make you a valued sushi chef.
What Steps Do You Take if You Run Out of a Key Ingredient When Preparing Sushi?
Highlight proactive practices like:
- Review projected orders and prep enough key ingredients in advance
- Promptly inform manager of shortage so they can restock
- Suggest substitute ingredients and modify specials if needed
- Apologize to customers and explain if a dish is unavailable
- Offer suitable alternatives based on their preferences
Conveying you handle shortages professionally rather than panicking reassures interviewers.
How Do You Mentor or Train Less Experienced Sushi Chefs?
Discuss tactics like:
- Sharing techniques/advice as they work beside you
- Explaining why certain skills like knife sharpening matter
- Guiding them through preparing basic rolls first
- Providing feedback on their technique and areas to improve
- Encouraging questions and being patient
- Leading by example through your diligence and mastery
Proving you positively influence new team members will impress interviewers.
Tell Me About a Time You Dealt Calmly and Effectively With a High-Stress Situation as a Sushi Chef.
Share a story demonstrating grace under pressure – perhaps a peak hour rush or multiple complicated orders at once. Discuss how you:
- Prioritized urgently needed sushi
- Multitasked efficiently without panicking
- Communicated clearly with servers on timing
- Asked a coworker for help restocking
- Caught errors quickly and redid any flawed dishes
- Remained focused and positive until the rush was handled
Portraying your poise under fire will underscore you have the stress management abilities needed to thrive as a sushi chef.
What Interests You in Becoming a Sushi Chef Specifically?
Convey your passion for Japanese cuisine, explaining what attracts you to the art and tradition of sushi. Share any related hobbies, travels or exposure to Japanese culture that sparked your interest. Discuss previous mentors who fueled your passion for the craft. Your genuine enthusiasm will help you stand out.
How Do You Stay Up-To-Date on New Trends and Innovations in Sushi?
Highlight proactive learning practices like:
- Reading sushi chef blogs, magazines and books
- Following acclaimed sushi chefs on social media
- Visiting acclaimed Japanese and sushi restaurants when traveling
- Taking classes on advanced techniques like sushi sculpting
- Experimenting with new ingredients and presentation ideas
Discussing your dedication to continuous learning makes you an attractive hire for any sushi establishment.
Do You Have Any Questions for Me?
Close your interview strong by asking smart questions like:
- How will I be trained and mentored here as a new sushi chef?
- What qualities do your most successful sushi chefs possess?
- How does the team collaborate on designing seasonal special rolls?
Thoughtful questions reiterate your interest and leave the interviewer with a positive final impression.
With preparation using these sample questions, you will be ready to put your sushi mastery on display and land the perfect sushi chef job for you!
More About Chef Kaz
You can read about Chef Kaz’s experiences on Cozymeal to get more tips on how to become a sushi chef.
An Interview With Chef Kaz
What inspires your cooking?
I get most of my ideas for cooking from two things: the people who will eat it and the ingredients I use.
Unless someone wants to eat my food, even if that someone is me, I have no reason to cook. So, it’s very important what that person wants and most importantly, why that person wants what he/she wants. As simple as it may seem, I’m cooking for someone else’s pleasure, which comes first. Then it’s my pleasure to cook and see their happy face.
The occasion of the meal is important, and the guests will have some influence on my dishes. Like, I’ll make a different kind of sushi for a birthday dinner than I will for an anniversary dinner. To celebrate a birthday or an anniversary, I might make temari sushi (sushi in the shape of balls) and nigiri. In Japan, these two types of sushi are served at different times.
Because I am the type of chef who gets inspiration from looking at ingredients. Coming up with a menu without seeing the actual ingredients is hard for me, but I do it all the time.
I feel like the ingredients are talking to me when I look at them. They tell me how to cut, prepare, cook, season, and mix them with other ingredients in the best way. This is how I get ideas for dishes. I might cook an ingredient in a different way even if I’ve used it before because my ideas are different.
Every morning, my fish supplier sends me an email with a list of prices for fish. That’s how I start my day. List of available fish changes every day, so its a good way for me to get some inspiration. The list also shows how and where the fish was caught, which is very important for me to know since I only use fish that is caught in a sustainable way.
Do you have a favorite ingredient, recipe or dish?
My favorite dish to make is tom ka taley. (I know its Thai Food, not sushi. ) Its Thai seafood coconut soup. I learned to cook it at my first sushi restaurant as an employee meal. The owner told me I could make an employee meal with anything in the restaurant except sushi fish. I picked up a Thai cookbook at the library because I’ve always wanted to learn how to cook Thai food.
There is a Thai supermarket where I bought fish sauce, lime leaves, and galanga (Thai ginger). The restaurant ordered a whole chicken, which they cut up and served as teriyaki chicken. They threw away the bones, so I used them to make chicken broth and mixed them with other things to make tom ka taley. Some of my friends and coworkers told me it was one of the best soups I’ve ever made.
As for sushi/fish related recipe, it’s seafood ceviche.
And people say my sake mojito is fantastic!
My recent favorite ingredient is local/San Francisco swordfish sashimi and nigiri. I had swordfish “raw” for the first time recently, and it was amazing. It tastes like toro or tuna belly but isn’t too fatty, and it has a fresh ocean flavor.
What’s one trick that cooks at home should know that’s made your culinary life easier?
Have a clipboard, paper and a pen before you start cooking.
That is, write down everything you need, including the amount and types of food you need, the tools you will need (like plates and forks), and the steps you will take to cook the food. Planning is everything.
I’ve seen a lot of people forget an ingredient and have to stop cooking to go to the store. (This happened a lot during dinner parties and Thanksgiving dinners. ).
The only thing they had to do was make a list of the things they needed to buy and make sure they bought everything on the list. The brain is made to remember everything, but different parts of the brain store different kinds of information. So if we’re focused on one thing, we might forget to look at other things, which could make us forget important things like “buy soy sauce.” “.
We don’t have to “remember” what we need to get because we wrote it down. Instead, we can focus on cooking.
When did you start partnering with Cozymeal and why?
I wanted to get in touch with more people who want my service, which is sushi classes and private sushi dinners. A lot of people I talked to were shocked to learn that there was a private sushi chef offering private sushi classes and dinners. I guess it’s new to have a sushi chef come to your house.
There are many people who love sushi and want me to come to their homes to teach them. I’d love to meet them, show them how to make sushi, and then serve it to them and watch their happy faces. I thought Cozymeal would help me to do that. (I am terrible at marketing myself, so I decided to rely on Cozymeal to do that part!).
If you could open a restaurant, what would it be like?
I’ve decided I’ll never open my own restaurant, so it will never exist. However, I would be happy to work as a consultant or give people ideas and advice on how to open a restaurant.
What did you do before you were a chef?
I was an art director in Los Angeles, designing Hollywood movie posters such as True Lies and Frankenstein. As a Zen priest, I led workshops and taught Zen cooking. I also worked as a producer for a Japanese international film festival.
Have you experienced any spectacular successes as a chef? Failures?
Since my business opened in 2012, I’ve gotten 16 five-star reviews on Yelp, which makes me pretty happy. We’ve worked with many well-known big companies, like Google, Oracle, CitiBank, Prudential, and VISA, and I’m grateful for that. I also have many private clients who are CEOs of well-known companies. I get to work at beautifully designed kitchens in beautiful homes, some of which have spectacular views.
My monthly sushi classes in San Francisco and San Mateo have already been filled for a month, so things are going well for me.
But the best part of my job, which I consider a huge success, is seeing people make their first California roll and get so excited about it, or when they taste fresh wasabi from the grater and are blown away by the smell and sweetness of real wasabi instead of the powdered horseradish they tend to eat and think is wasabi.
What went wrong? I was late for a load-in time at a dinner event, which made the client unhappy. Since then, I promised myself always to arrive at least half an hour early to any event.
Tell me a story (good or bad) of something that happened while you were cooking. It can be at any time, in any place, about a success or failure.
Since the first sushi restaurant I worked in was on Sunset Strip in Hollywood, I had the chance to meet and serve a lot of famous people. As a huge Rolling Stones fan, I was blown away when Mick Jagger walked into the restaurant. I called all my friends to tell them the news. He said it was fine to take a picture with him and put his hand on my shoulder, which was very nice.
Bobby Brown, the singer, came into the restaurant one time and saw me eating Thai noodles I made as an employee meal. He told me it wasn’t on the menu when he asked what it was and said, “I want that!” I thought that was funny.
When I met and talked to a lot of famous people, I realized that they are just like you and me, and they like it when we treat them the same way we treat everyone else.
Sushi Chef Answers Sushi Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED
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