Kaz Okoshi - Owner-chef of Kaz Sushi Bistro

East meets West with a dash of wasabi

Kazuhiro (Kaz) Okochi, owner/chef of Kaz Sushi Bistro, remembers first trying to cook back in fifth or sixth grade, when he was living in Nagoya, Japan. His parents worked together in their small air-conditioning business. “When I got home from school, I was alone. I had to do something to fill up the hungry stomach.” His mother had a  cookbook, and he tried his hand at pastries. He also watched a half-hour cooking show on television.

Although his mother had little time for cooking for the family of four, his father was always interested in food. He would tell his son stories of how his own father, who had died before Okochi was born, would travel far during the terrible days of World War II to find good ingredients.

After high school, Okochi was expected to go to university but didn’t pass the exam. “It was fine by me,” he said. He only wanted to come to the United States. “As a teenager I was very much influenced by U.S. culture, just like a lot of teenage kids watching Hollywood movies and TV.” So he arrived in 1980, at age 19, and enrolled in a fine arts course in Oklahoma.

When he completed the course, he could have gone on to higher education. “But fine arts was not my goal.” He had decided by then that he wanted to make his living in food, and he headed home to Japan, to the Tsuji Culinary Institute in Osaka. It was the same school that had produced the cooking shows he had watched on television as a child.

“At that time, in my head, culinary schools in the states had not much reputation,” Okochi said. “I had set up in my mind a certain sort of culinary school.” The Tsuji Culinary Institute is one of Japan’s most respected. It taught him Japanese and Chinese cooking, pastry work and ice carving. But key for Okochi was the focus on French cuisine.

Toward the end of the course, the career counselor asked him where he would like to go to cook. Okochi told him it didn’t much matter since at some point he would like to go back to America. So the counselor suggested he focus on becoming a sushi chef, given that sushi was beginning to become popular in the States. Okochi landed a highly sought-after apprenticeship, at Sushi-Gen, one of Osaka’s top sushi restaurants. He spent five years there developing his sushi skills, including life-or-death proficiency in cleaning the poisonous blowfish fugu for which he is now one of 17 chefs officially licensed in the United States.

Eventually he contacted the original owner of Washington’s Sushi-Ko, who had graduated from the same culinary school and who interviewed him from Osaka for the job of executive chef. “I didn’t choose Washington — I chose the job, which happened to be in Washington.”

When he arrived in 1988, he tried out Japanese food around the city. He was horrified by the quality of the fish used for sashimi. “My first memory was, Wow! Most bad! I don’t want to deal with it! All of the yellowtail came from Japan frozen. I never deal with frozen fish when in Japan!” As to the sushi, he remembers that reaction, too: “What is this? Everyone is serving the same thing! There is nothing good. It’s a totally different standard from Japan.”

So for the first two years he focused on “getting used to buying things. But after that, there were new spots, new presentations,” and over time, Japanese food improved. “Around 1990 was the time I started trying to do adventurous things,” he said. “Chefs were putting towers, powders, oils on their plates. So I kind of got influenced by these people young enough to experiment with these things.”

Then the fusion fashion and culinary dramatics faded. “Chefs started looking more serious, more straight, looking for good flavor rather than funky presentation.” In 1999, after 10 years at Sushi-Ko and a brief stint developing the sushi for Whole Foods, he decided to open his own restaurant, which he named Kaz Sushi Bistro. He took traditional Japanese recipes and updated them with new ingredients and contemporary techniques, an approach he calls “freestyle Japanese cuisine.”

Chef Kaz, as he’s known around town, gets his flavor from highquality fish. “Most Japanese restaurants get products from one or two sources. But I am trying to do more specialized,” he said. His salmon comes from Norway. “It’s far better than domestic or Canadian salmon,” he said. Other fish comes from suppliers based as far as Alaska and Hawaii.

With sushi’s soaring popularity, so much has changed, Okochi said. The best Japanese sushi restaurants know the people in the fishing businesses they deal with. From fishermen to purveyors, standards have improved. “They notice how important it is to keep good-quality packaging. Handling is much better.Also, customers get educated. Chefs demand more quality,” causing the whole industry to improve.

Okochi, who has a 17-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son, finds his own tastes are becoming simpler. “At a younger age you’re willing to try new things. Being a chef, I want to serve what I like to eat. I can’t eat spicy food, so I don’t want to serve spicy food.”

“Getting older, tastes change little by little,” he continued. “I am going back to the food I had growing up, simple food — a piece of tofu with soy sauce poured over it. It probably sounds boring. But I feel so much pleasure. I enjoy such pure flavor. Ten, 15 years ago, I liked to try new things every day. Now, it doesn’t have to be new.”

Kaz Sushi Bistro (202-530-5500; http://www.kazsushi.com) is located at 1915 I St.Sushi costs $4 to $9.

This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the Northwest, Dupont, Foggy Bottom and Georgetown Current Newspapers. Photo Bill Petros/The Current.