Health

The key to making easy sushi at home? Throw a hand roll party All you need for a hand roll party at home is a big bowl of sushi rice, a tall stack of nori (dried sheets of seaweed) and any fillings and condiments you want. Fresh, crunchy vegetables are excellent with sushi rice, and … Read more

The ultimate California roll lives on at this SGV fish market. (Fights at the sushi case prove it.) Not all imitation crab is created the same. Just ask Kenzo Yamada. Also known as Yama-san to locals, he opened Yama Seafood market in San Gabriel in 1984 and started making California rolls 20 years ago. By … Read more

Nearly a decade after the opening of KazuNori, hand roll bars are embedded in the culinary fabric of L.A. (Illustration by ZUCK / For The Times)

Supermarket sushi you’ll actually want to eat I tend to grade supermarket sushi on a curve. Confined in plastic boxes under fluorescent lights in frigid deli cases, most packaged sushi takes all of the elements essential to good sushi and chucks them out the window in favor of convenience. Oftentimes it can be too cold, … Read more

Yuko Shimizu / For The Times 1 Los Angeles is a sushi city — home to countless restaurants that treat raw fish with the sort of reverence usually reserved for religious rites. But this wasn’t always the case. It took an unlikely alliance to make it happen. It started in Tokyo in 1965, with a … Read more

Dry-aged sushi? One of L.A.’s best fishmongers says ‘fresh is boring’ Liwei Liao, owner of the Joint fish market in Sherman Oaks, has a motto: “Fresh is boring.” Coral-red snappers from Japan hang upside down in the rows of refrigerators, mouths agape and eyes bright and glassy, as if they‘ve just been plucked from the … Read more

Tell your friends: ‘I know a dancer who makes the best vegan sushi in L.A.’ Growing up in Saitama, Japan, Yoko Hasebe didn’t dream of sushi. From the age of 7, she studied ballet and later jazz dance at the Nihon University College of Art in Tokyo. Fate brought her to California and a series … Read more

(Brandon Ly / Los Angeles Times) Although bluefin tuna is commonly found at sushi restaurants throughout Los Angeles, many diners might not be aware of what it means to eat a particular species or how it’s sourced. The more you know about bluefin tuna, the better equipped you are to make decisions about whether to … Read more

“Everything sort of surrounds bluefin tuna,” says sushi chef Daniel Son. 1 When a massive bluefin tuna sold in 2019 for a record-breaking $3.1 million at Tokyo’s then brand-new Toyosu fish market, it brought renewed attention to how extraordinarily valuable bluefin is. And renewed questions about the species’ survival. The prized fish, which is a … Read more

This South Bay sushi shop has been serving the same six items for decades — and wants to keep it that way I am firmly dating myself with this anecdote, but the first time I went to a rave while growing up outside of Chicago, there was a Le Carré-like air of mystery. Furtive landline … Read more