An Evening with Author Gary Rose In conversation with Alexa Rose Bookstar Barnes & Noble, Studio City

BOOKSTORE HOST

Hi, everyone, welcome to Bookstar. Thank you so much for joining us tonight for this chat with Gary

Rose, author of Sushi Row. We're very happy to have you all here.

In case you don't already have a book, that's totally fine. We have plenty behind the counter at

the front of the store. So at the end of the event, if you'd like to have yours signed, please head

to the back and we'll help you out.

Let me give you a quick introduction to Gary Rose. He is, of course, the author and photographer

behind Sushi Row. He has spent decades in film and commercial production, and his photography has

taken him everywhere from Papua New Guinea to the Galápagos. But this book brought him right back

home, to the sushi restaurants of Ventura Boulevard.

Tonight, his daughter, Alexa, will interview him. Thank you so much for joining us.

ALEXA

All right, you want me to take it away, Dad?

GARY

Sure.

THE BOOK, AND THE ACCIDENT OF IT

ALEXA

Okay, let's start off. Do you want to tell us a little bit about why you wanted to make this book?

And do you love sushi?

GARY

like the crab that's still looking at you. But I made this book by accident. I started out wanting

to do a photographic journey into sushi, photographing it in a way it hadn't been done before. It

was called Eating Art. As I went along, I started meeting the chefs and the owners, and before I

knew it, the stories behind the restaurants and the history behind Sushi Row were far more

interesting than the photography I was doing. The photography was good. But the stories are

amazing, and the book turned out to be full of American dreamers. That's what it became about.

ALEXA

Love it, Gary. I think I got ahead of myself. What is Sushi Row?

GARY

I do. I like sushi. I'm not one of those adventurous sushi eaters who'll eat the stuff on Asanebo's

plates,

Sushi Row doesn't officially exist. I've been trying for the last three years to get the city to

actually put up signs. It's this historic stretch, three miles of Ventura Boulevard, that started

with Nozawa, Asanebo, Taro, and Katsuya. They were really the first sushi chefs introducing America

to sushi, mainly to film industry people and musicians who were willing to take a chance and eat

raw fish, even though their parents were sure they'd end up in the hospital. But the sushi thing

caught on. It's an area that's been written about a ton. People talk about Sushi Row, but there are

still no signs.

Taro opened in 1979. Downtown Los Angeles, in Little Tokyo, was really the first introduction to

sushi, not in bars, but in restaurants. And when Taro opened, it was like the Academy Awards,

filled with every actor you could imagine, people who wanted to learn how to use chopsticks and

roll the dice on eating raw fish.

PATIENCE, AND A FAVORITE CHAPTER

ALEXA

Love it, Gary. All right, can I just call you Dad? What's one thing you learned while working on

the book that surprised you the most?

GARY

Good question. I mean, patience was a big one. It took a long time to get these restaurants to

understand that I was actually making a book, and that I wasn't trying to finagle them into

spending money somehow. They were all incredibly suspicious. In a lot of the restaurants the owners

aren't around, so you're very reliant on managers. I never thought some of them would take a year

before I got permission. I filmed in each restaurant using one specific set, to keep the playing

field level so everybody's photography would be the same. They were responsible for plating the

food and choosing what it was.

ALEXA

What's your favorite chapter, or the most rewarding one to write?

GARY

I had a great time at Asanebo. Anybody who knows Chef Tetsuya knows he's a character. I think he

actually speaks a lot more English than he lets on. He says he only speaks “sushi English,” and

claims he has no idea who any of the celebrities or musicians are, which is sort of funny.

His story is very unique. Not many people know he was Nobu's partner at a restaurant called Oshou.

The two of them left together and opened Matsuhisa, and Tetsuya was responsible for the menu. So

when he went off to open his own place, Asanebo, it had actually started life as a karaoke bar.

Another funny thing, I asked him what Asanebo means. We'd been talking about the karaoke bar, and

him and his brother drinking there into the early morning, and I said, “Oh my God, Asanebo means

hangover.” And he said, “No, no, no, no, no. It just means sleeping in late, in Japanese.”

REMEMBERING CHEF KATSUYA

ALEXA

Amazing. Okay, we're talking about chefs; I want to ask you about Chef Katsuya, who recently passed

away. I know he wrote the foreword to the book, so I wanted to ask how your experience was working

with him. And you should tell everyone about spicy tuna and crispy rice, because that was one of

the most interesting parts of the book.

GARY

He's credited with it, even though he'll tell you he didn't invent it, he just made it better.

Spicy tuna and crispy rice came from an idea he had: the biggest condiment in America is butter,

and the biggest condiment in Japan is soy sauce. So when he mixed the two together, and gently

pan-fried the rice instead of deep-frying it, it became something different, easier to eat, not

chewy.

The reason he came up with it was that a guy used to come into the restaurant every week with his

girlfriend, or maybe his wife, and she never ate any sushi; she'd just sit there while he ate for

an hour.

ALEXA

Like your wife.

GARY

Yeah, like my wife. Very similar. So one day Katsuya gave her this new rice concoction, and she

liked it. The next week he added the spicy tuna, and for extra measure, so she wouldn't taste

anything that resembled fish, he put jalapeño on top. And that was it. Other people in the

restaurant said, “I want that too.” That's how it came about. A version of the dish apparently

existed before, but he made it something special. We honor him tonight.

ALEXA

Yeah, it's really sad that he passed away. He was such an interesting guy; not only did he come to

this country with nothing and work his way up, but he…

GARY

He was a complete and total perfectionist. When we were doing the photo session, we went into the

restaurant between lunch and dinner, and the first thing he did was reach into the rice, and this

expression came over his face. He said, “Who made this rice?” and started in on the staff. They had

to take the whole batch away and make new rice because it was too moist; there was too much water

in it.

Some of that perfectionism was part of why his partnership with Sam Nazarian eventually fell apart.

They'd put restaurants in Dubai, Las Vegas, and elsewhere. Chef Katsuya got upset that they were

cutting corners and doing things cheaper, and that wasn't what he wanted his name on. So they

parted ways.

ALEXA

Amazing. Okay, I think we should take a break and get a question from the audience.

QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE

AUDIENCE MEMBER (STEVE)

What was Gary's first piece of sushi?

GARY

I think, like a lot of people, it was a California roll. And that's another funny thing about

Asanebo. When it was still the karaoke restaurant, the landlord wouldn't let them serve sushi, so

Tetsuya and his brother decided they'd just do sashimi. I asked him how that went, and he said,

“Horrible.” Everybody wanted California rolls. So yeah, the first thing I ever ate was a California

roll, well before I put a real piece of sushi in my mouth.

ALEXA

What was different? I mean, you go into a sushi restaurant for the first time, you don't even know

how to use chopsticks.

GARY

Right, so you're fumbling with those, and you start with something simple because you want to be

adventurous, but not too adventurous. One of the things I wrote in the book is that the people who

really enjoy sushi tend to be artistic, worldly people, people who read and want to try new things.

It's a bit of a raw fish cult, in the best sense, and you find that in sushi restaurants. So yeah,

you start slow, and over the years you get more and more adventurous.

ALEXA

I still don't like the orange stuff.

GARY

The sea urchin? People either love it or they don't. There's no in-between.

As for Taro, the original ownership group was around seven people from the entertainment business

and a couple of lawyers, and over the years that group narrowed down to a final three. What's

remarkable is that the restaurant is still in its original state. They've never changed or painted

over the tree murals on the walls. It's all still very original. Back then, sushi was becoming

novel in a few other pockets of the city too. The very first sushi bar had been downtown, in Little

Tokyo, before that it had just been restaurants serving Japanese food generally. Then somebody with

money and no idea what to do with it said, ·Let's open a sushi restaurant,· and it was supposed to

be crazy, cool, and hip.

Apparently the parking lot was full of Lincolns and Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces. It was quite a

scenein the seventies.

ALEXA

Getting the chefs on board for the photography was very difficult at first, wasn't it?

GARY

Very. So to sidebar a bit: I had a set built, a three-wall miniature set, and had it painted at an

auto body shop in black lacquer because I wanted the sushi to reflect. That created a lighting

nightmare, so I ended up putting a big light behind the set and lighting all the sushi with

mirrors. That let me catch things like roe or gold flake and make them pop. Everything was shot at

very high resolution, very high depth of field, a lot of light, so nothing was ever soft or out of

focus. Once the chefs saw those pictures, they came around. But the very first ones were hard. It

took some of the restaurants two years to say yes, and I was relentless. People who know me know

I'm a bit of a bulldog. I was there every two weeks. I had people throw me out, scream at me, yell

at me. I remember Charla telling me, “That's not going to happen.” I said, “Yeah, they will.

They'll come around.”

One time I had to send Charla into Sushi Dan on my behalf, because the owner hated me so much that

the second she saw my face, she started screaming. I didn't even get a word in. But eventually they

all came around. I stopped in just yesterday, and they told me he's a wonderful man now. It's like

the book has slowly saturated Studio City. I think people have gone into these restaurants and

mentioned the book to the owners. Even Chef Tetsu at Asanebo, since I didn't want to play

favorites, I organized the chapters east to west, which made him restaurant number seventeen. He

was not happy about that. He kept asking, “Why am I seventeen?” I said, “It's east to west.” He

said, “I know, but I still shouldn't be seventeen.” So the whole time, it was “seventeen,

seventeen…” But that's how I tried to keep it neutral.

One restaurant closed during the project, but it's still in the book. He's

actually on the cover. His name is Leo Akira, and his restaurant was called Akira. Someone drove a

car into it. His funding was from Japan, and rebuilding just wasn't in the cards; it was too crazy

an American thing to explain: a drunk driver with a dog and an ankle monitor plowed straight into

the restaurant and smashed it to pieces.

There was also a place called Ahi, on Coldwater and Ventura. That chef wasn't especially friendly,

and he's not in the book. He kept telling me he was going to close. One phenomenon I find genuinely

interesting is that when a sushi restaurant closes here, another sushi restaurant almost always

opens in its place. Kazu had been open thirty-five years and specialized in omakase. The chef

screamed and yelled at me the first time I walked in. He was getting ready to close and move back

to Japan to run a six-table restaurant out of his house. I walked in without a camera, and it was

the best photograph I never took, this seventy-year-old Japanese man perched on a stool in Crocs

and white tube socks, one Croc off, massaging his foot. I would have done anything for that shot,

but he wouldn't let me photograph him or his wife, and he threw me out because he was closing for

good.

So I went back on a Saturday night. The restaurant was empty. I said, “all right, I'm going to eat

something.” He said, “Get out.” I said, “I'm hungry.” He said, “omakase.” I asked how much that

was. “Two hundred fifty,” he said. I told him no, I'd just order some rolls. I sat there ordering

for two hours and heard his whole story. It was touching. Within three weeks, Sushi Bar Tetsuya was

moving into that same space; it's a phenomenal restaurant today. I actually asked him in the

interview, “Are you crazy? Opening a sushi restaurant with nineteen competitors, in a space where a

sushi restaurant just went out of business, that's not good business.” And he said, “My sushi is

better.” Now that restaurant is full of people; it's kind of crazy, but it's a real phenomenon.

There are ten restaurants on Sushi Row that have changed names over the years and simply become the

next sushi restaurant.

Sugarfish is in the book out of respect for what Nozawa did, and for how he tried to explain

omakase to Americans in the first place. For people who'd never encountered it, the whole idea was

strange: “Wait, you're going to tell me what I eat? I'm the one paying the bill.” He became known

as the “Sushi Nazi,” famous for things like throwing Gwyneth Paltrow out for ordering a California

roll. There are so many stories about him. It's really become a chain now. They own Sugarfish, HiHo

Burger, and an Italian restaurant. Every time I tried to get an interview with Tommy, his son, or

with Mrs. Nozawa or Chef Nozawa himself, their publicist said no, flatly, from day one. I said,

“I'm talking to Tetsuya at Asanebo, I'm talking to Chef Katsuya.” She said, “No, you can't talk to

them.” So I ended up writing that chapter from researched, published information. I had to include

him; he was a hugely important part of Sushi Row, especially in the early days.

Sushi Row actually predates Matsuhisa by about ten years. People don't often think about that. In

1979, the restaurants people usually picture didn't exist yet. Chef Katsuya later opened Koi, which

was very popular, and Matsuhisa is considered one of the premier Japanese restaurants in the world.

I think it all started here because of the film studios. We were kitty-corner to Disney, Universal,

and Warner Brothers, and all the agents were over in Beverly Hills. In the 1970s, New Hollywood

exploded; we had Jaws and Apocalypse Now, and so many great films; a run like that has never really

happened again. Everyone had to get back to work on soundstages or sets, so they'd meet their

agents in the middle. Every restaurant I spoke to said their crowd was full of musicians, agents,

actors; someone would rattle off ten celebrities and add, “and that was just a Tuesday afternoon.”

That's who filled these restaurants and wanted to eat sushi first. It's like advertising: why are

celebrities used in ads? Because they're aspirational. Other people see that and think, “I want to

be like that.”

ALEXA

While we're on the topic of the film industry, I want to ask you, Mr. Film Boy, you're a filmmaker

and photographer, not an author, until now. What was the hardest part of writing your first book?

GARY

Writing is difficult because you're siloed. I think everyone who's written a book knows that

feeling, especially after a while. This book took three years, and you're working on it with no one

to talk to. That changed at the end. Alexa edited the book, and that was remarkable. But that's the

hard part. As a photographer, you take a picture and get immediate feedback. You like it or you

don't. I think every photographer looks through their images and thinks, “this one's bad, this

one's bad, this one's bad… oh, that one's good.” But with writing, for me it was more like, “I hope

people don't hate this.” I tried to keep it in my own voice, casual and fun, because I didn't want

it to feel heavy or judgy.

ALEXA

It's a great read. And once we got rid of all your little dyslexic moments…

GARY

Yes, I am dyslexic, which makes writing even harder. We worked together to get through that.

ALEXA

Yes, we did. Does anyone else have a question?

FAVORITES, AND THE HARDEST QUESTION

ALEXA

So, everyone wants to know: what's your favorite restaurant on Sushi Row?

GARY

Knew that was coming. That's the ten-million-dollar question. I've been asked it a hundred and

fifty times, and I answer it the same way every time. These restaurants are all different. They

each have a different vibe, and it depends on your headspace, on what you're in the mood for. Taro

is casual, fun, and family-oriented. Asanebo is a bit more upscale. Sushi Bar Tetsuya is fantastic.

Tomoki is fantastic. It's really all about the environment. Leona's is like a nightclub; the guy

behind the bar, Jose, knows every tequila on the planet, so you can have sushi and tequila, nothing

better, right? It's all about the vibe. And I swear, I do not have a favorite restaurant. I know

that's not really an answer, but it's the best I've got.

Do you want to spend money, or not? You're sitting in the sushi capital of the world; there are

more sushi restaurants in these three miles than anywhere else outside of Japan. If you just want

some solid sushi, you could order Katsuya Delivery; it's pretty good. If you want something else,

there's Shiki, a tucked-away little place with a real family feel. There's also Sushi Stop, where

you can get a poke bowl for ten dollars. They're all different, and honestly, it's genuinely hard

to answer the question.

ALEXA

I'll say, since I can be a little biased, Katsuya was the first place Dad ever took my brother and

me. We'd never had sushi before. He was writing this book, and now we're both sushi lovers. Great

experience, ten out of ten.

I'll say, as someone who doesn't live out here, it's a classic Valley staple; Katsuya is always a

winner, always good. But there are others too. Tetsuya's is amazing if you're looking for a fancy

date-night sushi dinner; it's fantastic, and he's an incredible chef. He used to cook for the

Dodgers. He's covered in tattoos; he's the coolest-looking guy you've ever seen.

ALEXA

Do we have any other questions from the crowd?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

What was the most surprising story, either about how a restaurant came to be, or about one of the

owners, the most surprising thing you learned?

GARY

One of the most surprising, honestly kind of shocking, stories was that Taro is owned by the man

who was the parking valet on the night it opened. That's a wild story; he must have parked a lot of

cars to end up owning the place. The original owners really liked him, and for twenty years they

told him, “if you ever want to sell the restaurant, please come to us first.” By the time his

parking career was done, he had a whole parking empire; he was parking cars at nearly every

restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, and he eventually parlayed that into a security company as well.

He was an immigrant, sixteen years old, came from Iran with nothing, and today he owns one of the

most historic restaurants on the whole road.

S

GARY

I was genuinely worried about getting this into its final form. I'd never done a book before, so it

was one of those things where you're just hoping it comes out right. I made some mistakes. I'd

never done it before; I didn't have a mentor, I just went for it. That little code on the back, the

ISBN, don't buy the cheap one. There's a version for thirty-five dollars and one for a hundred and

fifty; buy the hundred-and-fifty-dollar one. It's a whole story, but I learned the hard way. If

you're a publisher, you probably already know that.

No, I self-published the book. I started a company called Sushi Row Publishing. Publishers honestly

didn't understand the book; some thought it should have recipes in it. I heard a lot of different

reactions. I talked to plenty of very well-known coffee table book editors, and the response was

usually some version of, “yeah, but every neighborhood has sushi restaurants.” I'd say, “yeah, but

nowhere else has this many.” They weren't always convinced people would go for it. But readers on

the East Coast have bought the book and enjoyed it too, because it's about a phenomenon that

happened right here, one they'd never heard about before. I'm still looking for a publisher,

because I'm only doing this once, and once these copies are gone, they're gone. They're almost sold

out, so get one while you can.

AUDIENCE MEMBER (STEVE CAPLAN)

What did all this actually cost you, in terms of the food alone?

GARY

Honestly, I don't know what it all added up to. I was fortunate enough to get to eat everything I

photographed. It's a hard job, but somebody's got to eat it. I really did eat everything. In fact,

there were things I still couldn't tell you what they were. At Asanebo, there was this one dish

with a little crab standing straight up, looking right at me. I said, “that's garnish, right? You

don't actually eat that.” He said, “yeah, you eat it.” I said, “maybe you eat it.” He said, “no,

don't be a wimp, just eat it, it's like a chip.” I said, “but it's a whole crab, looking at me.”

Now there are three chefs standing there watching, so I ate it. It did not taste like a chip. It

tasted like eating a crab shell.

It was very hard physically too. My Tesla basically became a grip truck, packed with C-stands,

lighting boxes, softboxes, all kinds of gear. At one point I actually considered extending the

project all the way from Sherman Oaks to Woodland Hills, some people argue that's the real

corridor, others insist Sushi Row is the true core of where it all started. It's debatable, there's

no judge and jury on it. I did think, for a while, “it would be cool to cover every single

restaurant,” and then I realized that book would run seven hundred pages and weigh twenty-five

pounds. I changed my mind fast.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Could this ever be a reality show?

GARY

I don't know that it could be a reality show, honestly; these guys aren't exactly entertainers, and

they take what they do very seriously. I did once mention it to a producer friend, told him, “hey,

I'm working on this thing,” and how it had turned into this American dream story, the most sushi

restaurants anywhere in the world, the place where sushi in America really started. I genuinely

think there's a documentary in it. Nothing came of that conversation at the time, but I've since

talked to someone else who saw the book and said, “I'm going to bring this to my team, this could

be a really interesting documentary.” I do think it could work as a documentary, but it would

probably need to expand to cover how sushi developed across all of Los Angeles because L.A. was

actually the first place in the country to eat sushi. I believe they even mentioned Taro when I was

interviewing them; they showed me the old clip from Entourage.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Last question, what about Sawtelle? It has such a large Japanese population.

GARY

It would be pretty odd for a neighborhood like that not to have its own cluster of sushi

restaurants, and Sawtelle is actually where Sushi Stop got its start. It's Japanese-owned, the

company itself is based in Japan, and they send a small team over to run things here. I remember

pitching the whole project to the man running it, Masumi, going as fast as I could, telling him it

was going to be great, that I'd get the chef and the whole restaurant involved. He just sort of

went along with it, and it wasn't until we actually started shooting that I realized he barely

spoke any English at all, so I'm honestly not sure how much of it he understood going in. It's been

since June 1, and I still haven't managed to get him a copy of the finished book; I'm not even sure where he is these days. But Sawtelle is, without

question, a hugely significant Japanese neighborhood.

BOOKSTORE HOST

Well, thank you so much, Gary. If anyone has more questions while you get your book signed, feel

free to ask; he'll definitely answer it. Thank you.

GARY

I just want to say, obviously there are a lot of people here tonight, and I want to thank everyone

who made the trip out to support me on this project. I know it's a lot of traffic and a lot of

hassle, and I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Oh, and did everybody get a raffle ticket? We're raffling off a copy of the book tonight.

Two, two, six, eight, seven, two, dash, zero, two, eight. Good job, that's his book.

GARY

There were really two kinds of chefs on Sushi Row. There was Nozawa, who was all about

authenticity. He was trying to make Americans understand real Japanese sushi, exactly as it's done

in Japan. And then there were chefs like Katsuya, who wanted to adapt sushi for the American

palate. When you go to Japan and eat sushi there, it's quite different, simpler, larger cuts of

fish. That's just how it's done there. There's no “oh my God roll,” nothing like that. I wanted a

sexy roll, and a Studio City roll, and that's exactly what we got.

BOOKSTORE HOST

Thank you so much for coming, everybody. If you don't have a book yet, we have them at the front,

behind the counter. Feel free to head back there, buy one, and come on back to have it signed.