Studio City Has Earned Its Street Signs

Happy Cinco de Mayo. Today the city of Los Angeles officially renamed an intersection near Casa Vega in honor of the Vega family, and good for them. I love Casa Vega. I've been there hundreds of times and I knew the Vega family. It's a landmark, and the honor is deserved.

But I'll be honest with you. Seeing it today stings a little.

For over a year, I've been working to convince the city to officially designate the three-mile stretch of Ventura Boulevard between Coldwater Canyon and Lankershim as Sushi Row, with actual street signs that acknowledge what happened there. Because something remarkable did happen there. That corridor in Studio City is where mainstream America first encountered authentic sushi culture, shaped by proximity to the studios and the creative community of New Hollywood. I've spent two years documenting it in a coffee table book with 345 photographs and interviews with the chefs who built it from the ground up.

The city has been receptive. I've attended three neighborhood council meetings. The votes were unanimous. I've worked with Field Deputy Sidney Liss from Councilmember Nithya Raman's office. I went out personally and collected signatures from all nineteen sushi restaurant owners on the Row, every one of them enthusiastic about the designation. The Studio City Neighborhood Council is on board. Everyone agrees it should happen.

And yet, here we are on Cinco de Mayo watching another neighborhood get its signs while Studio City is still waiting.

I don't say this to complain. I say this because Studio City deserves to own this history, and the history is real. Teru Sushi was likely the first sushi bar outside of Little Tokyo. Katsuya Uechi invented spicy tuna on crispy rice right here on this strip. Kazunori Nozawa introduced strict omakase dining to American audiences on this street. Asanebo was the first restaurant in Los Angeles to receive Michelin stars. These are not small things. This is a culinary legacy that belongs to Studio City, to the San Fernando Valley, and honestly to the entire history of Japanese food in America.

The Sushi Row book comes out in June. Maybe the book will do what the meetings haven't quite finished yet, and give the city the final push to make it official. I hope so. These restaurants and the people who built them deserve to be recognized, not just in a book, but on the street where it all happened.

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