Kaz Matsune was born with a love for cooking. His passion led him to be a diligent student and a skilled sushi chef at restaurants such as Minako (San Francisco's first organic, Japanese restaurant), Ozumo, and the famed Fort Mason restaurant, Greens.
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Today, Kaz teaches corporate teams and sushi lovers of all stripes his craft with Breakthrough Sushi - the first and only sustainable team building sushi company in the US.
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Over the course of his 18-year professional culinary career, Kaz has served top celebrities and some of the Bay Area's top companies, including Google, Facebook, Oracle, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Verizon Wireless, and Citibank. He has taught over 10,000 sushi lovers and even held lessons at the Culinary Institute of America at Copia.
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Kaz has also appeared in videos for Grammarly and Survey Monkey, as well as ad campaigns for Adobe and Eventbrite. His writing is featured on Quora, The Huffington Post, Slate, Apple News, and he has published three books on sushi. The most recent book, How I Became a Sushi Chef, is a memoir of his culinary journey.
Why I Love Making Sushi More than Eating it
November 30, 2017
I love making Sushi more than eating it.
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I love it because when I started being a Sushi chef seventeen years ago, I had no idea how to make Sushi Rice, how to cut Maguro, fillet Kanpachi, make a California Roll, Dragon Roll, Shrimp Tempura roll, or to make Sashimi and Nigiri. I enjoyed every step in learning all the techniques associated with making Sushi. I love it because I have met so many great Sushi Chefs who taught me what I know today. I am ever so grateful. Many of them told me about the mise en place of Sushi, how to take care of my tools like knives, how to be efficient in the kitchen, and most importantly, how to work cleanly at the Sushi Bar. I was a very messy worker when I started.
February 2, 2017
Here are some restaurant etiquette rules in sushi and Japanese kitchens.
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Say "good morning" at the beginning of the shift. No matter what time of the day your shift starts, you always greet by saying "ohayo gozai masu," good morning in Japanese. This is common practice at restaurants in Japan, as well as in the entertainment industry. In the beginning, I felt weird saying "good morning" at 3 p.m., and after a while, I got used to it, and it just became natural. Why and when this rule started is unclear, though, some say the word "ohayo" signifies the beginning.
February 2, 2017
There are many reasons to use a soup lid in Japanese cuisine, and many reasons why sushi restaurants in the United States may not use a lid. Here are a few ideas:
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The lid keeps the soup hot and the dust out. Back in the olden days (i.e., 300 - 400 years ago) in Japan, the kitchen was far away from the dining area, so they used lids to keep the soup warm. The lid also kept the dust out while transporting the soup. At restaurants in the U.S., soup is served at the beginning of the meal, and it only takes a few seconds to transport, so there really is no need to use a lid to keep it warm. In a modern kitchen, there is no need to worry about keeping ashes from burning coal from the cooking fire out of the food, either.
January 17, 2019
The ordinary sign at the corner strip mall store was nothing fancy. Just large green letters on a white background, “SUSHI.”
“Is that it?” Toshi asked me in doubt.
“I think so,” I replied.
We both looked at each other as if to say, Should we go in, or should we not?
“This must be it. That’s the correct address,” I said. I remembered what Ko told me—it doesn’t look like a sushi restaurant from the outside. He was absolutely right; it did not.
“Let’s go in,” I said.
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September 4, 2018
Despite what we hear about Yakuza in Japanese media, their lifestyle appears to be different from what most of us think. (myself included.)
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Here is a story I heard from my father-in-law.
My-father-in law, Den, has been running a small restaurant in a rural area of Japan for the past 30 years. It's located in the remote part of the town.
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