Between auditions, she learned to make rolls and how to cut fish and eventually prepare nigiri sushi – the hand-shaped style of sushi that is composed of seasoned rice topped with raw or preserved seafood – for omakase menus.

In 2018, when more customers began asking for vegetarian options, Hasebe was asked to design vegan sushi. The requests planted the seed for her future.

“People were asking for it so much,” she says. “We had a couple vegan rolls and they were popular.” As a result, she traded mackerel for mushrooms, tuna belly for tomatoes, octopus for okra.

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Hasebe was at the forefront of a trend.

Since the beginning of this year, two vegan sushi restaurants have opened in Los Angeles.

In January, Kusaki opened as Los Angeles’ first vegan omakase sushi restaurant.

I used to put a lot of stuff on top of sushi, but it has to be more simple. I want to focus on the flavour of the vegetableYoko Hasebe

Following that, Niku Nashi opened in February inside APB, a cocktail bar on Los Angeles’ exclusive Melrose Avenue, with options like spicy “no tuna” hand rolls and dragon rolls with cream cheese, asparagus, seared “no eel” and avocado.

Extensive selections of vegan sushi are also served at Ichijiku Sushi in the city’s Highland Park neighbourhood, Fiish in nearby Culver City, Vegan Castle in Long Beach and Ma-Kin in Agoura Hills.

Hasebe is the vegan sushi chef behind Plant Sushi Yoko, which she quietly launched as a delivery and pickup service in 2020 after losing her restaurant job at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

For Hasebe, it’s less about a trend and more about chisan-chisho, a local-food approach that started as a grass-roots movement in Japan in the 1990s in response to agricultural globalisation.

The phrase means “produced locally, consumed locally”, but the concept also emphasises environmental stewardship and community identity.

“We have so many great vegetables. I want to use the ingredients that are from here instead of having fish shipped from Japan, which is amazing that we can do that, but I think vegetables speak of California,” Hasebe says.

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Plant-based sushi in Los Angeles has its roots in the Little Tokyo neighbourhood, where restaurant Shojin has served a macrobiotic menu, including vegan sushi, since 2008.

According to some accounts, the history of vegetarian maki (and all maki sushi) goes back to Buddhist monks in 13th-century Kyoto, who devised a technique for rolling their food in dried seaweed.

But Plant Sushi Yoko is thoroughly of the moment.

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Hasebe is standing in her kitchen, gently shaping an ingot of sushi rice for nigiri in the palm of her right hand. On the counter in front of her is an array of ingredients and prepared neta, or toppings.

Slivers of Japanese Fuji apple flank slices of tofu that Hasebe has smoked over applewood. Coins cut from the thick stems of king trumpet mushrooms are butterflied.

Corn, sheared from the sides of a cob so that the kernels remain attached to one another in fillets, are battered and fried. She bundles asparagus that are thinner than pencils on top of rice, bound by a slender belt of seaweed.

She understands the sensitivity of each ingredient. Now I tell my friends, I know a dancer who makes the best vegan sushi in LANaoko Takei, author and Japanese cookware store owner, on Hasebe
“I used to put a lot of stuff on top of sushi. Yuba – tofu skin – with cheese and avocado. Or mango with daikon and chilli, truffle oil – things like that. But it has to be more simple,” she says.

“If you put too much, it’s not wrong; customers wanted that. But I wanted to focus on the flavour of the vegetable, appreciate the raw ingredient for what it is.”

No one would call it traditional, either.

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“When I started out, I asked, ‘How can I evolve sushi that’s made by a female chef?’ I wanted to make a statement, ‘This is what a female sushi chef does, this is what I do.’ It had to be different.”

Naoko Takei, author and owner of Japanese cookware store Toiro, has worked with Hasebe during cooking demonstrations.

“She understands the sensitivity of each ingredient and how to pull out the flavours instead of adding the flavours,” Takei says. “She doesn’t try to mimic anything, she presents them as original. Now I tell my friends, ‘I know a dancer who makes the best vegan sushi in LA.’”

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For Hasebe, it’s also deeply personal, as she “became obsessed with eating and cooking because of body image issues”. But sushi became a passion the moment she handed her first nigiri to a customer.

“To make something in your hands, give it to someone and see them eat it right in front of you, that’s a connection,” she says.

Now that it’s spring, she’s looking forward to using takenoko, the young sprout that grows from bamboo’s underground stem.

“And okra, it’s the perfect texture right now for sushi,” she says, “It’s not too crunchy and stiff, perfect with the rice when you chew it.”

And for artichokes and beets: “I’m trying to figure out recipes for those.”

Vegetables have more variety and more texture than seafood, Hasebe says, and most vegetables go well with sushi rice.

“I don’t think I’ve come across a vegetable that I don’t like with sushi rice,” she says. “That’s what I love about it, and I think that’s what people love about it too.”

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