 I used to play DJ. I'm trying to be an MC, but you realize it's like a, you know, English problem. It's happened, you know? The uni here is fresh and delicious. Uni over wagyu. The new thing right now. Oh, the uni! Put the little wasabi right there. Go pet that in there, you know what I mean? Just, you know, dab it, dab it right there. Boom! Sushi is one of those dishes you can get from a fridge, in a bento, off a conveyor belt, and in a very private and pricey omakase style. There's over 4,000 sushi restaurants in America, but how did it get so popular? We explore three different levels of sushi, everything from the Japanese-owned to even non-Asian-owned, but everyone is trying to put their own spin on it and spread their universal love for it. We're here with our friend Chab Matzo, who's got family roots in little Tokyo, LA, to experience what might be the future of sushi. All right, so sitting here in Makako, I gotta say, it definitely has like a neighborhood vibe. It's kind of homely. There's a lot of places in the 66 that are like this. They're more like go-to spots. I just like the traditional feel of walking in there knowing the chef. You have stuff like the Alaska roll, the Boston roll. Okay, that's definitely obviously new, because Boston is not known for sushi. We definitely want to do this lunch special, any three rolls for 1235. Guys, that is such a good deal. Our lunch special is right here. David is here. Tell us about the history. All right, so it all originated with the California roll. There was the first sushi restaurant in little Tokyo in the late 60s. They came out with rolls. In the beginning, the rolls weren't popular just because the seaweed was on the outside. Because the more traditional styles to have the seaweed on the outside, right? Yeah, so I think just to hide the crunch, they put the rice on the outside. They put avocado in there for the texture of berry California, and also they put the crab in there for that fishy taste. Back then, it was an exotic food. People were hesitant to it. Once the 80s came, the whole sushi roll craze took off. You know what I would compare the California roll to? Run DMC doing that collaboration with Aerosmith. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Rap rock was necessary for rap to enter the American mainstream consciousness at that time. It's crazy to think that the California roll is responsible partially for blowing up sushi. Guys, of course, the Philly roll is going to have your Philadelphia cream cheese inside. In my opinion, the two most mainstream rolls in the entire mainland North America have got to be the California roll and the Philly roll. This Boston roll right here has no raw fish in it. California roll. You started seeing some rolls in Japan also use rice on the outside. Is that more of an American thing or a Japanese thing? No, it's definitely more of an American thing. Here's a wonder if they're doing that just because there's a lot of more tourists going to Japan. They're opening up the tradition to tweak it a little bit more for the Western palate. Spicy yellowtail. Funny thing, actually, when I was younger, I used to go to sushi restaurants. I used to poke everything out of the middle and just eat the rice and the nori together. The word sushi is referring to the vinegar rice and not the actual fish. So you're actually just eating the sushi. Philly roll. Does it not taste like a bagel salmon lox and cream cheese? Yeah, it tastes like something from Tompkins bagel. Boston roll. All right, what's in the Boston roll? The Boston roll just has cucumber, lettuce, and shrimp. I've never heard of it in my life. But the Boston roll sucks. It's like Boston. I would refer to this sushi style as any town USA because it's probably likely that any town in the USA has a sushi spot that's sort of based off this type of menu. But I will say the one thing that they had that was kind of authentic is they got the Lamune. All right, you guys, that was pretty cool to come here to Makiko, get the nostalgic vibes in. We want to show the transition from 1990 to 2020. Makiko Saka. All right, so before we go on to our next spot, we got to make a quick stop and try this supermarket sushi. But not just any supermarket, David. We're talking about Chinese supermarket. It kind of goes to show you how many different people have taken ownership of sushi. We're eating Chinese supermarket sushi. We just came from like the 1980 spot and then we're headed to the Michelin-affiliated Korean spot. Next, it doesn't get cheaper than buying it from the supermarket. Yeah, this one's actually five bucks right here for nine rolls. Supermarket sushi. The rice here is not as good, but there's a lot of it. And this fish right here is not very bad. But I've eaten a lot of Kai Ten and to go sushi in my life so I can kind of take it. And with a heavy amount of wasabi and soy sauce, you can kind of mask anything. Overall, I think with a few exceptions, pass on the supermarket sushi. Makoku kind of represents how sushi might have started in America. But now let's jump to a Michelin star level spot that is doing sushi on a whole new level. These are dishes that look unlike anything else. Now we're at this spot, Makiko Saka. It just opened in 2020. This group, Kosaka, has a Michelin star at their fancier spot. This is sort of their, I guess, takedown or express concept. I actually like places like this from Michelin family because not a lot of people can go eat at Michelin star restaurants. Places like this make it a little bit more affordable for everybody else. So at this spot, the chefs are Japanese, but it is Korean-owned, so that's very 2020. Makiko Saka. Okay, I'm here with the owner, Kee, of Makiko Saka. So Makiko is a hand roll. The Japanese food is like a mainstream, especially in New York. Almost 100% is all the fish is flown from Japan. We get delivery every day. Taste is the most important, but you should be very visually pleasing to your eyes. All right, this is the uni cup with caviar. Guys, we are scooping the uni right now here at Makiko Saka like it's ice cream. I've never had uni in a cup, so it's seared with a little bit of caviar. A lot of places, they make things look nice, and it doesn't taste nice, but this place is doing it right. You can never go wrong with uni. The uni here is fresh and delicious. How do the customers supposed to eat this? Because this almost like looks like a postcard. Right, we chose this super fine, I guess, refined nori. This is like opening a red envelope on Chinese New Year. Yes, instead of money's nori, right? This rabbit. You could grab it, depends how you like it. It's all seasoned, so you could just taste it. You could use a soy sauce as well. I would do it the more traditional way. Because these chefs know what they're doing with their balance, and it is kind of disrespectful to dip it in soy sauce. Thank you, that's right. David, the seaweed is from Kyushu. Shout out to Tim Shiba-san. I'm gonna go for the bluefin tuna, right in the middle. And you're wrapping it like a taco. Yeah! I have the bluefin toro, and you have the yellow tail. Even that seaweed is good, it's super crunchy, and it's dissolving my mouth, and then like the bluefin tuna is actually really fatty. Actually, you know what? I'm happy just eating this by itself. This is some great A.C. seaweed right here. Yeah. Dan, why don't you grab one behind the camera? This is the type of fancy sushi that Dan can even eat behind the camera. Okay, there we go. You can hear how crunchy that seaweed is, that nori, sirakuni on top of a scallop, bro. That's what I think is fun, and that's actually why I think the rolls are getting so much more popular. It's fun to eat, interactive, and what's so special about the seaweed is that it's from the saga prefecture of Kyushu, and that means that the tides are really high and low, so there's a lot of like nutrients that get into the seaweed, so there's just levels to this. When you are eating higher end sushi, what is recommended is you do cleanse your palate with ginger afterwards. Well, these are deconstructed onigiris, so the bros are going for the onigiris. Deconstructed onigiri. Honestly, it was like eating a donut, because it was topped, you know, plus internally. I'm gonna go for this sea bass piece. We're doing origami with the nori, guys. So we're gonna call it nori-gami. Sea bass right here. Very, very crispy on the outside, flaky inside. Chad is from LA, but you do kind of look like one of those famous Japanese pitchers. You told me you pitched in MLB for like two seasons and then went back to Japan League. I would believe you. Futamaki. It's kind of like a larger traditional roll. This one looks a lot like kimbap. That has a very unique taste to it. I really, really enjoyed that so far. My favorite have been that futamaki, and they're deconstructed onigiri. Wow, what a boy. All right, you guys, we are looking at the traditional maki roll. Hence the name, maki kosaka. This is gonna be, I guess, kind of like your hamburger to your steak, where it's like the same beef, and you can have the same components, but it's gonna taste different because of the form. The ori definitely is a little bit more expensive just due to the way the fish is cut. This is actually like the OG style maki roll with the seaweed on the outside. One thing I do like about this place, they specify seaweed inside or seaweed outside. Salmon maki. This has a perfect ratio for fish, rice, and seaweed right here. Tuna maki. That one's even better. I like that scallion in there. Sometimes when I see these rolls at like your regular spot versus the nigiri, I'm always leaning towards nigiri. I'm like, oh, nigiri is categorically better. I don't think that's true because here you have good seaweed and good fish. Scallion maki. A lot of people like to cover up the scallop with cream. There was no cream in there. No crab maki. That one in the tuna one is hard for me. Those are like tied. Now we head to a place that is trying to turn the omakase experience into a fast casual concept at an affordable level. Chefs hand you a fresh maki roll and you eat it right away. Could this be the next big thing in sushi? All right, you guys, we are on a spot called Temakase. I believe it is a fusion between the omakase and the temaki. So I think they combined them. I just came up with that right now. I swear to God. Of course they did. That's the name. They are just like the hand rolls that we just had except they're larger. This never existed back in the days, right? Maki came out first. I'm happy to see a trend like this come about. This is the type of sushi trend that is sweeping the nation, guys. Hand rolls, you pick them up, eat them with your hands. Temakase. All right, you guys, we are here at Temakase. Andrew, you are looking at a... Pear wrapped salmon in a yuzu sauce right here. Let me go in. Burst of citrus, sweetness from the pear, different textures. Here we have the sashimi appetizers right here. We have the salmon, yellowtail, and the tuna. This is like the Americanized pick right here. Tuna on crispy rice. That's how you know I like it because I don't even like this dish, but they did a good here. It ended up tasting almost like a hash brown. Last but not least, you have a maguro avocado. I think maguro is just tuna. I think like to me, sushi is one of those things where it doesn't have to be 100% traditional. You guys, we are looking at what might be, and you know, I'm not saying that it's omakase, but this would be the cheapest one in the country. Yeah. I don't know. Usually it would not all be lined up like this. You would eat these one roll at a time as the chef brings it out for you. But for the sake of time, we're eating them all together. Each roll is between $7 or $8 in sushi. That's a lot of fish for 35 bucks. No, definitely. Even if you look at this, that rice-to-fish ratio is insane. Seven equal. I much prefer this design over the cone-shaped hand rolls. Blue crab roll. You can't really see it, but there is truffle in there, and that truffle tastes really, really good with this blue crab. This is a fire roll. You guys shut up. Hey, she's Burmese. There's a lot of like non-Japanese owning shops and non-Japanese even making the sushi. A lot of people, once they say the word sushi, they think raw fish. Some of this is raw, but this next one, the lobster roll, is not raw. Lobster roll. I like to brush the wasabi on the back of it. Another thing about this body is that we're having a lot of fun because it's really easy to eat. You're in a kind of nightclub style environment. It's worth the money. Spicy scallop. Obviously the seaweed, it will begin to soak up the moisture, the fact that it's dehydrated, and it might get a little bit soggy. That's why it's so important to eat the tamaki rolls like right when they come out. Toro scallion. You could never go wrong with Toro. I'm gonna have to go with this one. I'm going with lobster. I'm rolling with the blue crab one. Oh yeah. I forgot. I have a toss up. I love truffle and I love Toro. This is the uni roll. Oh, the uni. Here we have the uni roll. Fresh. You can still hear that crisp. Can you hear that? You want the seaweed and the nori to still be crispy. All right, a little bit of soy sauce right here. Now it is uni season and they are not skimpin' on uni. Put the little wasabi right there. Go pet that in there, you know what I mean? Just dab it, dab it right there. Boom. We couldn't end this video without visiting our friend Koji. He started as a DJ, wanted to be a rapper, but tied it all together at his restaurant, Doska. It's what I would call a chill omakase. Doska is on the corner of Delancey and Allen over in the Lower East Side. The chef and owner, Koji, is from Kagawa, Japan and he grew up fishing all over his little island that he's from. I expect you to be good. I guess if you are Japanese and this is your craft, you should outshine anybody else that isn't a Japanese sushi chef. Theoretically, I do have high expectations. Koji very much embodies the Lower East Side, his love of hip hop, his love of good food, his craftsmanship. Let's go check it out. Koji Kagawa, what got you into the Tamaki sushi game? My family always making the house, catching the fish and putting inside all the ingredients. So you would catch your own fish? Yeah, my father likes fishing all the time. For me, I'm just using my own recipe, what I feel like a Japanese palette. I know you're very into hip hop. Is that one of the things that drew you to New York? I used to play DJ. I tried to be an MC, but you realize it's like an English problem. It's happened, you know? Here we are. Let's get some Tamakis. All right, you guys. Round one has arrived here at Doska. Doska is a slang in Japanese for what's up. I got a uni. You have a negi toro and Chad, what do you got? I got the ebi, the sweet shrimp. Doska. Oh, we put some soy sauce inside already. The toro is super fresh. There's some Fudukaki in there to give the uni a little bit of extra crunch. You can try that one, bro. This one is it. I feel like you can never go wrong with uni, right? I've definitely gone wrong with uni before. Round two here at Doska. I've got a bluefin tuna. Here I have the spicy scallop, which is a very, very popular hand-rolled flavor. And I have the yellowtail whiskallion. Nice little crisps. I love the type of soy sauces putting on. I can tell it's very thick. It's a little bit sweet. You gotta try it. David's like, no, one bite, one bite, Andrew. The little radish inside adds this nice sweet crunch to it. I'm speechless. If you could stay quiet after eating something good, you know it's good. Dos were good. All right, round three here at Doska. I've got Ikura, which is salmon egg, right? Over cucumbers. And then I have the uni over wagyu. This is the new thing right now, right? Surf and turf. I'm saying you take something from the sea, you put it with something from the land. So here I have the Toro, topped with caviar and gold flakes. What do you think of the gold flake? This is a big trend right now. I kind of just want to put that in my pocket. I don't want to eat it. Round three. Still speechless. Koji is not playing. Let me tell you this, the natural flavor of everything really, really shines through here at Doska. They don't need to add so much because everything is fresh. As you can see, we haven't been dipping it in soy sauce. I haven't even been putting wasabi on it. Honestly, I didn't need it. All right, you guys, we're round four. I have a fried shrimp with yellow Peruvian chili sauce. I've got unagi eel, but cut in a very steak-like manner. I have the fried oyster with chipotle in here. You would think that just like a tempura shrimp roll is just you've had it before, but you haven't had it here. I'm not a fan of fried oysters. I wanted to get that shrimp tempura. I'm glad I tried it because this is good. It definitely changed my opinion on fried oysters. Everything was so good here at Doska. There was some really traditional things and some like fusion things. I think it really goes to show you how Koji has worked around the world, from Miami to Israel to Vegas. He's learned how to serve all different types of people and I think it shows in the recipes that he's picked. All right, you guys, that brings us to the very end of our New York City hand-rolled crawl. I mean, we checked out so many different spots owned by so many different types of people, different philosophies about the product they wanted to represent. One of my major takeaways is that most of the spots had a Japanese chef involved in the conception of a lot of the dishes, but it also depends on the generation of the Japanese chef and even where they come from and how they're used to making sushi. I like Doska. That's my number one. In my opinion, it's a neighborhood spot. Talk to the chef. You're able to add certain things to your hand roll at a jalapeno, at truffle, caviar to whatever you want to do. A lot of places they don't, that we've been to didn't give that option. Each spot really has its own vibe. It even has its own system and its own kind of approachability. Click on the links down below. Check out each spot on your own and it's just really cool to check out where sushi is going in 2020. And please let us know in the comment section below what is your favorite way to eat sushi. Why do you think tamakis and hand rolls are dominating the game in 2020? And what's the next big sushi trend? Thank you so much for watching this world NY. We love exploring culture through food. Huge shout out to Chad. Check out a spot in Oritay on Grand Street in New York City. Until next time, we're out. Peace. Okay, damn. You're going for the, uh... Getting in this Nori Dami. Crap. I would like to see you double fist and wrap the other one, man. This feels wrong. Get it. Use your knees, so... That's the one? That's the one.