Eat The World - Sushi Roles

Gender Equality Behind The Counter Is Still A Long Way Off

- Naomi Tomky

TWELVE YEARS AGO, FOLLOWING a short but eye-opening stint in prison, Mary Stallworth needed a new career. Floating around Detroit kitchens as a line cook between gambling binges wasn’t going to cut it anymore. But because the restaurant business was all she knew, Stallworth worked to advance past the line. Half Japanese and half African-American, she found a unique niche as the liaison between the sushi bar and the rest of the kitchen at Chen Chow Brasserie in Birmingham, Michigan. She picked up skills, first making rolls for family meals, then training to help put out large orders. Just as she began to feel she had found her calling in the world of rice, fish, and seaweed, the sushi chef left. And the new hire— a big gun out of Japan—refused to have a woman at his sushi bar. “I had fought so hard to get out of the kitchen,” Stallworth recalls, “but he wouldn’t even look at me.”

Kate Koo, chef and owner of the lauded Zilla Sake in Portland, Oregon, also suspected bias when, multiple times, she responded to ads for a sushi chef, only to arrive and be told that serving and hostessing positions were all that were available. Mariah Kmitta, of Seattle’s Mashiko—one of the nation’s few sushi restaurants committed to serving only sustainable seafood—had the wholehearted support of the restaurant’s head sushi chef, Hajime Soto, but tells of customers who took one look at her and walked out the door. “People wanted an Asian male,” she says.