"Kaiten sushi" (restaurants with conveyor belts that deliver the sushi to the customer) have become popular in the US and Europe. The US is currently experiencing a second sushi "boom", comparable to the first one 20 years ago.
American restaurants are developing distinctive, new types of sushi. On this page, we will report these new styles coming from the East Coast.
This information presented by ASAHIYA PUBLISHING CO.,LTD.



Under favorable economic conditions in recent years, sushi has "arrived" on the American scene, despite its relatively high price. With an increase in shops offering both traditional and original menus, sushi is always gaining in popularity!
About 20 years ago, we reported the first American sushi boom in our Sushi Magazine. At that time, although some shops were making original creations like the "California Roll", we focused on the "orthodox" nigiri-sushi, since most of the customers were Japanese living overseas.



Compared to the situation twenty years ago, the current sushi boom has a completely different focus: American customers. Due to the slump in the Japanese economy in the 1990's, many banks and companies sent their employees back to Japan, resulting in the loss of those "overseas Japanese".
In this "second wave" of the sushi boom, successful sushi restaurants are filled with Americans, not Japanese. As a result, there has been a big change in the traditional sushi menu, with restaurants originating many new types of sushi designed to appeal to American tastes. Japanese may wonder if this is really "sushi" as they know it, but by taking liberty with Japanese traditions, these shops have attracted the attention of restaurant owners and chefs in Japan, who in turn refer to these new recipes to come up with their own ideas.





The number of Japanese restaurants, especially those offering sushi, has risen dramatically in the US as sushi has steadily gained in popularity among Americans, who tend to think of sushi as a "health food". Now we will look into the types of sushi that Americans prefer, according to East Coast sushi shops.





According to a recent issue of the "Food Trade Journal", a restaurant industry publication, the number of Japanese restaurants across the USA has doubled over the past ten years, from about 3,000 to 6,000 businesses. This figure includes Chinese or Korean restaurants that have added sushi to their menus. In other words, Asian restaurants are using sushi's popularity to win customers. We heard about the popularity of these restaurants, especially on the East Coast.

For example, in addition to the dramatic increase in Asian restaurants with sushi bars, supermarkets now sell so much "maki" sushi that it seems natural. This means that sushi, the representative dish of Japan, has spread far and wide across the US as it has won the hearts of Americans.
It's been over 20 years since we started reporting about the first American sushi "boom", from 1981 to 1991, and now we are in the second boom. Those people who became fans of sushi in the first boom now have the economic clout to dictate tastes in the current boom, thus affecting changes in sushi recipes.