Nearly every Japanese restaurant in America serves California rolls. Ubiquitous on both high end and low, these colorful rounds go for more than $30 at chichi spots like New York’s Masa, yet many Walmarts stock them in their refrigerated aisles, too. It’s hard to imagine a time when this sushi-bar staple—whose likeness has been spotted on T-shirts, earrings, and pencil erasers—wasn’t an integral part of America’s gastronomic vernacular.
Most food historians agree that the first California roll was served sometime during the late 1960s at Tokyo Kaikan, a restaurant in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles. Executives from the Japanese restaurant corporation EIWA opened Tokyo Kaikan in 1963, at a time when hardly any place in town served Japanese food, let alone raw fish. The cavernous restaurant had separate food stations for teppan-yaki, tempura, and sushi; upstairs, a disco hosted a different band every night, along with a karate show. At first, most customers were businessmen from Tokyo who had come to Los Angeles during Japan’s postwar economic boom and were craving food from home. “The assumption is that because it was called the California roll, it was invented for Californians, but the story isn’t quite that simple,” according to Trevor Corson, author of The Story of Sushi. Instead, this game-changing maki was the product of a gradual—and slightly murky—evolution, as you’ll see.
Avocado was hardly a traditional sushi ingredient in the 1960s, but then Tokyo Kaikan chef Ichiro Mashita went seeking a substitute for bluefin tuna to use in toro negimaki, a simple roll made with tuna belly and scallions. (Negi means scallion and maki refers to something that’s rolled up, so while many Americans associate the word negimaki with a beef and scallion roll, it can refer to any kind of roll with scallion.) Mashita often prepared toro negimaki for his Japanese customers—at least, during the months when tuna was available. Services like Federal Express were yet to be invented, so bluefin could only be had during the summer migration.
“Mashita was trying to re-create the taste and sensation of tuna belly, so he started with avocado for its fattiness, and then mixed it with king crab meat, to get the seafood flavor going,” says Corson. (It helped that the state’s iconic fruit was inexpensive and sold year-round.) This first California roll was incredibly simple, composed of only the avocado–crab meat mix, scallions, rice, and a nori wrapper; additional ingredients like mayonnaise, cucumber, and sesame seeds were added later as other chefs started experimenting with their own versions.
Sasha Issenberg, author of The Sushi Economy, recounts a different story about the roll’s origins. As told to him by Minoru Yokoshima, then vice chairman of EIWA, group owner Kodaka Daikichiro visited Los Angeles during the ‘60s and asked Tokyo Kaikan’s chefs, “Why don’t you make sushi for the Caucasians?” Yokoshima says the chefs responded by serving a roll of king crab leg, avocado, and mayonnaise; there is no mention of deliberately substituting for toro. In his book, Issenberg suggests his own theory for the discrepancy: “Perhaps predictably, EIWA’s current leadership has fashioned…a narrative of institutional ingenuity, in which the creativity comes from the top of the hierarchy.” Because Chef Mashita died a few years ago, and none of his former co-workers contacted agreed to be interviewed for this article, it’s difficult to know which version of the California roll’s origin story contains more of the truth.
As the 1960s progressed and Tokyo Kaikan’s renown grew, the restaurant’s Japanese clients began bringing their American colleagues to dine with them. Since eating seaweed paper wasn’t popular among Americans, one of the chefs (likely Mashita, according to Corson) started making uramaki, or inside-out rolls, hiding the nori in the middle and putting the rice on the outside. No one could have predicted the huge impact of this change, yet today, most of the elaborate, American-style sushi rolls are served inside out. “Flipping the roll was a distinctly American invention, but it’s not traditional in Japan because chefs there go to great lengths to crisp their nori just right,” Corson explains. Because the seaweed immediately gets soggy when it’s placed inside, Corson laments the loss of what he calls “the perfect balance of the crunchy outer crust and the soft middle.” But there’s no denying that Americans have flipped for uramaki; today, many people ask for even basic rolls like tuna or salmon served inside out.
So much for the avocado and the outer layer of rice—what of the imitation crab meat that’s at the heart of most California rolls? Its origins may come as a surprise, especially to those who believe America corners the market on “faux foods.” In the mid 1970s, a Japanese company called Sugiyo began working with Berelson, a San Francisco–based seafood distributor, to market imitation crab meat called Sea Legs to the American public. The preparation process, still in use today, involves boning, mashing, and cooking white-fleshed fish (usually pollock) to create a paste called surimi. This is then reshaped to look like crab, lobster, shrimp, or other types of seafood (flavoring and dyes are added as well). Although relatively new to the United States, surimi techniques have existed for many centuries throughout Asia, and historians believe the process began as a way to preserve leftover fish. As prices and demand for real crab increased here in America, many chefs started using Sea Legs and other “krab” products, as they are often called, in California rolls. Restaurants were able to charge less for rolls made this way, since not only is imitation crab cheaper, but it requires less kitchen labor than the real deal, which must be hand-shelled. Krab products’ affordability and the fact that they contain only cooked seafood helped the California roll to surge in popularity among sushi-shy Americans.
Today, California rolls have gone global: You can find them in London, Dubai, Dublin, and beyond; in Rio de Janeiro, mango is typically swapped in for avocado. They’ve even circled back to Tokyo, where a new genre called “creative sushi” has emerged. There, proudly nontraditional restaurants like Rainbow Roll Sushi and Genji Sushi New York serve generously sized American-style rolls—with names like Caterpillar, Dragon, Phoenix, and California—to locals and tourists alike.
And just as we’ve seen with American menu standards such as burgers and pizza, chefs all over the world are revamping the California roll based on creative whims and regional preferences. At Cafe Ish, a Japanese-Australian spot outside Sydney, chef Josh Nicholls’ California roll contains crumbed crocodile, avocado, pickled rosella flowers, and mayonnaise made with lemon myrtle, a common bush herb. Jean Kerr, in her Mystic Seafood cookbook, tops California Roll Oysters with avocado, lemon juice, salmon roe, and wasabi. And Peter Abarcar, Jr., executive chef at Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel on Hawaii’s Big Island, makes a broiled California Roll Pizza with nori, rice, blue crab, local avocado, roasted sweet corn, soy barbecue sauce, and tobiko (flying fish roe). Abarcar explains his riff on the classic version saying, “As a chef, the California roll just gets so played out, so the pizza was a fun way to mix up the presentation but keep the familiar flavor combination, which people love and, let’s face it, does work really well.”
Not quite 50 years old, the California roll is younger than Madonna but seems to have re-created its image almost as many times. And though it may not be traditional, there is no doubt that it has been highly influential in directing the course of American sushi: “Almost all the rolls that we eat today are variations of the California roll,” says Corson.
Brooklyn-based Lexi Dwyer is a former editor at Epicurious and Brides magazine. Her writing has appeared on BonAppetit.com, iVillage, and NYMag.com. Though today she’s more likely to order uni topped with quail egg or an ume-shiso roll, she still remembers her first-ever sushi dinner—California roll included—at Go Sushi in New York’s East Village circa 1999.