A portrait of Hiroha Moriyuki at C'est Japon à Suisha from July 15, 2022.
In a smoky snack bar in Maebashi in the late 1980s, a young Hiroha Moriyuki, otherwise known as Shu, tended the counter. While he was just a junior employee and only in his early teens, he might as well have been the owner, cooking small snacks and pouring drinks for the Japanese salarymen looking for a place to relax and while away their worries. He had been there since 6PM, after school finished for the day, and soon enough, the clock would strike midnight and he would close the bar. A quick energy drink at a friend’s place and he would be off to school. More or less, this was his routine from Tuesday to Saturday. Many nights, no sleep was to be had.
Hiroha-san took on this job because he had an inkling that knowing how to talk to customers would be an essential skill to develop. But what he didn’t expect to discover was a love for cooking. Upon graduating from high school, Hiroha-san decided to attend a cooking school, a program that lasted two years and allowed him to dabble in Japanese, Chinese, French and Italian cuisines.
Despite graduating and receiving a national cooking license in 1992, there was no guarantee of a job. Japan was now in the throes of an economic downturn, the Japanese asset price bubble having just burst. Money was no longer free-flowing and most importantly, opportunities were scarce. Hiroha-san had travelled extensively, having visited Paris, Monaco and the United States, and was impressed by the cooking culture he had found in each country. But this was 1992. Only three countries granted Japanese the opportunity to have a working holiday visa: Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Luckily, there was a family friend living in Niagara Falls who owned a Japanese restaurant. With his only knowledge of Niagara Falls coming from the classic Superman II movie headlined by Christopher Reeve, Hiroha-san made the decision to move to Niagara Falls at the age of 22.
Despite being initially disappointed that Niagara Falls was nothing like Victoria Falls and in his words, looked more like a pond, Hiroha-san would eventually discover over a year that his heart felt comfortable in this area of the world, far away from his homeland. And with that, he would do his best to find any job that would allow him to continue living in Canada.
In 1992, Arai-san, the manager of the Ottawa branch of Suisha Gardens was fighting a battle against a seemingly relentless revolving door of kitchen staff. Requesting help from his network, Hiroha-san was recommended to him from the former first manager of the Ottawa branch of Suisha Gardens, prompting an eventual interview and hiring of Hiroha-san as a chef.
Hiroha-san would start at the Ottawa branch of Suisha Gardens in 1993. While he started in the basement kitchen, he quickly moved upstairs to the sushi kitchen area on the main floor. In the 1990s, sourcing Japanese ingredients was difficult and Yamaguchi-san, the then-head chef of Suisha Gardens, was key in educating Hiroha-san on potential substitutes. But even with all of this effort, the typical clientele of the time did not distinguish Japanese food from other ethnic cuisine. It was all “Asian” food. In those days, Hiroha-san prepared a lot of teriyaki chicken and California rolls.
An undated portrait of the Suisha Gardens' Ottawa branch in the 1990s, shown at the OB/OG Kai in September 2022. Arai-san and Yamaguchi-san are in the centre of the picture. Hiroha-san is the second person from the right.
Despite this, these years at Suisha were formative. He found another family at Suisha Gardens, with both Arai-san and Yamaguchi-san becoming elder brother figures. Eventually, he also met his wife, Mina-san, who had been hired as a server.
With Arai-san managing the restaurant and eventually owning it outright, Arai-san’s instituted motto of hospitality, “To Serve and Cook with Hospitality In Your Heart” had an indelible impact on him and his values. And slowly but surely, as he grew into his role as the itamae of Suisha Gardens, that motto would weave throughout his own relationship with sushi and become a cornerstone of his own vision at Nagi Sushi.
He would remain at Suisha Gardens and its recent reincarnation into C'est Japon à Suisha, until the restaurant closed in 2023, a total of thirty years and more than half of his life.
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