Nozawa Now Demanding Fun at New Sushi Concept

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Less is leading to more for one expanding sushi concept.

Kazunori Nozawa, who retired last year after 25 years as the exacting chef of Studio City’s upscale Sushi Nozawa, now spends most of his time fish shopping and making sure his expanding casual dining concept, Sugarfish by Sushi Nozawa, is up to his stringent standards. The menu is short and the atmosphere is relaxed.

“People have fun,” said Jerry Greenberg, Sugarfish’s chief executive.

Nozawa is president of Sugarfish, which he formed in 2008 with Greenberg and Nozawa’s son, Tom Nozawa, who runs the company’s supply chain operations. The company, which employs about 160, has seven locations in Los Angeles, including the original Sushi Nozawa, which now flies the Sugarfish flag. Sugarfish also runs a more exclusive and intimate high-end sushi bar tucked inside its Beverly Hills location called Nozawa Bar.

An eighth location near La Brea Boulevard and First Street will open in 1,500 square feet by the end of the year.

Sugarfish’s growth over the last five years has management considering expanding nationally.

The popularity of the more accessible Sugarfish brand can be attributed in part to what the restaurants do not do: offer many choices. But the very limited menu allows the restaurants to keep costs down by being efficient. Fewer menu items mean less waste and less waste means lower costs. A Sugarfish dinner combination plate runs from about $20 to $40 per person.

“Nobody wants to spend $400 a person,” said Jerry Prendergast, principal of West L.A. restaurant consultancy Prendergast & Associates. The restaurant is saying, “My selection is limited and that’s the only way I can get quality fish.”

Careful cuts

That is not to say Sugarfish, which declined to disclose its revenue, has no waste.

“We try to identify the pristine parts of the fish,” Tom Nozawa said. “We will discard parts of the fish like certain membranes or parts that are bitter or stringy, even if we lose money. We’re quality driven, not profit driven. That’s dad’s philosophy.”

High waste levels often doom sushi bars because more variety makes it harder to sell all of the inventory, which is expensive and spoils quickly, Prendergast said. But reputation plays a role as well.

“Truthfully, how many sushi chefs can the average person name? You have this incredible name, known for some of the best sushi in the United States,” he said. “You get his quality of fish in a much less expensive environment.”

Tom Nozawa said he’d like to expand the brand to San Diego, San Francisco and as far as New York, but that at this point there is no timetable for that rollout.

“It’s an absolute challenge to expand, but if we have the right people, it would minimize the challenge,” he said.

Greenberg could have the experience to help pull off geographic expansion.

A co-founder and former co-chief executive and co-chairman of Sapient Corp., a publicly traded technology consulting company in Boston, Greenberg stepped down in 2006 and took a consulting relationship with the company. He rejoined the board in 2012 and is again co-chairman. He controls a 6.8 percent stake with personal holdings of $88 million.

He came to know Sushi Nozawa on one of his frequent trips to Los Angeles in the early 1990s. He went to the restaurant one Saturday afternoon and was immediately hooked – enough to drive back from the Westside to Studio City that same day for dinner.

“I would look into flying into Burbank (on Fridays) because Sushi Nozawa was closed on the weekends,” said Greenberg, who has had a house in Los Angeles since 2000 and spends most of his time here now. “I would be so bummed if I missed it.”

Greenberg became friends with Kazunori Nozawa and his family, and in 2007 started talking about opening an Apple Pan-like chain of restaurants that had the quality of Nozawa’s food but at a more affordable price.

Despite having no experience in food service, he and Nozawa created a team to run Sugarfish. The team included Tom Nozawa, who had worked in various Japanese and French restaurants.

The first restaurant opened in Marina del Rey in 2008, just a few months before the recession hit. Greenberg said it was something that made the restaurant stronger. Sugarfish saw a drop-off in its business, but quickly rebounded and started to grow.

“Our guests really appreciate the level of quality and the price is very fair. We’ve made it more accessible,” he said.

Greenberg said accessibility is important to him because it allows him to preserve Kazunori Nozawa’s food style for future generations to taste.

“The idea of doing Sugarfish together was perpetuating Nozawa’s food into the future,” he said. “Someday, Nozawa would retire and the food would not be around.”