Chances are you’d noticed the evolving exterior of 331 Wilshire Blvd over the past nine months and wondered when the tantalizing tease of a new sushi restaurant would be over. Well, the patience of those who seek reasonably-priced raw fish has finally been rewarded as the long-awaited Maru Sushi has officially opened its doors.
Owner and head chef Nick Choi speaks very little English, so this interview was conducted through his trusty employee Diana Lee, who acted as a translator.
"His idea was, usually if you go to a Santa Monica restaurant, he said all the food is so expensive, but he wanted to try out [a more] reasonable price with good quality and wanted to show that to the customer. And he wanted to try it in Santa Monica," Lee said.
Choi originally hails from Seoul, South Korea, but he trained in Japan and came to the US over 30 years ago. He owns another restaurant in the Los Angeles metropolitan area called Otto Sushi at 7205 Van Nuys Blvd.
"There is another location, but it’s not the same name and a different style and different concept. We always open up the restaurant depending on the area," Lee said, adding that the demographics of the local area can also affect decisions on what to offer on the menu. She says that the Van Nuys restaurant caters to a bigger demand for delivery for instance, whereas the Santa Monica eatery is designed more for a sit down dining experience. Lee also says that Choi very much intends Maru Sushi to be for local residents, rather than purely focusing on tourists.
According to Lee, Choi chose this particular site, formally Greenleaf Kitchen & Cocktails, because there’s good public parking behind the building (parking garage 9) and he very deliberately wanted to open an affordably-priced sushi restaurant in the downtown area where there are a lot of high-end and consequently expensive eating options.
Choi says that he carefully selects his fish from all over the world, depending on what is in season and where, with much of it coming from Canada, Spain, Scotland and New Zealand.
He also says that in his professional career, he’s opened a total of 28 restaurants, every one of them in the state of California, but he’s never experienced as many problems with permitting and city officials as he has recently had to endure in Santa Monica. Lee explains that Choi was repeatedly told to address changes that he himself had not made.
"Even right now they’re in a process, he keeps complaining that they say, ‘you fix something, put it back,’ but he’s never touched it. He has so much problems with that [sic] … going crazy, getting stuck in a restaurant because of a small thing that he never touched," Lee says.
Because Choi had hoped to open after just a few months of acquiring the site back in August of last year, he’s had to pay rent throughout this whole process.
Lee says that Choi has been repeatedly offered the chance to be the head chef of well-known restaurants in Japan, but he has insisted on operating his own. He says that the word "maru" means circle (it’s often attached to Japanese ship names, Kobayashi Maru, for example) and in this instance he wants it to reflect the circular journey of the customer’s experience in the restaurant. From entering, to ordering, to enjoying to finally leaving.
"He says life should have no sharp edges," Lee said, adding, "And that’s what he’s trying to do, to not add any edges or corners in people’s lives."
