East Side Sushi, a 2014 film directed by Anthony Lucero, is a delightful cross-cultural fairy tale. Set in LA, Mexican-American single Mom Juana and her young daughter Lydia, share a household with her father. Working hard at various low paying jobs – the father mainly in a dry goods store, and she in various restaurants, as a sports club janitor, etc., they barely make ends meet, while focused on Lydia, a sweet, bright pre-teen, having a “better” life, starting with her attending a private school.
Each day, mixed in with all these jobs and a pre-dawn to after dark schedule, they also sell fresh fruit from a hand cart. The father is getting older and weaker, and after a robbery of the cart’s proceeds at the end of a busy day and Juana getting knocked unconscious, she decides she needs a different path. Over the years, she has developed remarkable knife skills (to accompany the dish washing and cleaning skills!), and so when she passes a mid-scale sushi restaurant with a help wanted sign in the window, she applies for the assistant to the chefs (dishwasher, clean-up person and whatever other tasks she’s asked to do), and despite the Japanese owners’ concerns about hiring a non-Japanese who’s never tasted, let alone worked in a sushi restaurant (can’t even use chopsticks), gets the job.
Over time, she’s asked to do more and more, from checking the fish for freshness to preparing them for the sushi chefs, to even making rolls (of course, invisibly in the back when they’re shorthanded), gets better and better at it, develops a friendship with the head sushi chef and, of course, remains unacceptable to the very traditional Japanese owner. And in a fit of pique at not being allowed to work up front at the sushi bar – after all she’s not only non-Japanese, but a woman — she quits.
In the meantime, she has entered the TV reality competition for Sushi Champions – requiring along with execution of traditional sushi items and rolls, a unique chef’s creation, which of course integrates Mexican ingredients with the traditional roll shapes and tastes – and is invited as one of four finalists to the live competition.
From there the rest is predictable, albeit with a couple of cute twists.
The film is delightful in a straight forward feel good way, is well done, and both sad and funny where it should be. Mainly in English with some subtitled dialogue between Juana and her father, an occasionally a few sentences of Japanese among the restaurant staff.
See it – you’ll enjoy it, perhaps choke up a bit, and mainly smile.