HOOKED ON SUSHI

Once considered rarefied and exotic in the United States, sushi has become something entirely different in the last five years: convenience food

- Julia Moskin

In 1985, when American actress Molly Ringwald's character in The Breakfast Club pulls out a bento box of sushi at the fictional Shermer High School, the other students are unnerved by this mystifying lunch.

In 2025, when lunch period starts at the real Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, a Chicago suburb similar to the movie's setting, students race to line up at the sushi bar in the school cafeteria.

How did raw fish and seaweed become staples of the American diet? In the 1980s, sushi had mystique. Although it was sold in vending machines and petrol stations in Japan, in the United States, it was a rarefied food that could be made only from pristine ingredients, by masters who had trained for decades.

But as sushi restaurants proliferated between the East and West Coasts, and as infrastructure was built for storing and transporting frozen seafood, American sushi became something else: convenience food.

In interviews, sushi chefs, marketeers, researchers and wholesalers all agreed that the Covid-19 pandemic prompted an unexpected, and enormous, spike in the American appetite for sushi.

As people tired of home cooking, and of takeaway staples such as pizza and burritos, sushi at home became popular, whether delivered from Nobu in Beverly Hills or picked up from a Target in Minneapolis.

A spokesperson for the Kroger supermarket chain, which has offered sushi since 1991 and claims to be the largest seller in the country, said sales have jumped by 50 per cent since 2019, to one million rolls a day.

Before the pandemic, to-go sushi was about 6 per cent of total business across the 12 Blue Ribbon Sushi restaurants spread across the country, from Boston to Los Angeles. Now, according to co-owner Bruce Bromberg, it is 30 per cent.

Chef Masaharu Morimoto said that across his global restaurant group, to-go sushi sales doubled during the pandemic, and have remained high since the dining rooms reopened.