Oleg Pashkevich trained in Kyiv under the Japanese sushi master Yoshi and is the chef at Sushi360, the first kaiten restaurant in Odesa.
I’m 28. I was working as a bartender in a restaurant when Japanese cuisine became popular in our country. I decided I wanted to make classy sushi, so I went to Kyiv, where I became an apprentice to the Japanese sushi master Yoshi.
My apprenticeship was like a Hollywood thriller of the 1990s, where the hero goes to a martial arts guru in the heart of Tibet. Only my Tibet was in Kyiv.
I was given a Japanese Yanagi-ba knife and had to cut a big daikon (Japanese radish) into slices as thin as rice paper. If I didn’t do it well, I got hit with the spatula used to fry tamago.
After my apprenticeship at Yoshi’s, I came back to Odesa, where I improved my skills at different Japanese restaurants.
I’ve been working at Sushi360 since it opened. The managers offered me the chef’s position, and I’m very grateful for that. I really liked the concept of a kaiten restaurant: this is the first restaurant of its kind in Odesa and the second in Ukraine. Here, as in many restaurants in Japan and around the world, you can eat freshly made sushi.
As tends to happen in Odesa, I, a master of Japanese cuisine and an Odesa local with Jewish roots and a typical Slavic face, study the Torah. I follow its laws in everything I do, and that’s why I work only with natural products, without preservatives or food coloring, according to kashrut.
I love Thai and Japanese cuisine, and of course our own Odesa cuisine: I like stuffed fish and forshmak. As for my interests, they are work and the synagogue, and I don’t have time for anything else. I also like inventing dishes and serving them to guests.
Just this week I invented the dish: a roll with tempura shrimp in wasabi sesame with pineapple, avocado and pepper salsa. It’s an interesting combination of Spanish salsa, a Japanese roll, and another Japanese dish, shrimp tempura and sesame with a wasabi flavor.
