Collaboration is at the heart of everything On a Roll does.
The restaurant in downtown Fresno offers both Mexican-style and Japanese-style sushi, but has traditionally offered them as separate categories, including listing them on separate pages of the menu.
With sushi tacos, the restaurant fuses both styles into a new dish.
Mexican-style sushi takes inspiration from the Japanese dish, but caters towards Mexican flavor profiles and sensibilities. The resulting product, which hails from Sinaloa and has been gathering in popularity for at least the past decade, is usually breaded and fried, and often features ingredients like beef, chicken or cooked shrimp.
“We’re the only sushi place in all of Fresno where you can have authentic Japanese sushi and authentic Mexican sushi and not mix them,” said Mariana Guizar, one of the restaurant’s owners.
That’s changing with a new menu item: sushi tacos.
“We haven’t done anything fusion,” Guizar said. “Mexicans are known for our tacos, and Japanese are known for their sushi, so let’s mix them.”
The restaurant is debuting three types of sushi tacos as part of a new focus on its happy hour menu: El Crunchy, a taco featuring entirely cooked ingredients; El Rosita, which has a combination of raw salmon and some cooked ingredients, and El Tunazo, which features entirely raw ingredients like tuna.
All three are served in a piece of nori seaweed that has been fried to hold the shape of a crispy taco.
The tacos are Guizar’s brainchild, but the restaurant is a family operation. Guizar’s mother, Rosa, is one of the servers at the restaurant, and Guizar’s stepdad is a sushi chef. Another owner, Itati Lopez, is an influencer and entrepreneur who founded her own line of makeup, Viyant Beauty, and who helped promote the restaurant when it opened two years ago.
This is the first time the family has opened a restaurant, but they brought experience with them. Guizar and her mom both had careers in hospitality before opening the restaurant, and her stepdad worked in the food service industry.
“We love what we do,” Guizar said. “We love seeing people walk out with smiles on their faces because they had a good lunch or dinner.”
Guizar, who also runs the restaurant’s social media pages, enjoys working together within the community, and regularly teams up with the Downtown Fresno Partnership for events like themed food crawls, ticketed events where people go to several different locations within a couple of hours to try samples of what the locations have on offer.
Esteban Herevia, the program manager for the Downtown Fresno Partnership, has watched On a Roll grow over the past two years, and is excited to see the restaurant taking new steps.
“Good restaurants are gonna attract people to downtown,” Herevia said. “I would call On a Roll a very good restaurant.”
During the most recent downtown crawl, which was Pride themed, On a Roll was a check-in location. The Downtown Fresno Partnership paid for a drag queen performer to do a tribute to Jenni Rivera, and the restaurant had Pride-themed drink specials.
On a Roll is also participating in the next food crawl, a country-themed event in August.
Herevia said the first themed crawl downtown, in December, had 110 people participating; the Pride crawl had more than 300.
There’s another benefit: getting the restaurant and bar owners to talk to each other. Business is often viewed as a zero-sum game, in that any money spent at one location is money likely not being spent at another, but by opening up the lines of communication, the owners can talk to each other about issues they’re having, find solutions to those problems and work with each other.
“This is the first time all of the bars downtown are in a group chat,” Herevia said.
As for On a Roll, Guizar has already found success by inviting influencers in to try the food and reaching out to welcome performers into the city with catered sushi to where they’re staying.
“I collaborate with everyone and everything,” Guizar said. “I’m an open book.”