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<\/p>\nChika Kuramoto only gets two or three hours of sleep a night, she says. She leaves her home in South San Francisco by 2 or 3 a.m. to head for the kitchen of her Sunset storefront, CSK Kitchen, where she puts on an apron with a picture of three dogs on it and begins the day\u2019s work, fueled only by a cup of coffee.<\/p>\n
Kuramoto, 62, has plenty on her plate. In addition to owning Sakura, a Japanese grocery store at 936 Irving St., she runs a busy catering business on the weekends. <\/p>\n
Most recently, Kuramoto opened CSK Kitchen at 420 Judah St. on June 6. It\u2019s open six days a week and, like Sakura, sells the Japanese grab-and-go food that Kuramoto and her staff begin assembling at the crack of dawn, like onigiri and bento boxes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Kuramoto has cooked her whole life, learning from her mom and grandmother along the way. When she was growing up in Japan, Kuramoto said, her mom made everything from scratch, with the sole exception of French fries, which she bought frozen. <\/p>\n
\u201cI still feel like I need to get permission to use frozen food,\u201d Kuramoto said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But cooking hasn\u2019t always been a career. Kuramoto\u2019s first job was in a bank in Tokyo. That\u2019s where she met her husband, who worked for the same company in the U.S. The two suspected (correctly) that Japan\u2019s buoyant 1980s economy<\/a> was actually a bubble that was about to burst, and decided to move to San Francisco, his birthplace, in 1990.\u00a0<\/p>\n San Francisco\u2019s hills and ocean reminded her of Kobe in Japan, she said \u2014 but with more fog. When she first arrived, Kuramoto tackled English with the single-minded concentration she now applies to cooking. Her banker\u2019s English wasn\u2019t enough, so she tuned in to CNN every morning. As the day wore on, she\u2019d switch to sitcoms.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMy goal was, if I can understand their jokes and laugh, I\u2019m okay,\u201d Kuramoto said.\u00a0<\/p>\n After a few months, Kuramoto got the jokes and stopped watching sitcoms.\u00a0<\/p>\n She had to adjust to the norms of school vacations in the United States, with students out for the whole summer instead of just late July through the end of August. Kuramoto decided she had to shift careers and became a preschool teacher in 1998, a job that allowed her to spend more time with her children.<\/p>\n The new schedule gave her more time for cooking at home. At first, it was hard to find authentic ingredients to cook with. She would smuggle shiitake mushrooms in her luggage on her way back from Japan. Soon, she was feeding her children\u2019s friends as well as her own family. <\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re like, \u2018Oh my God, this is much better than a restaurant,\u201d Kuramoto said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Another culture shock: The Japanese restaurants in San Francisco were fine, she thought, but not what she was accustomed to.\u00a0 For one thing, she said American tempura had too much batter. <\/p>\n \u201cThe tempura is not that way,\u201d Kuramoto said firmly. \u201cYou need to have taste,\u201d she said. \u201cYou need to feel the ingredient.\u201d<\/p>\n Kuramoto\u2019s kids grew up. In 2018, her husband died, and she stopped teaching. Soon after the pandemic, she started catering for businesses and events. <\/p>\n \u201cI really want you guys to taste like real, authentic Japanese,\u201d she remembers thinking. \u201cThe way we cook, the way we use the ingredients; it\u2019s why I started this job.\u201d<\/p>\n
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