Keepers of the flame: Chicago’s only kosher sushi bar, Hamachi, is ‘going to be here forever’

In 2011, sushi chef Tee Shakya threw out the best job offer of his life. Fortunately, his mom convinced him to uncrumple and read the letter, which he mistook for a car advertisement.

“I’m opening up a sushi restaurant. Can you help me?” wrote Oleg Kostovetsky, who remembered selling Shakya a used Saab 9-3 and chatting with him about working at Ginger and Garlic in Naperville.

So, four years later, Kostovetsky sent Shakya a Hail Mary under his dealership’s old letterhead.

“He really liked the way I do sushi,” says Shakya, who was enticed by naming rights to the new joint and autonomy over its menu. “They hired me right away.”

Shakya called the kosher restaurant Hamachi, after the Japanese word for his favorite fish, yellowtail. Devising the menu wasn’t as easy, for the half-Tibetan, half-Nepalese chef — who grew up in India, discovered sushi as an adult and has served it to the likes of Brad Pitt, Michael Douglas and Peter Jennings — had never cooked kosher, which was essential to Kostovetsky’s vision for the restaurant.

“If I have a recipe with 10 ingredients, now I can use only six,” Shakya says. “The challenge was that I had to bring that same flavor, that same taste I used to do before.”

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And he had to appease a different palate. Most Orthodox Jewish customers, his main clientele, are total newcomers. The best introduction, he found, is with baked, fried and doctored-up rolls that allow sauces, textures and flavors to piggyback off the fish. From tuna to salmon to that namesake yellowtail, everything comes from Abe’s Smoked Fish in Skokie with the scales and skin left on to ensure it’s kosher. Shellfish isn’t allowed.

Shakya’s ornate sushi rolls are a point of pride and a Hamachi hallmark. His 60 different permutations quadruple what most restaurants offer, and they’re accompanied by a healthy supply of wraps, rice bowls, noodles and fried entrees. For the only full-service kosher sushi bar in Chicago and one of the city’s most successful, Shakya says that’s what it takes to bring in business. Especially when dairy is forbidden.

“I’m learning about different cultures,” he says. “It’s been very fortunate that we can offer something new.”

Hamachi’s reception wasn’t always this warm. After watching North Side kosher restaurants Evita Argentinian Steakhouse and Nuovo Chicago flirt with sushi and throw in the towel years before, customers were unconvinced the sushi bar would hang around.

“In Chicago, especially, when you open up a new kosher restaurant, the community always believed the place was going to close in a couple of months,” he says. “It happened to a lot of other people.”

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Shakya says he has avoided this curse for over 11 years by refreshing the menu again and again to give customers every excuse to try something new. That’s where previous places went wrong, he says, and what Hamachi gets right.

“Updating the menu every four months is a challenge, from me, to any other restaurant,” he says. “If you just do a California roll and a spicy tuna roll or something that you can get anywhere, you cannot survive.”

Time Out Chicago awarded Hamachi its Best New Sushi award in 2013, and his signature sauces hit Jewel Osco shelves a year later. Shakya says its unexpected popularity emboldened him to serve kosher customers and ingrain himself in the community. Since 2011, he has worked over 30 bar and bat mitzvahs, taught sushi classes to hundreds of Jewish women, and even keeps kosher at home.

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In 2018, Shakya opened a kitchen in the back, doubling the menu with wok-cooked and deep-fried items. While kosher ingredients are sold at a premium and his sushi can cost twice as much, Shakya says his customers, many of whom he knows personally, understand the effort behind making this once-arcane cuisine accessible to the area’s kosher eaters.

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“We sell it at a good price,” he says. “We want to keep our customers coming back.”

It’s been 30 years since Shakya moved to Chicago from India and encountered sushi for the first time during a layover in Tokyo. The odds that he would leave town, learn how to make sushi in New York City, return to Chicago, check his junk mail and open the only restaurant of its kind were remarkably slim. But it proves anything is fair game — even becoming the kosher fixture of fresh fish Rogers Park never knew it needed.

“It’s not a job at all. I just enjoy it,” he says. “We’re going to be here forever.”

2801 W. Howard St., 773-293-6904, hamachichicago.com

[ Read more about our Keepers of the Flame series here ]

Max Abrams is a freelance writer.

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